More than memories, Josh, then 24, wished for the crude procedure to salvage whatever synapses gave rise to her dry, generous humor, compelled her to greet every cat she saw with a high-pitched “helllooo,” and inspired her to write him poems....We're told this is a series, "Chasing Immortality."
Family members and strangers alike told them they were wasting Kim’s precious remaining time on a pipe dream. Kim herself would allow only that “if it does happen to work, it would be incredible.” “Dying,” her father admonished gently, “is a part of life.”There are elegant photographs with captions like "The containers that are used to store frozen brains and bodies at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz." and "An operating room at Alcor. The clear box is used to prepare the patient's head for preservation."
Yet as the brain preservation research that was just starting as Kim’s life was ending begins to bear fruit, the questions the couple faced may ultimately confront more of us with implications that could be preposterously profound.
“If I get frozen I will get my head chopped off,” Kim told her friend Ms. Neidig matter-of-factly. “It’s cheaper, and apparently it gets the juice in there faster.” And the idea of a disembodied Kim was O.K. with Josh: “I wasn’t planning on leaving her when she got old and saggy,” he observed.From one of the top comments: "Excuse me... but this is idiotic. First, our ability to freeze a brain in any fashion that would retain its integrity in the future isn't possible. Second, if it wasn't frozen correctly, then unfreezing it so that the previously active synapses are correctly aligned, is not possible. Third, not only we will have to do all that, but we'll need a cure for glioblastoma...
If the $80,000 fee for neuropreservation seemed steep.... The investment income from the trust also pays for storage in liquid nitrogen.... Alcor’s antifreeze, once pumped through the blood vessels, transitions into a glassy substance before ice can form and do damage. The process, called vitrification.... But that glassy substance has been known to crack, likely causing damage of a different kind.
otherwise, she'll wake up only to die again. Last, her current glioblastoma has already destroyed her brain, so that whatever gets re-constructed in the future will be her cancer-ridden brain...which really isn't even her."
For a more sensible (and funny) treatment of the topic, see "I'm Dying to Meet You in the Next Life," by David Rakoff (and a co-author). Excerpt, describing the "neuros" (heads) in the "dewars" ("the reinforced stainless-steel tanks named after Sir James Dewar of the scotch-producing dynasty"):
A dewar, I learn, can hold up to four bodies and five heads. The full-body patients are stored upside down, so that, in the unforeseen event of a nitrogen boil-off, the head would be the last to thaw. Neuros are stacked five high in the central column of the dewar. Each head is placed in what looks like a high, narrow steel stockpot. There is an empty one on a shelf. It looks like a superior piece of cookware, and I covet it immediately. I also learn that a few suspended beloved cats and dogs are scattered here and there throughout the dewars, wherever there's a bit of room. In the interest of space, pets are always neuros.Rakoff himself is now dead. He died when he was only 47. From the last paragraph:
I ask [senior board member and facilities engineer Hugh] Hixon whether any concessions are made to preserve the neuros' faces. Not really. Neuropreservation is all about the brain. The only reason it is kept in the skull is to minimize damage. Hair is removed to reduce insulation and to allow easy access to the burr holes made in the skull for the "crackphones"—seismograph-like sensors that monitor any fissures that may result from freezing. Also, the antifreeze renders the skin translucent. "This is not a cosmetic procedure" is all Hixon will say on the record....
The Alcorians will think me a fool, no doubt, and many things in this world are an outrage, to be sure, but death at our current life expectancy doesn't strike me as one of them.... Maybe I sound like some Victorian who felt that forty years ought to be enough for any man, but one of the marks of a life well lived has to be reaching a state of finally getting it, of not needing more and of being able to sign off with something approaching peace of mind. Given the choice, I'll throw my lot in with the rest of those whose deaths will be irrevocable, the Dustafarians....
Posts
89 comments:
"The Pont of Death" sounds like a 70s horror movie.
The Bridge of Death!
(Corrected.)
Falling into a black hole would do better. Then your brain information is preserved at the event horizon.
