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.
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.
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.
Life is full of moments like that. For example on your way to work that same morning, had you left your house 30 seconds later than you did, someone might have had to wait at an intersection longer than they otherwise would have, causing them to narrowly miss being in an accident further down the road instead of being hit. Butterfly effect and all that. You can’t predict the future.
I don't worry too much about the butterfly effect because it goes both ways. Sure one stoplight here makes a guy die, but another stoplight over there saves a guys life.
But in this case, when it's a clear "either I put off changing my oil and washing my car, or this 250 lb senior citizen with gout tries going on a hike", it's a lot more clear.
Perhap he shouldn't have gone with her. Perhaps your gf shouldn't have let him go with her. Perhaps you face marriage into a family that has hereditary bad judgment!
Changing your oil and washing your car may be the luckiest decision you've made in your life!
I once did not marry a (beautiful) daughter of a family with an overweight heart-diseased patron. Turned out to be one of the best accidents of life for me. Saw her years later and she was almost as big as her Daddy was when he had his second heart bypass! Glad I missed that "iceberg in the night"!
It is his fault that he made choices which resulted in him being unable to perform basic tasks in life that he would reasonably be expected to sometimes do, such as walking outside.
Is it my fault that I've resulted in being unable to perform "basic tasks" such as walking outside? Have I somehow manifested osteoarthritis by my bad choices?
I suppose it could be considered a bad choice that when my knee ligament snapped, I went to a hospital which was horrendously busy (thanks NHS!) and the doctor didn't care to do more than a cursory exam and send me away (bad choice on my part trusting an expert, I suppose!) which then lead to a (slow) avalanche of problems which eventually destroyed almost every part of my knee?
You do have a little fault here, but it’s marginal vs his lifetime choices, and his lack of understanding of his limits. There should be enough room for forgiveness in all of that.
I get it, I got friends and family that have completed suicide and it’s hard to not think about what I could have done differently.
I have gone to the gym multiple times per week for many many years so that I can remain a physically capable parent to my children, and not inflict upon them my premature disablement or death.
The part of this that really makes me think is when you thought "I don't think that's going to work" about him going on the hike. That's really tough. In the past there have been times I didn't speak up about a concern I had, then found out that a warning would have been warranted. This is something I think about a lot since becoming a father. There has never been anything in my life before where 99% safe wasn't enough. When you're a parent, 99% safe is a nightmare. Risky situations happen every day. Like staying close enough to the kid on the sidewalk to grab her if the she sees a ball and wants to run into the street for the first time ever. As a parent you have to get comfortable just being a total square all the time, and speaking up about safety even if everyone in the room rolls their eyes. So yeah. It's not your fault, and this person's choice wasn't your responsibility. But you're right, if you were a square and spoke up about safety maybe it would have saved a life. That is a valuable lesson to hold on to.
I default to statistics a lot more now, even if ballparked and made up in my head.. and it all stemmed from a different gf asking me "how dangerous do you think that was???!!?!" while giggling and high off adrenaline after taking her to around 155 mph on a Yamaha R1.
I thought for a second and said "idk, probably like 1 in 100 we would have died... Maybe even worse than that.. I don't think I could pull that off 100 times"
And that weird realization made something click and I've stopped doing stupid things.
The new me would have thought "hey, if 100 65 year old obese men with gout go hiking, at least one of them isn't making it back".
22 year old me thought "eh, he's just going to be slow".
I feel it's kind of a moot point. GP's intention or train of thought doesn't change the downstream effects. Busy or not, they didn't go, and that's the bool the universe went with.
As others have already stated though it's really not GP's fault and they're not responsible for managing other's decisions. Could they have saved a person? Maybe. Or maybe the late father would have died a week later anyways.
You wouldn’t have prevented it. You would have maybe unknowingly created a condition that would have postponed it. And then you would never have known that you had done so.
In any case, obesity is the result of a lifestyle and going on the hike was a choice that he made and that his daughter accepted when she chose to go on the hike with her father knowing his condition.
