Neurosurgeons have been using hypothermia (cooling down the body) and circulatory arrest (stopping the heart) to treat complicated brain aneurysms since the 1980's. Some of the outcomes have been very good.
When a person is in that state, they have no signs of life - no heartbeat and no blood to the brain, yet a significant portion of the time, they do well.
From the article, it looks like they have done this for up to 50 minutes.
"
The median duration of complete arrest in our series
was 11 minutes; the range was 7 to 53 minutes. This
is consistent with reports from other neurological surgeons who have employed extracorporeal circulation for
intracranial vascular surgery
"
I wonder how different the experience of waking up from induced hypothermia is from, say, a coma. From my understanding, in a coma there is sometimes brain activity, up to the point that some people end up with Locked-in syndrome(LIS).
An example is Martin Pistorius, who has vivid memories of his time in his pseudocoma. That means his sense of self was intact throughout that experience. That colors what it feels like to "escape" from the coma. In dreams, we usually have a sense of self, i.e. we "come back" to reality.
There are also people who experience the subjective Near-death experience (NDE) which sometimes involves bodily detachment, etc. but presumably this NDE feels like it's occurring to that person's self. When under anaesthesia, waking up from it is more like waking up from a really deep nap, and from my experience, is easy to integrate.
Now, when waking up from induced hypothermia, does the brain slowly kick on different modules? Does the brain snap back to the last thought the person was having? To use a programming analogy, does the brain save state in a physical way? Or is it like restarting a computer fresh?
This is such a cool technique. Thank you for sharing info on it.
"An example is Martin Pistorius, who has vivid memories of his time in his pseudocoma. That means his sense of self was intact throughout that experience."
If 6 years had passed with limited sensory input, and you were pretty sure you remembered all of it, how would you know if that's true?
How much detail do we really remember of our own last 6 years of fully awake, conscious existence not spent in such a state?
I feel like once you get to such a length of time you can't trust your own memory of it. Obviously he could know enough to say "I was conscious during some point of that time window" but measuring it would be hard.
My guess at a computer analogy: Start program -> Delete program -> Crash process -> Resurrection of process impossible.
The program being the bootstrapping mechanism that is present in a baby's brain. The process being consciousness.
Even if the bootstrapping mechanism was still present in the brain, we might not know how to call it and even if we did we would lose everything that was in memory at the time of the crash.
Our current understanding seems to be that the electrical activity of the brain is what maintains the mind-consciousness system. (From a physical/materialist pov)
Nah, there have been cases with short temporary flat EEG that came back to life, which is why the guidelines specify the duration for declaring someone dead in this way.
Those people suffered no memory or identity loss, so electric activity is not related. Connectome structure and tuned bioelectrical responses based on cell cytoplasm gradients, receptor structure and number tuned by a bunch of either RNA or proteins the most likely candidate. So the better analogy is it's like flash memory, left unpowered but running for too long the neurons will change.
Restarting the brain from that flatlined state is therefore possible, we just don't know how to do that properly. Most importantly, it won't do any good if the brain is damaged and is rarely useful.
Life must be sustained, once it is lost, it seems that there is a bell that cannot be un-rung.
However, our understanding of how much energy it takes to sustain life at a minimum seems to keep decreasing, like higher efficiency RAM in low-power mode.
At that point your brain is “off”. Having a non functioning heart doesn’t seem that noteworthy in this context given that we do straight up heart transplants.
Our definition of what's death coincided with us not being technically able to recover anyone from it. That's the reason it included "non recovery" (e.g. permanence).
Death includes a person having no brain activity, no breathing, no metabolism, no heart rate, no consciousness, etc. The permanence of those things is an accidental attribute of death, not it's fundament (that why we can say: "When you're dead, you're dead forever" or can imagine and write about "Dead coming back to life").
If death is a state characterized by X, Y and Z attributes (today, and for millennia now), then the discovery of a way to revert those X, Y, Z attributes in the future doesn't mean everybody who had then in the past wasn't death.
I'd say that your argument is a nominalism inspired version of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.
It's like as if one everybody would call a certifiably "dead person" today (e.g. a buried cadaver) is revived in 10 years due to some technological feat, someone goes to say "yes, but that was not a true dead person", moving the goalposts.
If technology is able to revive JFK in 2200, would you say JFK is not dead today?
Obviously the question actually being asked is "Are people traditionally classified dead actually dead dead?" to which the answer may only be "mostly" rather than "yes".
If we ever invent time travel that will mean that, relatively speaking, we all live forever. That would also mean that the universe is continually recording every single instance of time.
If I were a sci-fi author I would write that the reason the universe is expanding and accelerating is to record all of the new data being created. Just like a needle writing on a record. To record more data it needs to move the needle farther away from the center. And the farther away from the center it moves the faster the needle, relative to the disc, moves.
Or rather, it's not that time is "recorded", but it just exists, all at once, just like that, and we're simply experiencing a lower-dimensional slice of the universe, so we feel like we are "moving" through time when we really aren't.
There's a non-fiction book, The Physics of Immortality by Frank Tipler, with a similar premise. Because the universe (according to some models) will end in a Big Crunch, collapsing to a single point, and because information can't be destroyed, then an omniscient intelligence will arise near the end of time with the ability to restore everyone who ever lived.
That is a good metafor. Someone might say, it is not really erased, is it is just the pointer that is deleted. Someone else says, there are still traces of magnetic field left, just much weaker. But if the disk is put in a shredder we can be sure it will never be read again - it is truly dead.