I hold your hand in mine, dear,
I press it to my lips.
I take a healthy bite
From your dainty fingertips.
Isn't some surgeon going to try a human head transplant later this year?
That would make a great plot for a bad movie. A mad scientist could kidnap a bunch a people and switch all their heads.
Not tonight I have a headache.
Can we put Ted Williams frozen head in a big lucite ball and put it in the Hall of Fame? touch it to get electric shocks and an intoned phrase from Ted's trove of baseball hitting wisdom....
The Pontypool of Death!
The dark side of resurrection is described in the graphic novel Transmetropolitan. Decades later, people are successfully revived and disease free, but they come into a world that has drastically changed, their money's long gone from maintaining their cryogenic state, and there's no one left to remember or care about them.
In a case like this you have to keep a cool head.
The headless Horseman is still the scariest creature. It Chases you. Like a zombie on a mountain bike.
The headless horseman rides a mountain bike? Wow I missed this. When did he get an upgrade? Shouldn't we start calling him the headless...Biker? Cyclist? I would call him the Headless Mountaineer, but that brings up unhealthy images of a bike-riding Jed clampett, head firmly fixed in the front basket chasing you down the bike trails yelling Grrrannnnieee!!!! JETHRO!
just sayin'
This is one of those technologies that is going to sound eye-rollingly silly until the day they bring a frozen rat back to life.
Then it's going to suddenly be a fundamental human right -- and the single worst outrage in the world will be that rich people can afford it and poor people in third world countries can't.
Cryonics. Hmm. wonder what they're trying to distract us from....
I also wondered why would anyone with a glioblastoma ravaging her brain want to freeze/preserve that diseased and mangled brain.
Macabre and futile.
@Martha:
Life clings to life no matter how futile.
Western humans have divorced themselves from the facts of their own animality.
The process of our births, the daily facts of life (eating micturition, elimination), our deaths all are ritualized, cloistered and closeted so we avoid having to face their realities. There is a thread through a lot of modern thinking, apparent but not limited to the vegetarian/vegan subculture, the gist of which can be summed up as, "If I eat right, exercise right, take the popular suppliments and think in the approved fashion I will never die!"
Like freezing your head, I applaud the ingenuity and hope it works out for you, but I'll get on board when I see it work.
In Larry Niven's A World Out Of Time (a book expanded from one of his earlier short stories), in the future they never figure out how to unfreeze all tub e "corpsicles" tu at were frozen over the centuries... but they do figure out is that they can basically mind wipe a convicted felon, then extract the RNA memory from a corpsicle (destroying it in the process) and inject the personality and memories of the corpsicle into the convicted felon. This is done because the world of the future is controlled by a tyrannical State, and in the State corpsicles have no rights and can be used as slave labor. They lost those rights when descendants of corpsicles sued their estates to claim their inheritances, and won. It's a great book. All I just explained is in the first chapter, and is merely setup for a much longer and very interesting story.
Why would I want all the information in my brain to be preserved? The only information in there that is completely unique to me involves personal experience. Most of that is private, or embarrassing, or both. Further, when reactivated, my emotional state would be entirely changed and my personality and psyche would be under violent assault. What body is this (if I have a body)? Who are these people? What have they done to my brain (is it mine anymore and who is me?) while I was dead?
Now that I am old my main reasons for living are to be with the people I love and to find out what happens next. The people I love will be gone when I reactivate or also vastly altered. I will be unable to trust those who tell me what went on while I was absent. (Consider how little we trust those who tell us what is going on while we are present.)
Sleeping soundly and waking up in a endless nightmare. That's what this is.
Is this the ultimate result of "mindfulness?"
"...and ye shall be as gods"
First off: the film 'Vanilla Sky' comers to mind. And when 'Vanilla Sky' comes to mind I mainly mean Penelope Cruz's amazing naked breasts.
Technology should develop so that you could take Penelope Cruz's decapitated head and keep it able to give blow-jobs forever.
