14 ms·

Doctors' estimates of the feasibility of preserving the dying for future revival

57 points by arielzj 10mo ago

boznz 10mo ago
Would you really want to be that first patient to be revived ?
- stavros 10mo ago
  Yes! I wouldn't want to be the last patient to not be revived, but that's just regular death anyway.
  - zamadatix 10mo ago
    I'd let them work the kinks out on your revival and follow several hundred thousand (or more) later. After all, death isn't the only complication to worry about.
polishdude20 10mo ago
I thought about death the other day and how maybe it's akin to the feeling of going under before a surgery. When you go under and then wake up some hours later, often you feel like no time has passed at all. What if death is just that same feeling or lack thereof for Millenia, an infinite amount of time, but at some point from your perspective, you wake up instantly far in the future. Like a photon travelling for millions of years, you don't perceive time passing at all. Given an infinite amount of time, there will be a time where all of your atoms will recombine again in just the right away to bring you back to consciousness with all your memories in tact. To you, it feels like you woke up in an instant. To the universe, it took an infinite amount of time to wake up you again.
- tekla 10mo ago
  Nah, you wake up in the pearly gates of Christian heaven.
  - throwawaylaptop 10mo ago
    Not everyone.
    - IAmBroom 10mo ago
      We hope.
- willguest 10mo ago
  Counterpoint, what if it's not
- kylehotchkiss 10mo ago
  > Given an infinite amount of time, there will be a time where all of your atoms will recombine again in just the right away to bring you back to consciousness with all your memories in tact. n00b question, but if consciousness is a quantum effect[1], would mere atomic recombination really be enough to bring you back? Also, isn't entropy ripping the universe apart into a big glass cloud with energy equally distributed? [1] I once asked somebody with a doctorate in neuroscience/biology about this and promptly received an eyeroll, so I'm playing theoretical here
  - Terr_ 10mo ago
    > if consciousness is a quantum effect [...] promptly received an eyeroll A very long comic, but the punchline is relevant: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3 > would mere atomic recombination really be enough to bring you back? I think we need to distinguish between "quantum effect" versus "quantum state". There are probably a lot of biological processes that are possible or efficient from quantum effects (vision, smell, photosynthesis) but that doesn't mean the machinery itself has a fragility beyond the arrangement of its atoms. I imagine our brains/minds go through far greater levels of disruption in our daily lives, sleep-cycles, anesthesia, concussions, etc.
- zingerlio 10mo ago
  Never thought about the possibility that I AM the Boltzmann brain.
  - Terr_ 10mo ago
    I never thought about the possibility that my Boltzmann brain simulates other entities thinking they're the real Boltzmann brain. What arrogant solipsists I imagine into existence. :p
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- throwawaylaptop 10mo ago
  I don't think most people worry about the huge amounts of time after they have died. They worry about the 1-120 seconds while they are really dying and aware. My college gfs dad died after trying to accompany her on a hike, because I was too busy to go and he didn't want her to go alone. So he drove down on the weekend and went with her. He was an overweight man that never moved. ~24 hours after the hike, which he skipped most of and waited mid trail, he started having a heart attack in his home office. I have spent a lot of time thinking about what he was thinking those last minutes or seconds. And I wish I just went on that hike with her.
  - peacebeard 10mo ago
    It's not your fault.
    - throwawaylaptop 10mo ago
      Its obviously not my 'fault'. But it's pretty close to a death I could have prevented for a while if I wasnt pretending to be busy probably. I remember when she said her dad was going to go instead and I thought "uhh, I don't think that's going to work.. I should just go" but I didn't really like her that much at that point and figured it would just be a lame wasted hike, not that the dude would die.
      - codyb 10mo ago
        Ya know, ya really waited until the second comment here to add in the "pretending" lol
        throwawaylaptop 10mo ago
        Ha. That was more a play off the fact that most times "busy" is just relative. I wasn't THAT busy, maybe I just had things to do that I wanted to get done more than go on a hike.
        accrual 10mo ago
- withinrafael 10mo ago
  Somewhat along that line of thinking, I've wondered if my visual perspective was similar to a 3D game engine camera. And if upon death, it switched to a new entity.
  - aeve890 10mo ago
    Like a shooter spectator mode or like reincarnation with extra steps?
  - d-lisp 10mo ago
    You are the object the camera is bound to, which is elligible for collection when it become unreachable, allowing at some point in time for new allocations to be made with the amount of space you occupied during your life. Do note that if nothing is done with this space -ever- then your data is not zeroed out, yet you don't exist anymore ?
- benlivengood 10mo ago