Tragic, but there it is. The clock is ticking for us all. Any day now.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
> 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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
One way to mitigate that would be to put the money in a trust which pays the preservation company a monthly dividend. If the trust stops paying, the company can sue it. If the company goes out of business despite its ongoing revenue, the trust can try to find someone else to take over the storage. We already have trusts that manage wealth for multiple generations.
And how can you trust the trust? We also have plenty of trusts which are questionably aligned with their makers last wills, among them the Nobel peace prize (Nobel didn't just want the prize to go to anyone working for any kind of advancement of peace. He had a very particular instrument for peace in mind, namely peace conferences, which I don't think any laureate has arranged for fifty years.)
I think we have too many trusts already. Let the living decide what's important in life, not the dead.
That's why I said "mitigate" rather than "completely solve." Incentives are aligned better with two entities who check each other and earn ongoing fees, instead of giving a lump sum to a single entity.
And the Nobels might not be awarded exactly as originally intended, but they are still awarded every year. Nobody has swiped the funds for executive bonuses, as the commenter above suggested.
Whatever you define when you set it up. Donate to charity, give to your descendants, etc.
Preferably the company would also have liability, giving the trust standing to sue. Then the trust spends some of their money on the lawsuit, and if they win, applies the proceeds as above.
With enough money, at least here in the UK, it is possible to set up structures that endure for one sole purpose for many generations.
It was quite common for rich Victorians to donate their grounds/houses to be used for the public good and still today they are owned by the original trust and money from the trust can only be used in a certain way etc... we have many parks because of this (that otherwise could have been developed to extract money).
Obviously the longer the technology takes to develop, the higher the chance something goes wrong; though the concepts of trusts have existed for some 800 years so if it takes only 200 years, I think your chances are good!
Isn't the UK also the home of the "Rule against perpetuities" [1] specifically stopping dead people from exerting control over the ownership of private property? To stop some duke in the 1600s setting inheritance rules for "their" land 6 generations into the future?
There may be exceptions to the rule against perpetuities for charities, but I don't imagine any sane court would consider keeping a corpse frozen to be a charitable activity.
The way I think you'd set this up is you'd create a trust with the millions and then the trustees would pay the company its monthly fee from the trust's funds.
With enough funds, the trust should be able to both pay for your preservation and grow its balance. You'd even be able to inherit the remaining funds when revived.
Of course in practice there is still the possibility of the trustees being corrupt.
The novel When the Sleeper Wakes is based on a situation where a tax loophole meant that one particular suspended-animation quasi-corpse inherited (eventually) over half the property on Earth. His trust becomes a de facto world government, and his body, fully cured of its fatal flaw, lies in state in a sort of mausoleum/temple/seat of government.
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.
There's a news story about such a company where they basically throw the bodies in a chest freezer, or stuffed many of them together in one unit, etc. Nightmare fuel...
I have doubts that such a company could keep the power on for the next 200 years, with an increasingly unstable planet (climatically and politically).
Maybe sending your body in a lead coffin into the coldness of space is a better preservation method, maybe that's why the loser billionaires are so interested in going to space..
Some 20 years ago French Planete documentary channel (back then that channel had some good stuff - often shocking, unlike Discovery that slowly marched towards flashy popsci, aliens and WW2) was showing this piece about cryonics, and there was a segment about company that did indeed went bankrupt. Bodies of their clients due to unpaid bills de-thawed and started decomposing. And since that happen there was nothing else that families could do but just bury their beloved ones.
Some of the experts speaking argued that it's impossible to preserve and then revive human bodies with available technology because ice crystals do irreversible damage to body tissues.
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.
...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/S001122401...)
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.
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.
> 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.
> though the speculative nature of the estimates warrants consideration.
Experts in a related field were asked to guess how successful something no one has ever done would be, if it could be done.
That's like asking a bunch of certified mechanics how fast George Jetson's flying car could go. I mean, there are mechanics in The Jetson's universe, so... same knowledge base, right?