I would also freeze Scarlett Johannson's disembodied ass.
That should cover it.
I am Laslo.
1. This is not "life extension"; it is resurrection. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_extension
2. This is not "preposterously profound"; that would be Laslo.
I will keep you and love you forever, Penelope Cruz Head.
I will place you in a casserole pan to catch all the assorted drippings that will come out of your open neck.
I will close the lids over your blank lifeless eyes. Stop watching me.
You will never gag because you no longer have need for air.
I will let no one else have you, Penelope Cruz Head.
At night I will put you back in the freezer, lovingly swathed in Saran Wrap.
Until morning comes, when you gently thaw in a pot of warm water.
Then I will reapply red lipstick to your lukewarm lips, then wrap those lips around my cock.
I love you, Penelope Cruz Head.
I am Laslo.
I don't know about you, but I find the idea of fucking a head decapitated for Cryogenics much less creepy than a head decapitated in the conventional way.
Less messy, probably.
I am Laslo.
3. The Wisdom of Silenus.
This American Life did an amazing story on a cryogenics operation. The story is a few years old now, but so worth a listen. Everyone was so hapless.
Immortality? When there is no acknowledged afterlife, avoiding death becomes the primary goal of the living.
Larry Niven, again, created in his Ringworld novels a sentient species who scientifically proved there was no afterlife. Their society evolved into extreme technological competence driven by this knowledge, with the entire race's goal being to avoid death.
Their leader was known as the Hindmost, being the one furthest from any confrontation, safest from any risk, most likely to survive any danger. IIRC, Nobody knew who the leader was. Nobody.
The New York Times article mentions the Brain Preservation Foundation, which some neuroscientists and cryobiologists have set up with the long-term goal of turning death from a permanent off-state into a temporary and reversible off-state by approaching the problem as a challenge in applied neuroscience. Two prominent figures in the skeptic community - Michael Shermer and Susan Blackmore - have associated with this Foundation as advisers, so they apparently consider the idea scientifically explorable.
I used to keep a list of women that I'd want to decapitate, if I was the kind of guy who decapitated women..
Then I noticed it was very similar to my list of women that I wanted to have sex with.
I'm sure there is an innocent psychological reason for this.
I am Laslo.
I'm a member of Alcor and a regular reader of yours. I think that conditional on our species surviving, over the next 100 years we are likely to create a super-intelligence that would be able to easily restore someone who had been cryogenically preserved, like putting together pieces of a cracked jigsaw puzzle.
'Love Story wouldn't have been quite the same if Oliver Barrett IV had frozen Jenny's head at the end.
Especially if he had kept it at home in his freezer and...um... cultivated a Laslo lifestyle.
Cryonics?
Joe Biden crying himself to sleep.
The old rule used to be that you freeze something as quickly as possible and you thaw something as slowly as possible.
Maybe that's changed.
I really don't know.
Crossing over the river to the other side at death is traditional, but the warning is always not to pay the
Boatman
Until you have arrived.
I had a Reddit shower-thought this morning.
Until the hive mind comes, we are all aliens.
Shouldn't salaries make Fantasy Football a no brainier?
I wonder if foot-fetish people dream of keeping women's cut-off feet.
After they have collected a fair amount of feet are they able to still recognize who the foot had belonged to, or is painstaking labeling involved? I would think all runaways' feet look kinda the same, but there may be tattoos or especially ugly toenails.
Maybe someone in the foot-fetish community here at Althouse can elucidate.
Come on: we know who you are.
I am Laslo.
The series "Chasing Immortality" should be renamed, "Aging, Atheist, Coddled, Baby Boomers Facing End-of-Lne and Getting Worried"
They are talking about doing the first head transplant. (Someone actually agreed to have his head cut off. And a doctor agreed to do it. Have they thought about how the reattachment process is going to work?)
The two sciences are very quickly going to merge. Not that either science has produced much. But that's where they're going.
sojerofgod said
"If I eat right, exercise right, take the popular suppliments and think in the approved fashion I will never die!"