  If the universe is infinite that should happen sometime (not really important) around 10^10^29 meters away. Of course, you don't actually have to die for that copy to exist either, and a copy of the local galaxy etc. is not too much further away (10^10^92 m), so waking up indistinguishably somewhere else after a good night's sleep would happen occasionally too.
  - Retric 10mo ago
    Infinite does not mean everything happens. Waking up up the equivalent memories requires a body with that arrangement of neurons that isn’t in ill health. That could easily be looking for a 3 on an infinite sequence of odd numbers.
    - benlivengood 10mo ago
      Yes, at some point Boltzmann brains become higher likelihood but don't forget that interventions are not limited to prior history, e.g. someone builds a machine that performs whole-body surgery based on the timing of radioactive decay. Still more likely to end up with a functioning body than a Boltzmann brain. Most likely to end up with a weirder but more likely intervention (low expectation of it actually working, but not infinitesimal) (and from anthropic perspective)
      - Retric 10mo ago
        The issue I was pointing to was a society with a higher technical standard isn’t going to naturally create a brain that remembers a vastly less technologically advanced civilization. It’s possible they would create such structures artificially, but now your dependent upon a civilization with the capacity that also happens to create this specific arrangement.
- wat10000 10mo ago
  As the late great Douglas Adams wrote, "There is another theory which states that this has already happened." If time in infinite and there's a nonzero probability that random fluctuations could result in a conscious being with all your memories intact, then it's virtually certain that you are such a being right now, and not an original human actually present in the world that you perceive.
- andrewmcwatters 10mo ago
  [dead]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 10mo ago
  It's impossible to experience nothing. Spooky
  - gehwartzen 10mo ago
    You’ll never know that you died
- accrual 10mo ago
  Time is fun to think about. It seems to only matter if one has the facilities to perceive and quantify time passing. Some suggest time is an illusion. A nice linear construct to help conscious beings integrate in the material world. Eckhart Tolle advises there is no past and future, only now. And in some spiritual models time doesn't exist outside the material world, and takes on a hub and spoke model, where all of time is instantly accessible (think RAM vs tape). Not saying any of this is true or positing materalism vs not, but it's interesting to ponder.
- episteme 10mo ago
  With no memories going with me, it feels just as scary.
- marcher 10mo ago
  As someone who once came extremely close to death and was unconscious for days after eventually receiving medical care, my take on death is that it's probably similar to what you're saying about going under for surgery. I'm somewhat neutral to mixed on having been revived, but I no longer fear death. I still have a fear of suffering and having painful final moments, but death itself seems peaceful if nothing else. In terms of something happening after death, my only real thought on that is that it really troubles me that I came into existence in the first place and that I experience anything at all. I sometimes wonder if that was truly a one time thing or if it's something that could happen again.
  - CommenterPerson 10mo ago
    Well. Good that you were revived and shared your experience with us! Being born can be compared to a one in billions lottery win. We're given this time. "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us". I hope you get to feel more positive about being around. My belief is, when you're gone, you're gone. All this religion and quantum mechanics speculation about coming back is wishful thinking (it's one reason religion is so powerful. It's very hard and scary to comprehend our non existence. Religion provides a nice candy wrapped solution to all that.)
    - marcher 10mo ago
      I'm not negative on it exactly, but the idea of not being revived doesn't really bug me. If that had happened, then it's whatever, I guess? But I agree with your sentiment about using the time we're given. I don't put much thought into what happens after death other than in a purely self-entertainment, "oh that'd be a cool what-if scenario..." type of way. My goal now is to minimize my suffering and maximize my happiness to whatever extent I can. If I can make others happy too in some way as I do that, that'd be neat too.
  - cogman10 10mo ago
    My fears of death have nothing to do with my death and everything to do with the people I leave behind. I certainly don't want to suffer, but more so I don't want my loved ones to suffer.
- observationist 10mo ago