I chose to celebrate Halloween by binging on an HP Lovecraft audiobook, the Necronomicon. Of the short stories contained within, the second one, Reanimator, is my recommendation for anyone in search of spooky entertainment on this topic. I have to warn however that it's set in the 1920s, back when the N word and eugenics were both considered hip.
> We already phisically change completely every few years.
That is not true at all. Please don't perpetuate these old wives' tales on HN.
A lot of your cells do die and are replaced, sperm cells for example have a life span of 3 days, white blood cells about a year, but brain cells (especially relevant to the context of this thread) are with you for life.
Sense of self is quite possibly an illusion a bunch of separate processes in the brain use to organize things. If this is true, changing some of those gradually enough will preserve your sense of self. This is what any experience does to you in various degrees. (Changing them rapidly might conflict with previous memory though.) Even remembering something rewrites that memory and you end up with a slightly different one.
So it is possible that not only your body gets completely replaced many times over, but your identity and memories and thinking processes get replaced by imperfect copies.
I honestly think this is only "scary" the first time.
After that, you will have the experience of "dying and being resurrected" and since everything went fine that last time, the next time is less of a concern.
Hah, maybe. And maybe we die every night when we go to sleep and are only deluding ourselves into thinking we're the same person who went to sleep. But ultimately "dead" is a matter for us living beings to define, the universe itself has no notion of elan vital that discriminates between the living and the dead.
A useful thought experiment is to consider a machine that first duplicates a person and then drops the original into a meat grinder.
The duplicate that steps out would be identical to the original and have no memory of having been ground.
Would you step into such a machine, safe in the knowledge that from the point of view of the universe and all other living beings, you would emerge unharmed?
Well, there'd be two consciousnesses produced both of which I'd think of as me, pre-duplication. And one would die in horrible pain. I'd really rather not die in horrible pain even if there was still a me around afterward, though you could probably offer a large enough inducement that I'd take it. Of course, there exist inducements that would get me to consent to the meat grinder without duplication
Hugh Jackman does, in the film "The Prestige" - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0482571/ - with the inducement being "to perform the greatest magic trick" and one-up Christian Bale.
This will devolve into a 'what is consciousness' debate, but honestly does it matter?
To your consciousness, there is no gap, just the novel experience of watching someone who looks an awful lot like you die. If the consciousness is copied perfectly from a to b, is there a difference in it at that point?
Future you (or "you") won't give a shit. Present you may or may not have cause to worry.
A simple thought experiment: We somehow copy me, but leave the original alive after reviving the copy. Then we kill the original. As the original, I'm gonna be unhappy about that. The exact time you kill me doesn't change that, so killing me then copying me then reviving the copy at the very least isn't a trivially unobjectionable process. As to whether it's actually unobjectionable, that's probably way above our paygrades philosophically.
There's a great star trek episode where Riker gets duplicated in the transporter, leading to years of jokes (and philosophical debates) that the transporter doesn't send you anywhere, it just copies you and kills the original. Real fun to think about.
Except they went out of their way in that episode to explain that transporters absolutely do not work that way and this was a very strange occurrence that they could only guess at the cause of.
That's the thing. If you exist as one consciousness, then they copy the other while the first dies, the second is, essentially, the same consciousness. Therefore, you are still alive.
I feel like this has been discussed somewhere already in history.
This is a weird roadblock I've run into before when discussing this topic.
No matter how many times I say that I'm speaking from the individual's point of view, some readers seem incapable of looking at it from an individual perspective.
In the case of your statement, it would solely depend on how the copy was made. If it's copied by somehow reading the consciousness, storing it as data, and perfectly restoring it in a new brain, then no, it is not the same consciousness, and from your perspective you are dead.
If it's copied through some kind of direct transfer, where the electrical impulses move, through some kind of biological link, to a new brain, then it is possible that the same continuous consciousness could now exist in the new brain.
(to be clear, I don't mean any of what I said to be insulting. I'm just observing that there are perspectives on this issue that I don't quite understand)
We feel like there is a difference between those 2 cases because we experience a continuity in our experience of the universe (ie. consciousness).
Under this premise (as you stated), copying your entire state and spawning it elsewhere (then killing the original) means your original version experiences a stopping of their continuity.
But if you analyze that premise, you realize that the only reason we believe we existed a second ago is because of our memory (the same reason the clone believes it was always alive).
How can you know that you aren't being cloned, in-place, right now? ie. Copied, killed, and spawned in place almost instantaneously. At every instant you carry all your memories and thus "feel" continuity, but it's a new you.
In this view, being killed and spawned elsewhere is no different. It isn't taking anything away from you because you never had it.
Obviously this is just a thought experiment, but just the fact that right now, while you were questioning if being cloned and killed was bad for the original you, this process could have been happening to you without your knowledge, might mean it is irrelevant.
I know what you mean. Guess a helpful analogy for some might be to consider two objects of one class. Those objects can be instantiated with identical values, but they are, in fact, two different objects. They occupy a different, physical space and can be differentiated by that. Same with two identical copies of a person. Not the same space, not the same consciousness. I'm not sure why some overlook the space part in all of this.
Well I consider what makes "the individual" that is me the composition that makes up the brain and body I have. If you can recreate that composition I consider both people to equally have my individual point of view.