I agree, and I am a US physician! Curiously, their paper was sponsored by an entity that funds cryopreservation research. The paper asserts that those surveyed were general practitioners, but the actual survey itself had quotas for various subspecialties. The survey also has an introduction section that frames cryopreservation (not used in medicine) in the context of hypothermic protocols (commonly used in medicine), which would seem to lend it some legitimacy. But that isn't a fair comparison. Only critical care specialists and some surgeons and anesthesiologists have much experience with therapeutic hypothermia. GPs would typically have less experience and might not readily notice the inequivalence.
I can't help but wonder whether they changed the protocol after the survey was designed and only interviewed general practitioners. Or, worse, perhaps they selectively excluded a portion of the interviewed population.
1. We had both general practitioners and various specialists. We set a minimum quota for each so that we'd get some sense of what all the various groups thought. We aimed for and obtained 180 specialists along with the 150 general practitioners. See figure 1 c.
1a. We absolutely did not change the protocol after the survey was designed, or selectively exclude sections of the population. The inclusion/exclusion criteria are as per the methods, and this was a one-shot survey (no piloting beyond initial validation on colleagues). I'm all for open and reproducible science!
2. The introduction does not claim an equivalence between induced hypothermia and preservation, just that induced hypothermia does provide some precedence that preservation may work.
"Some surgical operations, such as repairs of aneurysms of the aortic arch, are performed using deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (Connoly et al., 2010). In this procedure, a patient’s body is cooled to ~20°C, experiencing both circulatory arrest and complete electrocerebral silence on EEG. Patients can survive 30+ minutes in this state with >90% survival rates and intact post-surgical cognition (Percy et al., 2009).
This demonstrates that long-term memory and personality can persist through prolonged cessation of brain activity - a finding which builds upon other neuroscience data showing that these depend on structural properties such as neuronal connectivity, rather than requiring uninterruptible electrochemical dynamics (Stecker et al., 2001).
Some terminally ill patients, based on this medical evidence and their personal beliefs about future medical advances, have requested procedures to preserve their brain structure after legal death..."
3. I was also surprised the probability estimates were as high as they were! I think doctors just think this has a greater chance of working than is commonly perceived.
Thanks for the excellent response and clarification! I apologize for misreading your method with regard to inclusion of subspecialties. Figure 1 is particularly enlightening. Indeed, I'm in one of the two most skeptical subspecialties, and I considered switching to the other for some time. I suppose that says something about my biases as does the fact that I lurk on HN.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not your fault.
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.
Life is full of moments like that. For example on your way to work that same morning, had you left your house 30 seconds later than you did, someone might have had to wait at an intersection longer than they otherwise would have, causing them to narrowly miss being in an accident further down the road instead of being hit. Butterfly effect and all that. You can’t predict the future.
I don't worry too much about the butterfly effect because it goes both ways. Sure one stoplight here makes a guy die, but another stoplight over there saves a guys life.
But in this case, when it's a clear "either I put off changing my oil and washing my car, or this 250 lb senior citizen with gout tries going on a hike", it's a lot more clear.
Perhap he shouldn't have gone with her. Perhaps your gf shouldn't have let him go with her. Perhaps you face marriage into a family that has hereditary bad judgment!
Changing your oil and washing your car may be the luckiest decision you've made in your life!
I once did not marry a (beautiful) daughter of a family with an overweight heart-diseased patron. Turned out to be one of the best accidents of life for me. Saw her years later and she was almost as big as her Daddy was when he had his second heart bypass! Glad I missed that "iceberg in the night"!
Not your fault your girlfriends dad was so out of shape a hike (potentially) killed him.
He should have hiked more often.
Not his fault that he couldn't predict his daughter deciding to go on a hike alone, which triggered his parental protective mode.
It is his fault that he made choices which resulted in him being unable to perform basic tasks in life that he would reasonably be expected to sometimes do, such as walking outside.
Is it my fault that I've resulted in being unable to perform "basic tasks" such as walking outside? Have I somehow manifested osteoarthritis by my bad choices?
I suppose it could be considered a bad choice that when my knee ligament snapped, I went to a hospital which was horrendously busy (thanks NHS!) and the doctor didn't care to do more than a cursory exam and send me away (bad choice on my part trusting an expert, I suppose!) which then lead to a (slow) avalanche of problems which eventually destroyed almost every part of my knee?