  Not quite - just because an infinite variety of things are allowed to happen doesn't mean that they will. You will never have been born with all your cells suddenly swapped out for pure gold. Your brain will never spontaneously spark a fission chain reaction and detonate, in all the infinite variety of outcomes through all time. The universe as we know it will also end long before any meaningful notion of infinity applies to the possible outcomes of various configurations of atoms. The best science can estimate, for now, is that heat death will occur in around 100 trillion years, probably closer to 1, and other universe ending outcomes can happen long before that. For the solar system, there's a few billion years before the inner planets get devoured by the sun. In those timeframes, the only outcome you have is the one occurring now. There's no eternal endless reset waiting at the end of everything where things endlessly repeat - the number of things that occur and near infinite variety of outcomes means that even if there's a big crunch and a restart long after the heat death of the universe, there will never, ever, in any meaningfully cognizable period of time, be another universe where Earth exists, or even the Milky Way. Tiny perturbations at the beginning of time across the sum total of all particles and energy defined the state of all the things that could ever be within our universe. Across an infinity of infinities, a multiverse in which all things exist, there's no meaningful differentiation at the level of thinking about everything, so I don't think it brings anything to the table. You get the one life - if science progresses to the point where we reach longevity escape velocity, or if they can guarantee preservation of your mind until such a time as they can revive or restore or fully emulate your embodiment, that's worth pursuing, even if somehow some weird mystical configuration of "you" traverses the eternal multiverse. We're closing in on really weird changes in human technological trajectories, it's going to be one hell of a ride.
- cogman10 10mo ago
  > Given an infinite amount of time, there will be a time where all of your atoms will recombine again in just the right away to bring you back to consciousness with all your memories in tact. Possibly so, possibly not. I think this gets into a fundamental (and common) misunderstanding of what infinity implies. I think the best way I could illustrate it is the concept of infinite non-repeating numbers. A fair number of people will think "Oh, because it's infinite and non-repeating, it must contain all possible number combinations". However, consider a number like `1.101001000100001000001...` This is a number that's infinite, non-repeating, and it only contains 1 and 0. With that in mind, it becomes trivial to imagine an infinite non-repeating number where `7` occurs only once. Said another way about time and the infinite. It's entirely possible that ultimately the universe decays into a proton vapor and once that happens, that's it. It stays infinitely as such a vapor cloud with none of the protons ever meeting one another. All that's to say is infinite doesn't imply that all possible states will be created once again. It could happen, but it's not guaranteed to happen.
- exe34 10mo ago
  I don't get this "infinite amount of time" thing. in a steady state universe, yes, sure, but if the expansion continues and no new incidents like the big bang happens, then it just gets colder and colder, right? and even if atoms were to come together in that way again, the CMB would be lower, so that fragment of timeline would lead to Pensias and Wilson to finish work earlier that day and never get the Nobel prize - so that history would be very different.
- SirMaster 10mo ago
  Not just surgery, but isn't that how you feel just after going to sleep at night or taking a nap? I guess as long as you don't have memory of your dreams from that time.
- foxyv 10mo ago
  I prefer the Buddhist interpretation of self. There isn't really a singular you. We are all interdependent beings. A four plus dimensional tree reaching back to the start of time. The "you" that you're experiencing right now is an illusion created by your brain. When the body you are currently experiencing with dies, there are still all the other bodies producing experience. After all, are you really the same person that began your life? Do you have the same memories? Can you even remember what being 10 years old was like? Are those memories real? Are you experiencing the same universe as when you were born? For all you know, you have died a thousand times and just don't remember it because those memories died in some other universe or some other body.
michaelt 10mo ago
When it comes to cryopreservation the thing I find infeasible is the idea a provider would bother with the preservation, under the incentives of capitalism. If someone pays millions of dollars to a company that promises to freeze their corpse for 200 years, the company can simply freeze the corpse for a decade or two, take the millions of dollars as dividends and executive bonuses, then declare bankruptcy. The dead can't sue.
- adastra22 10mo ago
  These aren’t companies doing the patient storage. It is non profits setup and run by people who are signed up themselves.
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  - FridayoLeary 10mo ago
    It's basically the same thing. What's stopping them from eventually losing interest or the non profit getting hijacked. I personally think the whole thing is a huge waste of money and i can imagine some guys in 50 years will think so too.
    - adastra22 10mo ago
      That they and the people they care about are stored there. This is a far stronger incentive than any profit motive.
  - michaelt 10mo ago
    Wasn't OpenAI a non-profit?