I love it when I see one of those quacks on PBS or a cable show spouting that drivel. Then they pan the audience and I get to see all those slack jawed 60 somethings nodding approval while they get ready to buy the book and eat the diet.
The inability to have more compassion and respect for the post-mortem wishes of such a lovely 23-year old (even from her father!), stricken down in the prime of her life, no matter how complicated or unrealistic her hopes, seems deplorable. Whether the future she wishes to see will be made available to her by current technology or not, it is certain that that future will one day belong to the likes of her, and the Ray Kurzweils and other dreamers and futurists of this world rather than to their detractors and haters.
NYT deserves no more castigation than you and a certain plurality/majority of your pretend-followers deserve for taking Christian/Judeo-Christian eschatology seriously. ("For some reason, the NYT is taking 'cryonics' seriously...")
After all, at least their story, was just a story. On a harmless and interesting personal wish that someone carried out.
But the respect you undoubtedly relinquish to a whole bunch of people (those more likely to be your fans) who believe that cremated remains will be reunited with loved-ones in a celestial shindig with deistic overlords in the spirit realm -- (either that or burned forever in unimaginable pain for all eternity - one of those two) -- is surely the more serious position, and one that must be presumed the obvious default for some very good reason or another.
Maybe she can be resurrected to the Worker's Paradise. Death and mortality are only symptoms of bourgeoise decadence like homosexuality and mcdern art.
Josh, and the NYT, still believe in the existence of the human soul. They think it resides in brain tissue. Keep the brain alive, keep the soul alive. Bring the brain back to life, bring back the soul.
The cryo fans seem to think that death is like a deep, dreamless sleep, but even in the deepest sleep -- even in a drug induced coma -- the brain still functions. It experiences time. There is still brain activity. Do they think that reviving a dead brain is like rebooting a PC?
Soldiers used to take a lock of their sweetheart's hair with them into battle. It was thought that on the day of resurrection, the revived went about the earth gathering up all the lost bits of their body. The lovers would therefore meet again just before the the Last Judgment. "A bit of bright hair about the bone"......In the off chance that this doesn't go off as planned, a lock of hair undoubtedly contains enough DNA to permit cloning. I'm sure with proper computer simulation you could imprint sufficient info onto the clone to make a rough copy of your beloved's personality. In any event, it's cheaper, more hygienic, and infinitely more romantic to carry a locket of your dead lover's hair with you than her frozen head.
I "still" believe in the existence of the soul.
The lock of your sweetheart's hair is tangible evidence, and a constant reminder, of your intangible love for each other. Makes sense to me.
If you want to be immortal, then write great literature. You will influence generations to come.
As Chesterton said, when men no longer believe in God they will not believe in nothing. They will believe in anything.
@Roughcoat,
I "still" believe in the existence of the soul.
As well you should. Whatever a "soul" may ultimately turn out to be, we're probably not just "meat machines". It's a really tough row to hoe to come up with a thoroughly materialist philosophy of mind, which is why it's been so rarely done in the history of philosophy. A lotta folks may have flirted around the edges, but they didn't go there for very good reasons.
It pains me to say it but for once R & B is right. What is the harm? Poor girl is dead and if the belief that this procedure gave her a bit of hope and comfort in the end why is that wrong? If she and her boyfriend are right, then she gets a second chance at life, not really different than when the time comes when the dead will be resurrected according to believers. And if not, then she is no worse off, dead being dead. A variation of Pascal's Wager is what this is.
Planning for immortality. It's a public relations coup.
cubanbob:
The Judaeo-Christian faith recognizes resurrection of a coherent energy pattern (i.e. "spirit"), not the reconstitution of decaying clumps of cells.
"I think that conditional on our species surviving, over the next 100 years we are likely to create a super-intelligence that would be able to easily restore someone who had been cryogenically preserved, like putting together pieces of a cracked jigsaw puzzle."
So if we don't kill ourselves with our stupidity, we are so smart that everyone will be able to live forever.