Yeah, probably all my fault, you're right.
You do have a little fault here, but it’s marginal vs his lifetime choices, and his lack of understanding of his limits. There should be enough room for forgiveness in all of that.
I get it, I got friends and family that have completed suicide and it’s hard to not think about what I could have done differently.
That's how I see it. Ive always felt a lot worse for the daughter too.
I really hate the fat-shaming going on here.
Yeah, he died. Yeah, he was out of shape.
He wanted to keep his daughter safe, and trying to do so cost him his life. He did something heroic.
What have you done at that level of importance?
I have gone to the gym multiple times per week for many many years so that I can remain a physically capable parent to my children, and not inflict upon them my premature disablement or death.
The part of this that really makes me think is when you thought "I don't think that's going to work" about him going on the hike. That's really tough. In the past there have been times I didn't speak up about a concern I had, then found out that a warning would have been warranted. This is something I think about a lot since becoming a father. There has never been anything in my life before where 99% safe wasn't enough. When you're a parent, 99% safe is a nightmare. Risky situations happen every day. Like staying close enough to the kid on the sidewalk to grab her if the she sees a ball and wants to run into the street for the first time ever. As a parent you have to get comfortable just being a total square all the time, and speaking up about safety even if everyone in the room rolls their eyes. So yeah. It's not your fault, and this person's choice wasn't your responsibility. But you're right, if you were a square and spoke up about safety maybe it would have saved a life. That is a valuable lesson to hold on to.
>There has never been anything in my life before where 99% safe wasn't enough
Have there been about 75 where it was? If so, congrats on beating the odds.
I default to statistics a lot more now, even if ballparked and made up in my head.. and it all stemmed from a different gf asking me "how dangerous do you think that was???!!?!" while giggling and high off adrenaline after taking her to around 155 mph on a Yamaha R1.
I thought for a second and said "idk, probably like 1 in 100 we would have died... Maybe even worse than that.. I don't think I could pull that off 100 times"
And that weird realization made something click and I've stopped doing stupid things.
The new me would have thought "hey, if 100 65 year old obese men with gout go hiking, at least one of them isn't making it back". 22 year old me thought "eh, he's just going to be slow".
Ya know, ya really waited until the second comment here to add in the "pretending" lol
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.
I feel it's kind of a moot point. GP's intention or train of thought doesn't change the downstream effects. Busy or not, they didn't go, and that's the bool the universe went with.
As others have already stated though it's really not GP's fault and they're not responsible for managing other's decisions. Could they have saved a person? Maybe. Or maybe the late father would have died a week later anyways.
You wouldn’t have prevented it. You would have maybe unknowingly created a condition that would have postponed it. And then you would never have known that you had done so.
In any case, obesity is the result of a lifestyle and going on the hike was a choice that he made and that his daughter accepted when she chose to go on the hike with her father knowing his condition.
Tragic, but there it is. The clock is ticking for us all. Any day now.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> I sometimes wonder if that was truly a one time thing or if it's something that could happen again.
You don't have to wonder. After all, if it happens again, you will be asking yourself this exact question, won't you?
That makes no sense. Of course they have to wonder about something that hasn't happened yet, and might not.
If it does happen, then they can stop wondering. Now now.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
Like a shooter spectator mode or like reincarnation with extra steps?
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.
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.
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)
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.
It's impossible to experience nothing. Spooky
You’ll never know that you died
Never thought about the possibility that I AM the Boltzmann brain.
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
With no memories going with me, it feels just as scary.
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.
> 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
> 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
> 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.
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.
Nah, you wake up in the pearly gates of Christian heaven.
Not everyone.
We hope.
Counterpoint, what if it's not
[dead]
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_...
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.
One way to mitigate that would be to put the money in a trust which pays the preservation company a monthly dividend. If the trust stops paying, the company can sue it. If the company goes out of business despite its ongoing revenue, the trust can try to find someone else to take over the storage. We already have trusts that manage wealth for multiple generations.