    - adastra22 10mo ago
      The second part of that sentence was the important bit.
    - 10mo ago
baxtr 10mo ago
> Conclusions and Relevance: US physicians assigned a median 25.5% probability to preservation retaining neural information under ideal conditions in a manner potentially compatible with future patient revival. The majority support for pre-mortem anticoagulation and substantial support for pre-cardiac arrest initiation indicate that many physicians would consider accommodating patient requests for preservation-enhancing interventions. These findings may inform development of clinical guidelines, though the speculative nature of the estimates warrants consideration.
- DennisP 10mo ago
  That's a way higher number than I expected.
  - nyeah 10mo ago
    I worry that there's a selection bias: physicians who even bothered to respond to a survey on this topic.
    - arielzj 10mo ago
      These were physicians who were being paid to complete surveys - no reason to think they were more likely to select/reject this one over any of the others available to them at the time.
      - nyeah 10mo ago
        <puzzled frown>. There's at least one reason. It's in the comment you responded to.
        IAmBroom 10mo ago
        Two: the phrase "being paid".
        overtone1000 10mo ago
        Apologies, that was my mistake. The subspecialties I thought weren't included were reported in detail in one of the figures, and they were some of the more optimistic groups. The result is surprising to me.
overtone1000 10mo ago
As with most science fiction, TNG did it better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_T...
- pndy 10mo ago
  Arthur C. Clarke explored this cultural shock as well in the final book of the Space Odyssey series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3001:_The_Final_Odyssey?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3001:_The_Final_Odyssey?useski...
Vecr 10mo ago
This is optimistic, I see "The cryonics people make a mistake in freezing you (how do we know they don't make lots of mistakes?)"[0] and "The current cryonics process is insufficient to preserve everything"[0] resulting of a product 10% already, seemingly matching the questionnaire as well as possible. They say "under ideal conditions" in the survey, so maybe that rules out cracking of brain tissue or ice growth, but that's not the number practitioners want to know about. [0]: https://www.jefftk.com/p/breaking-down-cryonics-probabilities https://www.jefftk.com/p/breaking-down-cryonics-probabilitie... “Principles of Cryopreservation by Vitrification” https://gwern.net/doc/biology/2015-fahy.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/biology/2015-fahy.pdf
- arielzj 10mo ago
  ...I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Asking about ideal conditions is a reasonable starting point for establishing a baseline, and high-quality preservation is definitely something that can be achieved under laboratory conditions with animal models (e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001122401500245X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001122401...)
  - Vecr 10mo ago
    Principles of Vitrification (Fahy PDF linked) p. 48 many practitioners think they have vitrified when they have not p. 45 volume changes of vitrifying agents, possibly in a way that avoids detection (very small scale?). Covers the second term, "freezing" (quibble quibble) speed and delays in the procedure cover the first. Your team seems not to be trying to maintain either normally solid/fluid tissue maintaining recoverable gradients or vitrification through an entire cycle below the triple point (with just removable or bio-compatible vitrifying mixtures) so your "goal" might be easier. Is the future AI just going to say you didn't do well enough even if you meet your "goal"? On the other hand if there's never any point in the cycle where any volume is not either recoverable to health or vitrified, all the AI can say is that cryonics doesn't work period.
toomanyrichies 10mo ago
Mark Twain put it pithily (and perhaps apocryphally): "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." Apparently there's a name for this: the Lucretian symmetry argument. And I recently learned there are philosophers who argue the asymmetry in our attitudes is actually rational, and that fearing death while not fearing pre-natal nonexistence makes sense [1]. I find comfort in treating the two as being equal, and I'd be lying if I said I'm not a little hesitant to read their case. [1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-015-9868-2_6 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-015-9868-2_...
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
Jordan-117 10mo ago
"Another Cold Morning" https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Transmetropolitan/Issue-8?id=14227&s=&readType=1 https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Transmetropolitan/Issue-8?i...
M95D 10mo ago
> preserving the dying for future revival What for? The economy doesn't need humans anymore.
- apothegm 10mo ago
  Not to mention that it’s obviously ridiculous to do things for reasons other than economic or financial.
  - M95D 10mo ago
    Yeah, that too! :)
tsoukase 10mo ago
Cryopreservation of cells and embryos are widely used, eg in in-virto fertilisation. Are the experiments with animals?