The problem with that is that it means that consciousness is not bound to your body. Two people can share the same consciousness and from that point on it is very easy to imagine that you are sharing the consciousness of your parents and their grandparents and so on until every organism on earth shares the same consciousness. This means consciousness has to be a property of the universe. Making a clone doesn't grant you immortality because you already are immortal.
The opposite scenario is that there are now two consciousnesses. If the original dies so does its consciousness and you failed to achieve immortality. Your clone is just your offspring with an identical body and set of memories.
So which is it? I personally picked it based on what I want to believe in, because even if it is a lie it helps me shape the world into one in which I want to life in, rather than one that I do not like and would prefer to get rid of.
I feel like this has been discussed somewhere already in history.
Ship of Theseus paradox, if you replace the planks and beams of a ship over and over until they are all replaced, is it still the original ship?
Difference is, humans have a perspective on the world which ships and brooms do not have. If you watched a team busying about with a machine for a few hours, and then a human stepped out of it, and then one of the team members turned to you and said "OK we've got a clone of you, now we're going to shoot you in the head" would you say "yes I see that new person out there across the room looks exactly like me, so it IS me, so go on, shoot me?"
Humans change all the time, ask your teenage self that.
Some things stay rather permanent though, as they're dynamically reinforced, short of serious trauma.
Those parts are likely to survive stepped replacement, or rather both the replacement and original adjust to get to the original state.
It's like trying to replace a component of a feedback system while it's live, it will be out of whack for a while but if control is good enough will return to baseline.
The universe doesn't have ships it has something that is aproximated somewhat by waves or particles or strings. The ship is a convenient pointer to discuss a collection of particles that whose state depend on each other in some fashion.
It's a handle of convenience. If it points to something useful it's useful if not then not there never was or will be a ship of theseus so whether it's the same ship means nothing.
It's definitely been discussed for a while. Recent takes on it include a really interesting Outer Limits episode and the recent Netflix show Living with Yourself.
This is easy to say if you're not the one dying. If you know a perfect clone of your current self is going to live from this point forward, are you still comfortable with being killed?
Most of it depends on the idea as to whether you think you experience death.
For example: general anesthesia is something I think most people having these conversations should experience (which is to say, generally a lot of people don't). Because it's very different to sleep. Waking up from GA, it's as though no time has passed at all - you were one place, suddenly you're another.
In the case where a person is duplicated exactly, sometime during that period of GA - what's the difference?
It takes a special pleading that somehow, someone would know the difference. While under general anesthesia it's worth considering that people can and do actually die. And unless something metaphysical happens at that point, then the reality is they never know. They went under, expected to wake up, and just don't.
> Because it's very different to sleep. Waking up from GA, it's as though no time has passed at all - you were one place, suddenly you're another.
Personally, most nights of normal sleep are like that for me as well. Dreams (or at least the remembrance thereof) are a rare occurrence rather than the norm.
(For reference, yes, I have been under GA. I didn't really find it to be all that different, other than the onset being somewhat more sudden and waking up in a different place.)
Presumably you knew that before you stepped into the teleporter, so decision to partially die is in both copies of you.
This all assumes a destructive copy process -- if a non-destructive teleporter is possible, you don't need to destroy remaining copy, but all kinds of legal issues arise. Maybe you'd want to have one copy destroyed to avoid paying double for lunch.
If you watch the show "Altered Carbon", I kind of felt like there was an unspoken idea that all of the characters are in fact deceased many times over. The capability of replicating the exact consciousness of any of them exists of course.
That's the thing, there is NO transition point. There's just two of you. SO, if there are two of your consciousness with the same thoughts, experiences, and the whole shabang up until the second one is made and the first dies, does it even matter that it's not the original?
I would argue no. Because for you, your consciousness, it's as if you are still the same person. The first doesn't matter, because it's just turned off. But you still exist.
Unless you're arguing for a 'soul', there is no difference between the two consciousnesses. Therefore, you are still alive.
> That's the thing, there is NO transition point. There's just two of you. SO, if there are two of your consciousness with the same thoughts, experiences, and the whole shabang up until the second one is made and the first dies, does it even matter that it's not the original?
Externally, no. But it matters to me, the original.
> I would argue no. Because for you, your consciousness, it's as if you are still the same person.
Yes, for the copy, it is as if they are the original.
> The first doesn't matter, because it's just turned off.
What if the copy is made non-destructively?
> But you still exist.
A version of you still exists.
> Unless you're arguing for a 'soul', there is no difference between the two consciousnesses. Therefore, you are still alive.
The causal chain of events matters. If a copy of your consciousness is made, it can be done without you ever knowing about it.
So let's assume that the universe is infinite in extent, and everything which can happen, does happen, infinite times. That means you are not the only "you" in the Universe.
You may now commit suicide, safe in the knowledge that it doesn't matter, because there's no difference between the current you and the distant you.
Unless you're now going to change tack and say it only counts if you're in each other's Light cone, and have seen each other, and understand the cloning machine's workings, and trust it was built correctly, and an endless amount of other procrastinating which proves that it does matter to you which one dies, and no matter what words you type, your behavior will show that you recognize a stark difference between "you" and "someone else".
Clearly a condition "I know they exist" doesn't change whether you two are the same person or not, so that can't be an important part of it.
>You may now commit suicide, safe in the knowledge that it doesn't matter, because there's no difference between the current you and the distant you.
If you decide to commit suicide, then any identical copies of yourself will also have the same thought process and decide to commit suicide too, so you'll have killed all identical copies of yourself. That's very different than deciding to do something (like use a scan-clone-destroy teleporter) that will create a copy of yourself and then destroy one copy of yourself.