And how can you trust the trust? We also have plenty of trusts which are questionably aligned with their makers last wills, among them the Nobel peace prize (Nobel didn't just want the prize to go to anyone working for any kind of advancement of peace. He had a very particular instrument for peace in mind, namely peace conferences, which I don't think any laureate has arranged for fifty years.)
I think we have too many trusts already. Let the living decide what's important in life, not the dead.
That's why I said "mitigate" rather than "completely solve." Incentives are aligned better with two entities who check each other and earn ongoing fees, instead of giving a lump sum to a single entity.
And the Nobels might not be awarded exactly as originally intended, but they are still awarded every year. Nobody has swiped the funds for executive bonuses, as the commenter above suggested.
The fact that we are talking about bodies supposedly preserved in a state of suspended animation, not yet really dead, refutes your premise.
Not sure what premise you mean. But I'm pretty sure not even the cryo-optimists pretends those people are not dead.
This is exactly how Companies are doing it… they put the money in a trust and pay for the ongoing costs by using interests from that trust.
Let's say there was a power cut and the backup generator failed. The corpse is gone.
What happens to the money in the trust?
Whatever you define when you set it up. Donate to charity, give to your descendants, etc.
Preferably the company would also have liability, giving the trust standing to sue. Then the trust spends some of their money on the lawsuit, and if they win, applies the proceeds as above.
With enough money, at least here in the UK, it is possible to set up structures that endure for one sole purpose for many generations.
It was quite common for rich Victorians to donate their grounds/houses to be used for the public good and still today they are owned by the original trust and money from the trust can only be used in a certain way etc... we have many parks because of this (that otherwise could have been developed to extract money).
Obviously the longer the technology takes to develop, the higher the chance something goes wrong; though the concepts of trusts have existed for some 800 years so if it takes only 200 years, I think your chances are good!
Isn't the UK also the home of the "Rule against perpetuities" [1] specifically stopping dead people from exerting control over the ownership of private property? To stop some duke in the 1600s setting inheritance rules for "their" land 6 generations into the future?
There may be exceptions to the rule against perpetuities for charities, but I don't imagine any sane court would consider keeping a corpse frozen to be a charitable activity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
The way I think you'd set this up is you'd create a trust with the millions and then the trustees would pay the company its monthly fee from the trust's funds.
With enough funds, the trust should be able to both pay for your preservation and grow its balance. You'd even be able to inherit the remaining funds when revived.
Of course in practice there is still the possibility of the trustees being corrupt.
The novel When the Sleeper Wakes is based on a situation where a tax loophole meant that one particular suspended-animation quasi-corpse inherited (eventually) over half the property on Earth. His trust becomes a de facto world government, and his body, fully cured of its fatal flaw, lies in state in a sort of mausoleum/temple/seat of government.
And one day he just wakes up.
These aren’t companies doing the patient storage. It is non profits setup and run by people who are signed up themselves.
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.
That they and the people they care about are stored there. This is a far stronger incentive than any profit motive.
Wasn't OpenAI a non-profit?
The second part of that sentence was the important bit.
And since all things under that umbrella are exactly the same...
Yeah, even the living can't collect much from a bankrupt corporation.
That's a good point, but the funds could be automatically released over time instead of a lump sum payment
There's a news story about such a company where they basically throw the bodies in a chest freezer, or stuffed many of them together in one unit, etc. Nightmare fuel...
I have doubts that such a company could keep the power on for the next 200 years, with an increasingly unstable planet (climatically and politically).
Maybe sending your body in a lead coffin into the coldness of space is a better preservation method, maybe that's why the loser billionaires are so interested in going to space..
Some 20 years ago French Planete documentary channel (back then that channel had some good stuff - often shocking, unlike Discovery that slowly marched towards flashy popsci, aliens and WW2) was showing this piece about cryonics, and there was a segment about company that did indeed went bankrupt. Bodies of their clients due to unpaid bills de-thawed and started decomposing. And since that happen there was nothing else that families could do but just bury their beloved ones.
Some of the experts speaking argued that it's impossible to preserve and then revive human bodies with available technology because ice crystals do irreversible damage to body tissues.