57 points by arielzj 10mo ago

boznz 10mo ago

Would you really want to be that first patient to be revived ?

stavros 10mo ago
Yes! I wouldn't want to be the last patient to not be revived, but that's just regular death anyway.
- zamadatix 10mo ago
  I'd let them work the kinks out on your revival and follow several hundred thousand (or more) later. After all, death isn't the only complication to worry about.

polishdude20 10mo ago

I thought about death the other day and how maybe it's akin to the feeling of going under before a surgery. When you go under and then wake up some hours later, often you feel like no time has passed at all. What if death is just that same feeling or lack thereof for Millenia, an infinite amount of time, but at some point from your perspective, you wake up instantly far in the future. Like a photon travelling for millions of years, you don't perceive time passing at all. Given an infinite amount of time, there will be a time where all of your atoms will recombine again in just the right away to bring you back to consciousness with all your memories in tact. To you, it feels like you woke up in an instant. To the universe, it took an infinite amount of time to wake up you again.

tekla 10mo ago
Nah, you wake up in the pearly gates of Christian heaven.
- throwawaylaptop 10mo ago
  Not everyone.
  - IAmBroom 10mo ago
    We hope.
willguest 10mo ago
Counterpoint, what if it's not
kylehotchkiss 10mo ago
> Given an infinite amount of time, there will be a time where all of your atoms will recombine again in just the right away to bring you back to consciousness with all your memories in tact. n00b question, but if consciousness is a quantum effect[1], would mere atomic recombination really be enough to bring you back? Also, isn't entropy ripping the universe apart into a big glass cloud with energy equally distributed? [1] I once asked somebody with a doctorate in neuroscience/biology about this and promptly received an eyeroll, so I'm playing theoretical here
- Terr_ 10mo ago
  > if consciousness is a quantum effect [...] promptly received an eyeroll A very long comic, but the punchline is relevant: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3 > would mere atomic recombination really be enough to bring you back? I think we need to distinguish between "quantum effect" versus "quantum state". There are probably a lot of biological processes that are possible or efficient from quantum effects (vision, smell, photosynthesis) but that doesn't mean the machinery itself has a fragility beyond the arrangement of its atoms. I imagine our brains/minds go through far greater levels of disruption in our daily lives, sleep-cycles, anesthesia, concussions, etc.
zingerlio 10mo ago
Never thought about the possibility that I AM the Boltzmann brain.
- Terr_ 10mo ago
  I never thought about the possibility that my Boltzmann brain simulates other entities thinking they're the real Boltzmann brain. What arrogant solipsists I imagine into existence. :p
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
throwawaylaptop 10mo ago
I don't think most people worry about the huge amounts of time after they have died. They worry about the 1-120 seconds while they are really dying and aware. My college gfs dad died after trying to accompany her on a hike, because I was too busy to go and he didn't want her to go alone. So he drove down on the weekend and went with her. He was an overweight man that never moved. ~24 hours after the hike, which he skipped most of and waited mid trail, he started having a heart attack in his home office. I have spent a lot of time thinking about what he was thinking those last minutes or seconds. And I wish I just went on that hike with her.
- peacebeard 10mo ago
  It's not your fault.
  - throwawaylaptop 10mo ago
    Its obviously not my 'fault'. But it's pretty close to a death I could have prevented for a while if I wasnt pretending to be busy probably. I remember when she said her dad was going to go instead and I thought "uhh, I don't think that's going to work.. I should just go" but I didn't really like her that much at that point and figured it would just be a lame wasted hike, not that the dude would die.
    - codyb 10mo ago
      Ya know, ya really waited until the second comment here to add in the "pretending" lol
      - throwawaylaptop 10mo ago
        Ha. That was more a play off the fact that most times "busy" is just relative. I wasn't THAT busy, maybe I just had things to do that I wanted to get done more than go on a hike.
      - accrual 10mo ago
withinrafael 10mo ago
Somewhat along that line of thinking, I've wondered if my visual perspective was similar to a 3D game engine camera. And if upon death, it switched to a new entity.
- aeve890 10mo ago
  Like a shooter spectator mode or like reincarnation with extra steps?
- d-lisp 10mo ago
  You are the object the camera is bound to, which is elligible for collection when it become unreachable, allowing at some point in time for new allocations to be made with the amount of space you occupied during your life. Do note that if nothing is done with this space -ever- then your data is not zeroed out, yet you don't exist anymore ?
benlivengood 10mo ago
If the universe is infinite that should happen sometime (not really important) around 10^10^29 meters away. Of course, you don't actually have to die for that copy to exist either, and a copy of the local galaxy etc. is not too much further away (10^10^92 m), so waking up indistinguishably somewhere else after a good night's sleep would happen occasionally too.
- Retric 10mo ago
  Infinite does not mean everything happens. Waking up up the equivalent memories requires a body with that arrangement of neurons that isn’t in ill health. That could easily be looking for a 3 on an infinite sequence of odd numbers.
  - benlivengood 10mo ago
    Yes, at some point Boltzmann brains become higher likelihood but don't forget that interventions are not limited to prior history, e.g. someone builds a machine that performs whole-body surgery based on the timing of radioactive decay. Still more likely to end up with a functioning body than a Boltzmann brain. Most likely to end up with a weirder but more likely intervention (low expectation of it actually working, but not infinitesimal) (and from anthropic perspective)
    - Retric 10mo ago
      The issue I was pointing to was a society with a higher technical standard isn’t going to naturally create a brain that remembers a vastly less technologically advanced civilization. It’s possible they would create such structures artificially, but now your dependent upon a civilization with the capacity that also happens to create this specific arrangement.
wat10000 10mo ago
As the late great Douglas Adams wrote, "There is another theory which states that this has already happened." If time in infinite and there's a nonzero probability that random fluctuations could result in a conscious being with all your memories intact, then it's virtually certain that you are such a being right now, and not an original human actually present in the world that you perceive.
andrewmcwatters 10mo ago
[dead]
2OEH8eoCRo0 10mo ago
It's impossible to experience nothing. Spooky
- gehwartzen 10mo ago
  You’ll never know that you died
accrual 10mo ago