Paul's letter to the Corinthians, Ch 15:
Behold, I shew you a mystery; We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed,
In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.
For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory.
O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?
It is a shame that people put their hopes for resurrection in Alcor rather than Paul.
n.n said...
cubanbob:
The Judaeo-Christian faith recognizes resurrection of a coherent energy pattern (i.e. "spirit"), not the reconstitution of decaying clumps of cells.
9/13/15, 1:21 PM"
Splitting hairs. If what is resurrected isn't a coherent sentient being then it isn't a resurrection. Whether the form is as you put a coherent energy pattern, a living human body that has been repaired with an intact mind or some variation thereof ( the consciousness and memories somehow transferred into a machine ) the result would be a resurrection.
I still say that if reattaching human heads was possible at present then a rat head would have been reattached to another rat's body as a demo.
But instead you have salesmen selling the future for a lot of money to people who won't be there to complain. When you ask why they haven't done simple animal re-attachments to show the way for more complicated human re-attachments, you get this used-car-salesman-selling-a-lemon cum funeral-parlor-selling-expensive-coffin double talk.
"Well, I know you want to show respect and love for the deceased" (who is yourself, by the way) " and "we'll attach you later to a body that's only been driven 35 easy years in the Mid-West. What? NO! No, Chicago homeless people, no that's a false outrageous rumor." But when she woke up, she kept buying Boone's Farm wine, they all do.
@n.n.,
per this: The Judaeo-Christian faith recognizes resurrection of a coherent energy pattern (i.e. "spirit"), not the reconstitution of decaying clumps of cells.
Not to quibble, but there is this Creed attributed to the Apostles that closes with
"I believe in the...Communion of Saints, Forgiveness of sins, Resurrection of the body, and Life Everlasting."
It's resurrection of the body.
Because a human being is not a complete person without the interaction of body, soul and spirit.
Don't know how God Almighty would do it--my body contains atoms that were used by many people and animals in times past. And my body sheds skin cells and absorbs/emits other molecules constantly.
These facts--plus the science about how the state of mind can interact with blood sugar, as well as other body system--make me wonder if reactivating the brain can bring the complete person back to life.
For anyone who hasn't already, watch the video that accompanies the story (ca. 15 mins in length). I realize that AV media might be more emotionally manipulative. But then, so, I'm sure, are the prejudices that many carry with them in deciding how to judge her decision. (And cubanbob's right - it was a harmless one - as well as yet another nice demonstration of the overwhelming charitable and financial power of social media consumers in this day and age).
If nothing else, you'll get a fuller appreciation for the determination and former beauty and potential possessed by this young soul before cancer robbed her of all those things and, as well, of any other earthly dreams that she had every legitimate right to hold.
All I'm saying is that I don't see how anyone can blame her.
I am glad to have lived long enough to have gained a better appreciation for the cycle of human life and how our eventual, ultimate return to the elements is inescapable, natural and (as we are therefore forced to admit) as beautiful as our dreams, myths and notions of how our spirits may yet somehow be retained. But it's hard for me to see how anyone else can deny that she hasn't, and therefore deserves every right to someday attain the remaining decades that would provide her that wisdom, or perhaps - according to the wildest of imaginations - something else entirely, whether we can even begin to fathom what that is or not.
@SJ,
Don't know how God Almighty would do it--my body contains atoms that were used by many people and animals in times past. And my body sheds skin cells and absorbs/emits other molecules constantly.
You ain't the only one who wondered aloud about just how this was going to get done. The Medieval scholastics even pondered as a quodlibetal question what would be the bodily state of the worst case scenario, a man who ate nothing but other humans, on the day of the resurrection. After all, every "atom" of his body would belong to someone's else's body, wouldn't it?
A really good discussion of how early Christianity through the medieval Scholastics thought about the mechanics of the resurrection of the body can be found here.
It is a shame that people put their hopes for resurrection in Alcor rather than Paul.