Playing russian roulette would leave many worlds without an instance of me, in a way that the teleporter wouldn't. I care about my responsibilities and loved ones left without me in those worlds.
If there were truly infinite worlds and infinite of each variation, and you could somehow play russian roulette instead with an entire world, so that each one has a risk of just entirely blinking out of existence ... it feels superficially wrong, but I find it hard to argue against. I'd worry that there's a risk of if it was done infinitely, then by some logic the infinite sum could eventually lead to all worlds not existing eventually, but if that was definitely known not to be a risk then I would find it hard to care about whether the world played russian roulette or not.
There is no “your consciousness” as an identity across the two copies. So you fork a process and you kill one of the processes. That process experiences death. Likewise one copy experiences death. Does it matter? Depending on your objectives. If it’s to achieve some sort of world domination through pseudo-immortality, probably not, since your copy will execute faithfully as you. But your perception, the body unit you’re in, will most definitely see an end. It won’t ‘jump’ into the other medium. This you will die. That you will live.
This assumes a non-destructive copying process _and_ a mandatory destruction of original. Those two things might not be easy to reconcile.
A destructive copy is strictly more feasible (as far as such things are feasible at all). But it comes with a possibility to print copies once the reading is done. Then you can get multiple clones made and they will be you, but will start diverge from each other right away due to slightly different experiences.
a gets to the transition point and dies. b "awakes" with a's memories.
So: you are a ... > [transition] ... you are ?
How do you know you (formerly a) become b at that point? Certainly from b's perspective that is the case - but from former a's perspective? Which do you "switch to"? Death or b?
You need to consider 3 perspectives:
a
then after the transition:
b (live a)
c (dead a)
If you don't want to consider dead a, then consider this: what if the experiment went wrong?
a isn't killed in the process, but a copy of their consciousness is loaded into b.
Same situation as before, but both a and b think they are former a.
Which are you (formerly a) in that circumstance? Why?
I would argue a has a strong case to be considered the correct version - which means you die in the first case.
The answers to this question depend on what positions one takes in the philosophy of mind. Find the correct philosophy of mind, and you will find the correct answer to this question (well, unless something like Derek Parfit's position is correct, in which case the correct answer is that there is no correct answer.)
For everyone interested in fiction which explores these things, I'd also like to plug the excellent anime Kaiba. [0]
It's set in the far future where editing your memories, copying them to other bodies, editing those bodies, is as common as smartphones today.
People get bad memories removed, download fake good memories (like Total Recall), transfer their consciousness into "designer bodies", and of course there's even a fetish for having sex with yourself (your clone, who knows best how to please you.)
Same idea with Star Trek style teleportation. If you are broken down and reassembled at another destination, you essentially died and a perfect copy of you was reassembled with your original parts. China Mievielle explores something like this as a sub plot in the book Kraken.
I take John K Clark's perspeective: "But I am not an object. I am not a noun, I am an adjective. I am the way matter behaves when it is organized in a John K Clark-ish way. At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way; someday that could change."
Since this thread is full of references I thought I'd throw in http://ageofem.com/ -- a baseline scenario book of the future that reads like history should we get brain emulation tech.
At the present time only one chunk of matter in the universe behaves that way;
How do you know this is true? How do you know there isn't a John K Clark-ish person in Australia or South Africa or Alpha Centauri?
What does it mean to say there is a John K Clark-ish lump of matter in Alpha Centauri, why is it useful to say that matter is "you"? You can't meet it, you can't share stories with it, you can't experience what it experiences through spooky action at a distance effects, you can't feel full when it eats, you presumably wouldn't want your spouse abandoning Earth and going to live with it instead, you presumably wouldn't want it spending out of your bank account; in what useful way is it "you" just because it's a similarly patterned organisation of matter?
If you relax the accuracy in the organization a little, is this any different from saying "your twin sibling is you" or "all humans are the same person"? And if you don't relax the accuracy in the pattern, where do you draw the line? Isn't that a bit of a joke to argue that all "similar enough" people are you, while carefully and deliberately excluding every candidate until nobody counts in that group?
But the system of continuous electrical processes that make up your consciousness is immutable, from your perspective.
If it is perfectly transferred to another vessel, as a series of direct connections (maybe some kind of neuron-based "wire"), then maybe it could be considered the same continuous consciousness.
The body around it, from the perspective of the system, doesn't matter. It can be replaced forever as long as the system remains continuous.
Yes, but it's a massive and complex feedback system. So every replaced piece is tuned back to be a good to perfect replacement - including thought.
When that does not happen you get hallucinations or cancers, for example.
You could build an empirically accurate copy of the ship in this way - not perfect but very close.
I believe it would take an infinitely large storage medium to store a person's full consciousness. Right now we can only take a sample. Discrete data. Human consciousness is infinite continuous data; Even if you somehow copy all neurons and their connections it won't be enough; For me the consciousness communicates with the brain, the brain is merely a proxy; Consciousness is pure sentient energy;
Oh and imagine we would need to capture / know the position AND velocity of even some of the "things" defining the consciousness. Its like really _uncertain_ what we can do then.
your brain might be copied in your sleep and you wouldn't know. The Matrix analogy is right - conscious experience is just a small subset of brain's functioning
I wish more programmers understood metaphysics better. We’re built to be philosophers.
