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.
> 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.)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
You don't have to wonder. After all, if it happens again, you will be asking yourself this exact question, won't you?
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.
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.
Do note that if nothing is done with this space -ever- then your data is not zeroed out, yet you don't exist anymore ?
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.
Deleted Comment
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
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.
Dead Comment
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_...
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.
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!
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
I think we have too many trusts already. Let the living decide what's important in life, not the dead.
What happens to the money in the trust?
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.
Deleted Comment
And one day he just wakes up.
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 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.
[0]: https://www.jefftk.com/p/breaking-down-cryonics-probabilitie... “Principles of Cryopreservation by Vitrification” https://gwern.net/doc/biology/2015-fahy.pdf
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_T...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3001:_The_Final_Odyssey?useski...
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