Well, maybe if you were a terminally ill 23-year old you might understand. If the purpose of life isn't to realize and fulfill (or attempt to fulfill) potential then I don't know what is and we might as well all be dead.
Laslo Spatula said...
I will keep you and love you forever, Penelope Cruz Head.
I will place you in a casserole pan to catch all the assorted drippings that will come out of your open neck.
I will close the lids over your blank lifeless eyes. Stop watching me.
You will never gag because you no longer have need for air.
I will let no one else have you, Penelope Cruz Head.
At night I will put you back in the freezer, lovingly swathed in Saran Wrap.
Until morning comes, when you gently thaw in a pot of warm water.
Then I will reapply red lipstick to your lukewarm lips, then wrap those lips around my cock.
I love you, Penelope Cruz Head.
Wasn't that Ted Bundy's favorite passtime?
Not Penelope Cruz, but his victims.
You ain't the only one who wondered aloud about just how this was going to get done.
It seems Chris Nolan or whoever wrote Interstellar is coming closest to figuring it out -- at least from whatever scientific perspective is available or relevant. Making time relative and being able to access it at any point (through the help of multiple dimensions or black holes or whatever it is that even rhhardin unsurprisingly muses about) seems like it would help greatly.
Who the hell knows. If there was nothing (but obviously something) before a big bang then I guess that nothing (but something) would have the power to let access whatever parts of the universe (and beyond) that we wanted.
It's the declining mystery of consciousness itself that adds most of the wonderment to all of this.
"...we are so smart that everyone will be able to live forever."
Not everyone... Only the few will be able to afford it (the real stuff, I mean, not cryogenics). The rest of us, well, how will we come to view those who are three, four, five hundred years old? We may yet find religion again someday.
R&B wrote:
"Well, maybe if you were a terminally ill 23-year old you might understand."
We are all terminal, R&B. A century from now now nearly every human being now alive will be dead. A very few might hang on for a further decade or two. None will reach a hundred and fifty years of age.
And so I return to Genesis 3: "...and ye shall be as gods"
If we postulate dark matter and assume dark energy to explain the visible universe, then we can have a go at postulating spiritual bodies enjoying the third heaven of The Creator God's New Jerusalem too. I suspect it is a huge golf course and a perfect beach. The type on earth would be Carmel and
Pebble Beach, gold course complete with dogs.
I'm not sure how one fails to see the difference in life potential and life fulfillment between a 23-year old and anyone older than her but I guess I just put more stock in fulfilling one's life dreams than some people might, Terry.
As for an arbitrary "limit" of 150 years, I suppose that sounds reasonable enough, but I don't see how it trumps the science of addressing telomere shortening - or how there somehow must be an annual limit to that. Either way, it's a completely different issue. Most people feel that a fulfilled life is defined by having a certain number of experiences, joys, careers, kids, partners, family, spouse, positive impact and posterity - that tend to be attained by a certain number of decades. But I guess you must look at the value (or lack thereof?) of a life in a way that's a bit more arbitrary than that.
"Maybe someone in the foot-fetish community here at Althouse can elucidate.
Come on: we know who you are."
No Toe-Fuckers came forward: not one.
I guess Althouse doesn't get the Brave Toe-Fuckers.
It would seem.
I am Laslo.
Rhythm and Balls said...
You ain't the only one who wondered aloud about just how this was going to get done.
It seems Chris Nolan or whoever wrote Interstellar is coming closest to figuring it out -- at least from whatever scientific perspective is available or relevant. Making time relative and being able to access it at any point (through the help of multiple dimensions or black holes or whatever it is that even rhhardin unsurprisingly muses about) seems like it would help greatly.
Who the hell knows. If there was nothing (but obviously something) before a big bang then I guess that nothing (but something) would have the power to let access whatever parts of the universe (and beyond) that we wanted.
It's the declining mystery of consciousness itself that adds most of the wonderment to all of this.