Yes, the ice crystals destroying the integrity of a large portion of the cells throughout the body remains a tiny chink in the whole plan.
Fortunately, "future technology" handwaves all problems away.
The ice crystal problem got solved decades ago.
If that's the case why aren't we doing more to encourage them?
Cryopreservation of cells and embryos are widely used, eg in in-virto fertilisation. Are the experiments with animals?
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-probabilitie... “Principles of Cryopreservation by Vitrification” https://gwern.net/doc/biology/2015-fahy.pdf
...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/S001122401...)
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.
As with most science fiction, TNG did it better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_T...
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?useski...
Would you really want to be that first patient to be revived ?
Yes! I wouldn't want to be the last patient to not be revived, but that's just regular death anyway.
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.
> 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.
> though the speculative nature of the estimates warrants consideration.
Experts in a related field were asked to guess how successful something no one has ever done would be, if it could be done.
That's like asking a bunch of certified mechanics how fast George Jetson's flying car could go. I mean, there are mechanics in The Jetson's universe, so... same knowledge base, right?
That's a way higher number than I expected.
I agree, and I am a US physician! Curiously, their paper was sponsored by an entity that funds cryopreservation research. The paper asserts that those surveyed were general practitioners, but the actual survey itself had quotas for various subspecialties. The survey also has an introduction section that frames cryopreservation (not used in medicine) in the context of hypothermic protocols (commonly used in medicine), which would seem to lend it some legitimacy. But that isn't a fair comparison. Only critical care specialists and some surgeons and anesthesiologists have much experience with therapeutic hypothermia. GPs would typically have less experience and might not readily notice the inequivalence.
I can't help but wonder whether they changed the protocol after the survey was designed and only interviewed general practitioners. Or, worse, perhaps they selectively excluded a portion of the interviewed population.
First author here to provide context:
1. We had both general practitioners and various specialists. We set a minimum quota for each so that we'd get some sense of what all the various groups thought. We aimed for and obtained 180 specialists along with the 150 general practitioners. See figure 1 c.
1a. We absolutely did not change the protocol after the survey was designed, or selectively exclude sections of the population. The inclusion/exclusion criteria are as per the methods, and this was a one-shot survey (no piloting beyond initial validation on colleagues). I'm all for open and reproducible science!
2. The introduction does not claim an equivalence between induced hypothermia and preservation, just that induced hypothermia does provide some precedence that preservation may work.
"Some surgical operations, such as repairs of aneurysms of the aortic arch, are performed using deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (Connoly et al., 2010). In this procedure, a patient’s body is cooled to ~20°C, experiencing both circulatory arrest and complete electrocerebral silence on EEG. Patients can survive 30+ minutes in this state with >90% survival rates and intact post-surgical cognition (Percy et al., 2009).
This demonstrates that long-term memory and personality can persist through prolonged cessation of brain activity - a finding which builds upon other neuroscience data showing that these depend on structural properties such as neuronal connectivity, rather than requiring uninterruptible electrochemical dynamics (Stecker et al., 2001).
Some terminally ill patients, based on this medical evidence and their personal beliefs about future medical advances, have requested procedures to preserve their brain structure after legal death..."
3. I was also surprised the probability estimates were as high as they were! I think doctors just think this has a greater chance of working than is commonly perceived.
Thanks for the excellent response and clarification! I apologize for misreading your method with regard to inclusion of subspecialties. Figure 1 is particularly enlightening. Indeed, I'm in one of the two most skeptical subspecialties, and I considered switching to the other for some time. I suppose that says something about my biases as does the fact that I lurk on HN.
I worry that there's a selection bias: physicians who even bothered to respond to a survey on this topic.
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.
<puzzled frown>. There's at least one reason. It's in the comment you responded to.
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.
Two: the phrase "being paid".
"Another Cold Morning"
https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Transmetropolitan/Issue-8?i...
> preserving the dying for future revival
What for? The economy doesn't need humans anymore.
Not to mention that it’s obviously ridiculous to do things for reasons other than economic or financial.
Yeah, that too! :)