The first command God gave Adam was to name every animal, which is the act of categorizing abstract concepts and building language to concretize these relationships. It’s in our human nature, but especially programmers. But any philosophy approaching the cross is to be damned lest we be convinced we must carry it and die. So we killed Socrates instead. And when the Greeks came back to ask Jesus to be their new Socrates, he explained that a seed must first die alone to become a fruit-bearing tree. The only people alive today that I know who might understand these things are programmers.
But no, even if a copy is made of you, it’s not you. Your brain is a channel for your mind, it is not it’s source.
There is a more “real” level of existence where all our actions really exist. This life is basically a metaphor for that more real life. The physical world is an analogy of what’s really happening. When we eat a plant or animal for example, we are actually consuming some of its life force to replenish part of our finite and diminishing life source. That’s why we can only eat things that were recently alive. We can’t eat rocks or very old meat.
You exist both inside and outside this physical world. A clone with an exact memory of yours is not you. It’s someone else.
> I wish more programmers understood metaphysics better. We’re built to be philosophers.
Total agree, programmers are professional thinkers after all =)
> There is a more “real” level of existence where all our actions really exist.
Yea I go with that. Hm, but do you think that your life force analogy is what is the more real level? I think it is just another analogy or explanation for whats really going on.
Your "life force" concept actually reminds me of thermodynamic entropy from physics: On which life force does a plant feed? Mostly it is energy from the sun or geothermal processes (think deep-see geysers). So we can say it "feeds" on the entropy of these celestial bodies.
Similar we feed on matter configured in a specific way. Containing energy in the specific configuration of atoms which we transform into other more unstructured ones. We fuel our batteries by increasing disorder in our nutrients(including oxygen) and therefore our environment.
Now going with the life force concept:
I think in your life force concept air should also have some kind of life force. Otherwise how do you explain that people die when locked in air tight room but with enough food and water and everything else? Do you say they life on? Don't they die because the "life force" of the air is all consumed?
Similar probably everything else has to get some life force.
I still maintain that this life is the analogy for the true reality. Physics is only concerned with the “how” but metaphysics explains the “why”, although both are answering questions about the same events. Physics isn’t untrue, just, by itself it’s missing the bigger picture.
The word spirit originally meant breath and the way we became alive is that God breathed into the nostrils of Adam. In the beginning, the spirit of God was said to be upon the face of the earth and it still is, hence wind. But when we cut ourselves off from the spirit of God, we will soon run out of what spirit of God we last breathed in and this die.
But think about it, everyone only has a few days left to live! We just keep extending that, day by day, by eating something else that recently died. And then it’s atoms become part of our bodies. It’s life force gets absorbed into us. But because it has a finite and limited life, it can’t fully stop us from dying. So we need to repeat it again a few hours later!
But that’s only part of the metaphysics of it all! We actually absorb the properties of what we consume! An apple contains within its seed the potential or power of an apple tree, which is dense and fibrous, and by consuming the apple we absorb its fibrousness and density. An animal has the power of movement, and by consuming its flesh we absorb the power of movement, which is why it builds up our muscle tissue! Metaphysics is the real physics, our physics are only a shadow of that.
I’ve been told all my life that I’m overthinking it or that I think too much. The fact is the opposite, the rest of the world doesn’t think enough! I come here to find people who do, to gain any insight they may have (especially on programming) and to share the insight I have received (especially on the true philosophy).
"Evolution equipped our species with powerful defense mechanisms to deal with this foreknowledge—in particular, psychological suppression and religion."
On some level you can think of it as a consequence of over sensitive pattern matching, which is something that I believe we can attribute to evolution.
It's also quite convenient for increasing local societal cohesion (though generally to the detriment of inclusiveness) which could conceivably provide a group advantage.
yeah but culture doesn't need to wait for natural selection in order to evolve.
Incidentally this phrase " cultures are a direct result of the evolutionary process" is a apparently taboo for anthropologists today. I tried to ask such a question on reddit's askanthropology, about which aspects of genetic differences contribute to cultural artifacts, like alcoholism differences, lactose intolerance differences etc. the question was apparently racist and removed
Whether or not death is reversible, this lends a lot of credence to cryo-suspension when near death. This proves clearly that an inactive brain reboot is possible, though to what extent memories or identity will be retained is unclear.
Even if the brain is restorable with about as much damage as stroke victim (which is a lot) this is still interesting.
You don't need to die to demonstrate that. General anesthesia suffices.
(FYI, for the benefit of those who have never experienced it, GA is a very different subjective experience from sleep. Even in dream-free sleep you wake up with a subjective sensation of time having passed. Not so with GA. The time you spend in GA is just completely gone. It feels like you went through a time warp.)
Exactly, I was under GA once. If felt like sugary vapor, and I started to feel funny. Then I blinked, just for a second, and when I opened they eyes, I suddenly felt that I can't focus my eyes and everything is blurry. They told I was out for 6 hours, but to me it was just a blink.
I've been under GA several times, the experience differs pretty drastically actually. When I had my wisdom teeth out it was much like you describe, as though a period of time had simply been excised from my reality. Other times the awakening was so slow that it was like I was slowly piecing reality back together from its base components.
My hospital mates told me that sometimes people go from GA to real sleep. Probably in that case they do feel some time passing and have difficult awakenings. Probably that's what happened to you.
There's a somewhat related issue there: the medications used for general anesthesia don't just suppress consciousness and the overall function of your body, they also suppress the ability to record memories. That's part of why patients can carry on conversations during amnesia induction but report no memories of those conversations.