9/13/15, 3:25 PM"
Not that I am in the least bit qualified to comment in any depth on this but it is presumed the the human brain operates as a sort of quantum computer which may explain how the brain may achieve what we call consciousness and self awareness (presumably the prodigious computing needed to achieve this state) I wouldn't be betting the ranch that an artificial brain that our essence can be transferred to is about to be achievable any time soon. On the other hand we are information and information theory states it can never be destroyed once created so presumably somewhere in the fabric of spacetime what was the information of everything that has ever lived somehow exists. Whether or not an individual organism's information can ever be located and from there accessed and restored is another thing. If we are going to use movie analogies I would suggest AI by Spielberg. As for the Big Bang, it's turtles all the way down.
"It is a shame that people put their hopes for resurrection in Alcor rather than Paul."
1-Not everyone is a Christian.
2-Even if you are a Christian they are not mutually exclusive.
If I'm going to wake up as a brain with no means of sensory perception of my environment or means to communicate with anyone in it, I believe I'd rather stay dead.
Well, as long as eyes, ears, nose, and tongue remain intact in that thawed head of hers and they go with awakening (and retaining) the brain instead of just using it as a way to be "uploaded" digitally, then that's at least four senses she could foreseeably access.
Plus all the touch on her face and whatever touch sensors or bioprosthetic touch neurons are interfaced with it.
Assuming future technology will be more primitive than our own for a successfully thawed brain doesn't seem to make sense.
It honestly comes across to me as at least as much a better way to preserve, and thus learn from, the past. Countless history and science documentaries these days show how much more we learn from an intact mummy than from dust. Fossils instead of scattered calcium. A preserved mastodon. DNA-accessible Neanderthal remains. We have to assume they'll learn at least as much from her as she'll be able to learn, and sense, and whatever else, from them.
And if they have the technology to make any academic conclusions from studying her there's at least a halfway decent chance that they'll be able to make her of some use to herself as well.
I think her Heinlein(?) quotes said it best. (Regarding a way to determine what's improbable or possible, etc.).
Better than nothing is a high standard, as Laslo has observed many times. In like manner, better than nothingness is a high standard for eternal life. I've hauled my sorry ass through seventy years of this crap. I'm in no big hurry to die, but I would be even less enthusiastic about going on and on forever.
Blogger Freeman Hunt said...
If I'm going to wake up as a brain with no means of sensory perception of my environment or means to communicate with anyone in it, I believe I'd rather stay dead.
How would you know that you weren't dead?
When people are cut off from sensory information, they dream, don't they? It wouldn't be the same thing as being bored. We tend to think of consciousness as being a kind of observer while this thing called reality is played out on a screen in front of us. I don't think that is true. To be conscious is not only to be the originator of thought, but also the thing that is perceiving thought.
Once the existence of black holes were confirmed and the evidence for Hawking's theory that black holes can create big bangs was shown to be sound, then I think nearly anything became possible.
R&B wrote:
"Well, as long as eyes, ears, nose, and tongue remain intact in that thawed head of hers and they go with awakening (and retaining) the brain instead of just using it as a way to be "uploaded" digitally, then that's at least four senses she could foreseeably access."
It's the brain (or mind) that makes sense information. The change in electrical potential of a nerve connecting a taste sensor or an optical sensor to the brain are the same, e.g., the signal from all the different nerves is the same. What makes us sense one thing as taste and another as light is the part of the brain they are hooked up to.
Well, shown to be plausible, anyway if not sound.
I liked physics but never got that far with it (just to introductory relativity etc.).
@5:19 - true, so the hope would be that the rest of the brain stays intact. The company did a scan showing that at least the outer part (neocortex?) did but whether that's got the connections necessary to make sense of "taste" I doubt.
What you're addressing touches on the whole science branch she was enthralled by in the first place in deciding to do this: The recognition that the way all the synapses are connected is what makes it all work. As with everything in biology these days, a trendy word for describing such totality was coined: Connectome. From there is where it was decided that computer engineers could somehow make their contributory foray into the field as well.
Although I would hate to imagine living without a sense of taste/smell really (probably as well as sight), it should be noticed that the condition exists. Stevie Wonder is an example of both.