Time is fun to think about. It seems to only matter if one has the facilities to perceive and quantify time passing. Some suggest time is an illusion. A nice linear construct to help conscious beings integrate in the material world. Eckhart Tolle advises there is no past and future, only now. And in some spiritual models time doesn't exist outside the material world, and takes on a hub and spoke model, where all of time is instantly accessible (think RAM vs tape). Not saying any of this is true or positing materalism vs not, but it's interesting to ponder.
episteme 10mo ago
With no memories going with me, it feels just as scary.
marcher 10mo ago
As someone who once came extremely close to death and was unconscious for days after eventually receiving medical care, my take on death is that it's probably similar to what you're saying about going under for surgery. I'm somewhat neutral to mixed on having been revived, but I no longer fear death. I still have a fear of suffering and having painful final moments, but death itself seems peaceful if nothing else. In terms of something happening after death, my only real thought on that is that it really troubles me that I came into existence in the first place and that I experience anything at all. I sometimes wonder if that was truly a one time thing or if it's something that could happen again.
- CommenterPerson 10mo ago
  Well. Good that you were revived and shared your experience with us! Being born can be compared to a one in billions lottery win. We're given this time. "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us". I hope you get to feel more positive about being around. My belief is, when you're gone, you're gone. All this religion and quantum mechanics speculation about coming back is wishful thinking (it's one reason religion is so powerful. It's very hard and scary to comprehend our non existence. Religion provides a nice candy wrapped solution to all that.)
  - marcher 10mo ago
    I'm not negative on it exactly, but the idea of not being revived doesn't really bug me. If that had happened, then it's whatever, I guess? But I agree with your sentiment about using the time we're given. I don't put much thought into what happens after death other than in a purely self-entertainment, "oh that'd be a cool what-if scenario..." type of way. My goal now is to minimize my suffering and maximize my happiness to whatever extent I can. If I can make others happy too in some way as I do that, that'd be neat too.
- cogman10 10mo ago
  My fears of death have nothing to do with my death and everything to do with the people I leave behind. I certainly don't want to suffer, but more so I don't want my loved ones to suffer.
observationist 10mo ago
Not quite - just because an infinite variety of things are allowed to happen doesn't mean that they will. You will never have been born with all your cells suddenly swapped out for pure gold. Your brain will never spontaneously spark a fission chain reaction and detonate, in all the infinite variety of outcomes through all time. The universe as we know it will also end long before any meaningful notion of infinity applies to the possible outcomes of various configurations of atoms. The best science can estimate, for now, is that heat death will occur in around 100 trillion years, probably closer to 1, and other universe ending outcomes can happen long before that. For the solar system, there's a few billion years before the inner planets get devoured by the sun. In those timeframes, the only outcome you have is the one occurring now. There's no eternal endless reset waiting at the end of everything where things endlessly repeat - the number of things that occur and near infinite variety of outcomes means that even if there's a big crunch and a restart long after the heat death of the universe, there will never, ever, in any meaningfully cognizable period of time, be another universe where Earth exists, or even the Milky Way. Tiny perturbations at the beginning of time across the sum total of all particles and energy defined the state of all the things that could ever be within our universe. Across an infinity of infinities, a multiverse in which all things exist, there's no meaningful differentiation at the level of thinking about everything, so I don't think it brings anything to the table. You get the one life - if science progresses to the point where we reach longevity escape velocity, or if they can guarantee preservation of your mind until such a time as they can revive or restore or fully emulate your embodiment, that's worth pursuing, even if somehow some weird mystical configuration of "you" traverses the eternal multiverse. We're closing in on really weird changes in human technological trajectories, it's going to be one hell of a ride.
cogman10 10mo ago
> Given an infinite amount of time, there will be a time where all of your atoms will recombine again in just the right away to bring you back to consciousness with all your memories in tact. Possibly so, possibly not. I think this gets into a fundamental (and common) misunderstanding of what infinity implies. I think the best way I could illustrate it is the concept of infinite non-repeating numbers. A fair number of people will think "Oh, because it's infinite and non-repeating, it must contain all possible number combinations". However, consider a number like `1.101001000100001000001...` This is a number that's infinite, non-repeating, and it only contains 1 and 0. With that in mind, it becomes trivial to imagine an infinite non-repeating number where `7` occurs only once. Said another way about time and the infinite. It's entirely possible that ultimately the universe decays into a proton vapor and once that happens, that's it. It stays infinitely as such a vapor cloud with none of the protons ever meeting one another. All that's to say is infinite doesn't imply that all possible states will be created once again. It could happen, but it's not guaranteed to happen.
exe34 10mo ago
I don't get this "infinite amount of time" thing. in a steady state universe, yes, sure, but if the expansion continues and no new incidents like the big bang happens, then it just gets colder and colder, right? and even if atoms were to come together in that way again, the CMB would be lower, so that fragment of timeline would lead to Pensias and Wilson to finish work earlier that day and never get the Nobel prize - so that history would be very different.
SirMaster 10mo ago
Not just surgery, but isn't that how you feel just after going to sleep at night or taking a nap? I guess as long as you don't have memory of your dreams from that time.
foxyv 10mo ago
I prefer the Buddhist interpretation of self. There isn't really a singular you. We are all interdependent beings. A four plus dimensional tree reaching back to the start of time. The "you" that you're experiencing right now is an illusion created by your brain. When the body you are currently experiencing with dies, there are still all the other bodies producing experience. After all, are you really the same person that began your life? Do you have the same memories? Can you even remember what being 10 years old was like? Are those memories real? Are you experiencing the same universe as when you were born? For all you know, you have died a thousand times and just don't remember it because those memories died in some other universe or some other body.