> The time you spend in GA is just completely gone. It feels like you went through a time warp.
I've heard this a lot, so I was surprised the one time I went under GA and it felt more or less like a normal dreamless night's sleep. I remember a sharp transition from awake -> out, but coming around felt like waking up groggy after a few hours sleep. Since then I've wondered if that's unusual or if people who feel like time passed just assumed it would be that way so don't mention anything.
I've been under GA, and yeah, first you feel cold in your vein where they start plasma infusion (without the drug yet I believe) and then you wake up in post op. No sense of time.
GA is insufficient demonstration though -- it is possible that memory recording and time keeping parts are down (there are several ways brain keeps time iirc), but other parts are working. I think there is always some electrical brain activity under GA, so something is still going on, just not enough to track time.
I'd call it "interesting" but not "fun." Also, there's some evidence that it can cause long-term cognitive impairment, but I guess that's probably true for any mind-altering drug.
Well. I believe it's totally possible to animate the body to an extent after death. But the totality of the individual, the consciousness, is gone. No going back; Either it merges back with the Universe, or goes to heaven, or fades away to nothing. Whatever you believe, it's gone. As someone famous (Lavoisier) said though: "Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed." I guess the "fades away to nothing" is the only impossible option;
Neural pathways are just pathways. The electrical patterns that reside in the interactions between neurons are necessary for conscious experience. Once the patterns are gone, information is lost. It is like taking a snapshot of a table of moving billiard balls. You only have the position of the balls, but not the velocity, acceleration, etc. And those are necessary to recreate the motion. The "motion" in the case of the brain is what creates the person (as far as anyone currently knows). Having the dead neurons and their dead connections is not enough.
I don't think that's accurate from what we know currently -- there might be a minimum level of activity necessary to restart the system, but I think we know only upper bound of that (whatever they get with general anesthesia).
But a lot of motions can be removed and then restored.
Maybe if you take a snapshot of that billiard table, then recreate static picture of that and just bump all the balls randomly, they will settle on similar movement patterns the original system had.
That doesn't seem true?
Short-term memory is encoded in transient electrical patterns, but long term memory definitely is not. You definitely don't lose your personhood if you suffer an interruption to short term memory, or else everyone who's ever had a seizure is already dead.
We actually have no idea how memory is encoded in any way - but that is irrelevant. When a person has a seizure, the electrical activity continues and is able to revert back to previous patterns through self correcting/preserving measures. My comment was referring to a completely dead brain with no activity whatsoever.
It all hinges on if brain death is the complete annihilation or degradation of the soul that lives on it, or not. One is gone to the extent that the patterns of information that live in the brain and comprise the individual are permanently gone, and not just on pause after what is today considered neurological death. If that fire (and the entire structure, really) isn't completely put out, maybe it's possible to re-kindle it?
>> In my case, it was only as a mature man that I became fully mortal. I had wasted an entire evening playing an addictive, first-person shooter video game—running through subterranean halls, flooded corridors, nightmarishly turning tunnels, and empty plazas under a foreign sun, firing my weapons at hordes of aliens relentlessly pursuing me.
Strange how the definition of "mature man" has also changed over the ages.
Murray Templeton was forty-five years old, in the prime of life, and with all parts of his body in perfect working order except for certain key portions of his coronary arteries, but that was enough.
The pain had come suddenly, had mounted to an unbearable peak, and had then ebbed steadily. He could feel his breath slowing and a kind of gathering peace washing over him.
There is no pleasure like the absence of pain – immediately after pain. Murray felt an almost giddy lightness as though he were lifting in the air and hovering.
He opened his eyes and noted with distant amusement that the others in the room were still agitated. He had been in the laboratory when the pain had struck, quite without warning, and when he had staggered, he had heard surprised outcries from the others before everything vanished into overwhelming agony.
Now, with the pain gone, the others were still hovering, still anxious, still gathered about his fallen body –– Which, he suddenly realised, he was looking down on.
He was down there, sprawled, face contorted. He was up here, at peace and watching.
He thought: Miracle of miracles! The life-after-life nuts were right.
And although that was a humiliating way for an atheistic physicist to die, he felt only the mildest surprise, and no alteration of the peace in which he was immersed.
He thought: There should be some angel – or something – coming for me.
The Earthly scene was fading. Darkness was invading his consciousness and off in a distance, as a last glimmer of sight, there was a figure of light, vaguely human in form, and radiating warmth.
Murray thought: What a joke on me. I’m going to Heaven.
Even as he thought that, the light faded, but the warmth remained. There was no lessening of the peace even though in all the Universe only he remained – and the Voice.
The Voice said, “I have done this so often and yet I still have the capacity to be pleased at success.”
It was in Murray’s mind to say something, but he was not conscious of possessing a mouth, tongue, or vocal chords. Nevertheless, tried to make a sound. He tried, mouthlessly, to hum words or breathe them or just push them out by a contraction of – something.
And they came out. He heard his own voice, quite recognisable, and his own words, infinitely clear.
Murray said, “Is this Heaven?”
The Voice said, “This is no place as you understand place.”
Murray was embarrassed, but the next question had to be asked. “Pardon me if I sound like a jackass. Are you God?”
Without changing intonation or in any way marring the perfection of the sound, the Voice managed to sound amused. “It is strange that I am always asked that in, of course, an infinite number of ways. There is no answer I can give that you would comprehend. I am – which is all that I can say significantly and you may cover that with any word or concept you please.”