Living without input from any sense makes you wonder if the brain wouldn't just bother to keep from awakening. Perhaps it would just stay in a dreamlike state.
In any event, that would probably not be like the hell of Locked-In Syndrome, no matter what Metallica or the movie that inspired One had to say about it.
SJ:
The answer depends on the discernment of origin and expression. The Judaeo-Christian faith recognizes the soul as a corporal expression of a spirit (e.g. independent, coherent energy pattern). This implies that resurrection occurs independent of the original corporal body. The secular faith recognizes the reverse and post-normal science (e.g. correlation, inference, circumstantial evidence) supports reaching that conclusion.
SJ:
I think a green energy analogy may further explain the relationship between energy and matter, spirit and soul. With green energy, the driver or energy (e.g. radiation, convection), is asserted to be environmentally friendly and renewable, whereas the technology or corporal body that expresses/converts it is neither. So, while the character and composition of the body changes, the driver does not and the product is still green energy. We recover and disrupt the environment in order to construct and operate windmills, solar panels, etc., but the driver remains constant with a unilateral relationship to green energy. The relationship between driver and technology of green energy is analogous to the relationship between spirit and corporal bodies.
That said, within the scientific domain, we have a limited capacity to discern origin and expression, cause and effect, between driver and technology, but we are incapable of discerning between spirit and its embodiment as a soul in a corporal body. So, we rely on correlation and inference to create a plausible explanation (i.e. philosophy) based on our individual faith.
Freezing a brain for later thawing and restoration is pointless and a scam of the grieving. You lower the heads temperature to 32 deg. then ice crystals form. Sharp pointy ice crystals that expand. The sharp shards penetrate the cell walls destroying the cellular integrity. thaw the brain out and you have a brain sieve. Totally worthless for downloading any information.
A more reasonable prospect is postulated in the "Heechee" series of books(author escapes me). In them, people entire cognizance is downloaded onto some memory media, while they are alive. Then the electronic you could live a separate electronic life. You could be duplicated to live as many lives as you wish, in any electronic world you wished. And because computers are so much faster than real life, to interact wiht real people, the electric ones would set up duplicates to just sit and listen to a real interface that would take seeming days to them.
ps. Larry Niven is a science fiction God. Get the "Ringworld" you wont put it down, and you'll read everything else he has written.
Carnifex wrote:
"A more reasonable prospect is postulated in the "Heechee" series of books(author escapes me)."
A forty-year old memory tells me it was Fred Pohl (checks). Yep, Fred Pohl.
Air is mostly nitrogen. Why doesn't Alcor use a closed cycle setup to condense the nitrogen used to cool the heads? LN2 must cost at least a few bucks per liter, even for Alcor. You gotta boil LN2 off to keep something cold. It's useful to think of LN2 as a heat absorber. Heat is absorbed by LN2, it boils off, so we need to buy more LN2 or recycle by capturing and cooling the LN2 produced by the system.
You would think an NYT reporter would know enough to ask "what do you do with the heat?"
Is the "mind" really nothing more than a physical organ we call the "brain", or is the brain simply a physical organ used by the mind?
Terry said...
Air is mostly nitrogen. Why doesn't Alcor use a closed cycle setup to condense the nitrogen used to cool the heads?
That would be a pretty big operation wouldn't it? As I recall those condensers are pretty big and energy gluttons. Alcor may be county on the fact that you can buy a lot of LN2 for what a condensing setup would cost.
Also.
Can LN2 freeze a cell without destroying it? All I know about LN2 is we used it as a drying agent in refinery pipelines when switching from one product to another. It was also inert to hydrocarbons.
For some reason, the NYT is taking "cryonics" seriously... in the context of a man having to preserve the head of his 23-year-old girlfriend at the point of death.
This is so wrong-headed, so to speak. All the important parts of your girlfriend can be preserved through simple taxidermy. Just put her in an electric blanket for half an hour, apply a little lube to your favorite orifice, and she's good to go.
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