michaelt 10mo ago

When it comes to cryopreservation the thing I find infeasible is the idea a provider would bother with the preservation, under the incentives of capitalism. If someone pays millions of dollars to a company that promises to freeze their corpse for 200 years, the company can simply freeze the corpse for a decade or two, take the millions of dollars as dividends and executive bonuses, then declare bankruptcy. The dead can't sue.

adastra22 10mo ago
These aren’t companies doing the patient storage. It is non profits setup and run by people who are signed up themselves.
- deleted 10mo ago
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- FridayoLeary 10mo ago
  It's basically the same thing. What's stopping them from eventually losing interest or the non profit getting hijacked. I personally think the whole thing is a huge waste of money and i can imagine some guys in 50 years will think so too.
  - adastra22 10mo ago
    That they and the people they care about are stored there. This is a far stronger incentive than any profit motive.
- michaelt 10mo ago
  Wasn't OpenAI a non-profit?
  - adastra22 10mo ago
    The second part of that sentence was the important bit.
  - 10mo ago

baxtr 10mo ago

> Conclusions and Relevance: US physicians assigned a median 25.5% probability to preservation retaining neural information under ideal conditions in a manner potentially compatible with future patient revival. The majority support for pre-mortem anticoagulation and substantial support for pre-cardiac arrest initiation indicate that many physicians would consider accommodating patient requests for preservation-enhancing interventions. These findings may inform development of clinical guidelines, though the speculative nature of the estimates warrants consideration.