Murray said, “And what am I? A soul? Or am I only personified existence too?” He tried not to sound sarcastic, but it seemed to him that he had failed. He thought then, fleetingly, of adding a ‘Your Grace’ or ‘Holy One’ or something to counteract the sarcasm, and could not bring himself to do so even though for the first time in his existence he speculated on the possibility of being punished for his insolence – or sin? – with Hell, and what that might be like.
The Voice did not sound offended. “You are easy to explain – even to you. You may call yourself a soul if that pleases you, but what you are is a nexus of electromagnetic forces, so arranged that all the interconnections and interrelationships are exactly imitative of those of your brain in your Universe-existence – down to the smallest detail. Therefore you have your capacity for thought, your memories, your personality. It still seems to you that you are you.”
Murray found himself incredulous. “You mean the essence of my brain was permanent?”
“Not at all. There is nothing about you that is permanent except what I choose to make so. I formed the nexus. I constructed it while you had physical existence and adjusted it to the moment when the existence failed.”
The Voice seemed distinctly pleased with itself, and went on after a moment’s pause. “An intricate but entirely precise construction. I could, of course, do it for every human being on your world but I am pleased that I do not. There is pleasure in the selection.”
“You choose very few then?”
“Very few.”
“And what happens to the rest?”
“Oblivion! – Oh, of course, you imagine a Hell.”
Murray would have flushed if he had the capacity to do so. He said, “I do not. It is spoken of. Still, I would scarcely have thought I was virtuous enough to have attracted your attention as one of the Elect.”
“Virtuous? – Ah, I see what you mean. It is troublesome to have to force my thinking small enough to permeate yours. No, I have chosen you for your capacity for thought, as I choose others, in quadrillions, from all the intelligent species of the Universe.”
Murray found himself suddenly curious, the habit of a lifetime. He said, “Do you choose them all yourself or are there others like you?”
For a fleeting moment, Murray thought there was an impatient reaction to that, but when the Voice came, it was unmoved. “Whether or not there are others is irrelevant to you. This Universe is mine, and mine alone. It is my invention, my construction, intended for my purpose alone.”
“And yet with quadrillions of nexi you have formed, you spend time with me? Am I that important?”
The Voice said, “You are not important at all. I am also with others in a way which, to your perception, would seem simultaneous.”
“And yet you are one?”
Again amusement. The Voice said, “You seek to trap me into an inconsistency. If you were an amoeba who could consider individuality only in connection with single cells and if you were to ask a sperm whale, made up of thirty quadrillion cells, whether it was one or many, how could the sperm whale answer in a way that would be comprehensible to the amoeba?”
Murray said dryly, “I’ll think about it. It may become comprehensible.”
“Exactly. That is your function. You will think.”
“To what end? You already know everything, I suppose.”
The Voice said, “Even if I knew everything, I could not know that I know everything.”
Murray said, “That sounds like a bit of Eastern philosophy – something that sounds profound precisely because it has no meaning.”
The Voice said, “You have promise. You answer my paradox with a paradox – except that mine is not a paradox. Consider. I have existed eternally, but what does that mean? It means I cannot remember having come into existence. If I could, I would not have existed eternally. If I cannot remember having come into existence, then there is at least one thing – the nature of my coming into existence – that I do not know.
“Then, too, although what I know is infinite, it is also true that what there is to know is infinite, and how can I be sure that both infinities are equal? The infinity of potential knowledge may be infinitely greater than the infinity of my actual knowledge. Here is a simple example: If I knew every one of the even integers, I would know an infinite number of items, and yet I would still not know a single odd integer.”
Murray said, “But the odd integers can be derived. If you divide every even integer in the entire infinite series by two, you will get another infinite series which will contain within it the infinite series of odd integers.”
The Voice said, “You have the idea. I am pleased. It will be your task to find other such ways, far more difficult ones, from the known to the not-yet-known. You have your memories. You will remember all the data you have ever collected or learned, or that you have or will deduce from that data. If necessary, you will be allowed to learn what additional data you will consider relevant to the problems you set yourself.”
“Could you not do all that for yourself?”
The Voice said, “I can, but it is more interesting this way. I constructed the Universe in order to have more facts to deal with. I inserted the uncertainty principle, entropy, and other randomisation factors to make the whole not instantly obvious. It has worked well for it has amused me throughout its entire existence.
“I then allowed complexities that produced first life and then intelligence, and use it as a source for a research team, not because I need the aid, but because it would introduce a new random factor. I found I could not predict the next interesting piece of knowledge gained, where it would come from, by what means derived.”
Murray said, “Does that ever happen?”
“Certainly. A century doesn’t pass in which some interesting item doesn’t appear somewhere.”
“Something that you could have thought of yourself, but had not done so yet?”
“Yes.”
Murray said, “Do you actually think there’s a chance of my obliging you in this manner?”
“In the next century? Virtually none. In the long run, though, your success is certain, since you will be engaged eternally.”
Murray said, “I will be thinking through eternity? Forever?”
“Yes.”
“To what end?”
“I have told you. To find new knowledge.”
“But beyond that. For what purpose am I to find new knowledge?”
“It was what you did in your Universe-bound life. What was its purpose then?”