DennisP 10mo ago
That's a way higher number than I expected.
- nyeah 10mo ago
  I worry that there's a selection bias: physicians who even bothered to respond to a survey on this topic.
  - arielzj 10mo ago
    These were physicians who were being paid to complete surveys - no reason to think they were more likely to select/reject this one over any of the others available to them at the time.
    - nyeah 10mo ago
      <puzzled frown>. There's at least one reason. It's in the comment you responded to.
      - IAmBroom 10mo ago
        Two: the phrase "being paid".
      - overtone1000 10mo ago
        Apologies, that was my mistake. The subspecialties I thought weren't included were reported in detail in one of the figures, and they were some of the more optimistic groups. The result is surprising to me.

overtone1000 10mo ago

As with most science fiction, TNG did it better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_T...

pndy 10mo ago
Arthur C. Clarke explored this cultural shock as well in the final book of the Space Odyssey series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3001:_The_Final_Odyssey?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3001:_The_Final_Odyssey?useski...

Vecr 10mo ago

This is optimistic, I see "The cryonics people make a mistake in freezing you (how do we know they don't make lots of mistakes?)"[0] and "The current cryonics process is insufficient to preserve everything"[0] resulting of a product 10% already, seemingly matching the questionnaire as well as possible. They say "under ideal conditions" in the survey, so maybe that rules out cracking of brain tissue or ice growth, but that's not the number practitioners want to know about. [0]: https://www.jefftk.com/p/breaking-down-cryonics-probabilities https://www.jefftk.com/p/breaking-down-cryonics-probabilitie... “Principles of Cryopreservation by Vitrification” https://gwern.net/doc/biology/2015-fahy.pdf https://gwern.net/doc/biology/2015-fahy.pdf

arielzj 10mo ago
...I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Asking about ideal conditions is a reasonable starting point for establishing a baseline, and high-quality preservation is definitely something that can be achieved under laboratory conditions with animal models (e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001122401500245X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001122401...)
- Vecr 10mo ago
  Principles of Vitrification (Fahy PDF linked) p. 48 many practitioners think they have vitrified when they have not p. 45 volume changes of vitrifying agents, possibly in a way that avoids detection (very small scale?). Covers the second term, "freezing" (quibble quibble) speed and delays in the procedure cover the first. Your team seems not to be trying to maintain either normally solid/fluid tissue maintaining recoverable gradients or vitrification through an entire cycle below the triple point (with just removable or bio-compatible vitrifying mixtures) so your "goal" might be easier. Is the future AI just going to say you didn't do well enough even if you meet your "goal"? On the other hand if there's never any point in the cycle where any volume is not either recoverable to health or vitrified, all the AI can say is that cryonics doesn't work period.

toomanyrichies 10mo ago

Mark Twain put it pithily (and perhaps apocryphally): "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." Apparently there's a name for this: the Lucretian symmetry argument. And I recently learned there are philosophers who argue the asymmetry in our attitudes is actually rational, and that fearing death while not fearing pre-natal nonexistence makes sense [1]. I find comfort in treating the two as being equal, and I'd be lying if I said I'm not a little hesitant to read their case. [1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-015-9868-2_6 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-015-9868-2_...

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Jordan-117 10mo ago

"Another Cold Morning" https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Transmetropolitan/Issue-8?id=14227&s=&readType=1 https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Transmetropolitan/Issue-8?i...

M95D 10mo ago

> preserving the dying for future revival What for? The economy doesn't need humans anymore.

apothegm 10mo ago
Not to mention that it’s obviously ridiculous to do things for reasons other than economic or financial.
- M95D 10mo ago
  Yeah, that too! :)

tsoukase 10mo ago

Cryopreservation of cells and embryos are widely used, eg in in-virto fertilisation. Are the experiments with animals?