Murray said, “To gain new knowledge that only I could gain. To receive the praise of my fellows. To feel the satisfaction of accomplishment knowing that I had only a short time allotted me for the purpose. – Now I would gain only what you could gain yourself if you wished to take a small bit of trouble. You cannot praise me; you can only be amused. And there is no credit or satisfaction in accomplishment when I have all eternity to do it in.”
The Voice said, “And you do not find thought and discovery worthwhile in itself? You do not find it requiring no further purpose?”
“For a finite time, yes. Not for all eternity.”
“I see your point. Nevertheless, you have no choice.”
“You say I am to think. You cannot make me do so.”
The Voice said, “I do not wish to constrain you directly. I will not need to. Since you can do nothing but think, you will think. You do not know how not to think.”
“Then I will give myself a goal. I will invent a purpose.”
The Voice said tolerantly, “That you can certainly do.”
“I have already found a purpose.”
“May I know what it is?”
“You know already. I know we are not speaking in the ordinary fashion. You adjust my nexus is such a way that I believe I hear you and I believe I speak, but you transfer thoughts to me and from me directly. And when my nexus changes with my thoughts you are at once aware of them and do not need my voluntary transmission.”
The Voice said, “You are surprisingly correct. I am pleased. – But it also pleases me to have you tell me your thoughts voluntarily.”
“Then I will tell you. The purpose of my thinking will be to discover a way to disrupt this nexus of me that you have created. I do not want to think for no purpose but to amuse you. I do not want to think forever to amuse you. I do not want to exist forever to amuse you. All my thinking will be directed toward ending the nexus. That would amuse me.”
The Voice said, “I have no objection to that. Even concentrated thought on ending your own existence may, in spite of you, come up with something new and interesting. And, of course, if you succeed in this suicide attempt you will have accomplished nothing, for I would instantly reconstruct you and in such a way as to make your method of suicide impossible. And if you found another and still more subtle fashion of disrupting yourself, I would reconstruct you with that possibility eliminated, and so on. It could be an interesting game, but you will nevertheless exist eternally. It is my will.”
Murray felt a quaver but the words came out with a perfect calm. “Am I in Hell then, after all? You have implied there is none, but if this were Hell you would lie to us as part of the game of Hell.”
The Voice said, “In that case, of what use is it to assure you that you are not in Hell? Nevertheless, I assure you. There is here neither Heaven nor Hell. There is only myself.”
Murray said, “Consider, then, that my thoughts may be useless to you. If I come up with nothing useful, will it not be worth your while to – disassemble me and take no further trouble with me?”
“As a reward? You want Nirvana as the prize of failure and you intend to assure me failure? There is no bargain there. You will not fail. With all eternity before you, you cannot avoid having at least one interesting thought, however you try against it.”
“Then I will create another purpose for myself. I will not try to destroy myself. I will set as my goal the humiliation of you. I will think of something you have not only never thought of but never could think of. I will think of the last answer, beyond which there is no knowledge further.”
The Voice said, “You do not understand the nature of the infinite. There may be things I have not yet troubled to know. There cannot be anything I cannot know.”
Murray said thoughtfully, “You cannot know your beginning. You have said so. Therefore you cannot know your end. Very well, then. That will be my purpose and that will be the last answer. I will not destroy myself. I will destroy you – if you do not destroy me first.”
The Voice said, “Ah! You come to that in rather less than average time. I would have thought it would have taken you longer. There is not one of those I have with me in this existence of perfect and eternal thought that does not have the ambition of destroying me. It cannot be done.”
Murray said, “I have all eternity to think of a way of destroying you.”
The Voice said, equably, “Then try to think of it.” And it was gone.
But Murray had his purpose now and was content.
For what could any Entity, conscious of eternal existence, want – but an end?
For what else had the Voice been searching for countless billions of years? And for what other reason had intelligence been created and certain specimens salvaged and put to work, but to aid in that great search? And Murray intended that it would be he, and he alone, who would succeed.
Carefully, and with the thrill of purpose, Murray began to think.
Agreed, it's a tautology I'll admit but if they can bring you back, you're not dead. Just like we used to be able to say no heard beat meant you were dead, and now we don't.
Paramedics still classify a person with no heartbeat as "dead". This is also part of the reason consent to restore life to someone at this stage is not required. At least that is the training I get a couple times a year from paramedics.
Exactly. It is implied (legally for this use case), at least in the United States of America. I don't know about outside the USA.
If I detect breathing or a heart beat, I am required to tap you a couple times and ask if it's ok for me to assist you. If you can't respond, consent is still implied. If you respond with anything suggesting "no", then I am to leave you alone and notify emergency personnel that you declined help.
If I am permitted to help, (you give consent or can not respond), then I must only do things that are within my training. If I step outside the line, such as administering a miracle pill (from Miracle Max), then I am liable for resulting damages. If I stay within my training, then I am protected legally.
In Hinduism, the Garuda Purana details this as not the physical mind, but the detached soul can see the body as it floats above it and watches its relatives weep. But it can reattach it self in some cases. Some Yogis also talk of being able to detach their body from their soul using breath alone.
http://ether.stanford.edu/library/neuroanesthesia/SNACC%20Re...
When a person is in that state, they have no signs of life - no heartbeat and no blood to the brain, yet a significant portion of the time, they do well.
From the article, it looks like they have done this for up to 50 minutes. " The median duration of complete arrest in our series was 11 minutes; the range was 7 to 53 minutes. This is consistent with reports from other neurological surgeons who have employed extracorporeal circulation for intracranial vascular surgery "