Discussion
Major leap towards reanimation after death as mammal's brain preserved
ozlikethewizard: Would people want this? Imagine waking up to a world where 200 years has passed, everyone you knew is dead, everything you knew is history.
thesmtsolver2: Why do you assume that everyone you know will be dead? Won't some of them also be preserved.As for "everything you knew is history", who wouldn't want to witness and be a part of a new world?
semitones: Fry found a way to make it work
tasn: Just buy the family pack and get your wife and kids on it too.As for traveling to the future: that sounds like fun!
ranger_danger: It's dolomite, baby
janwirth: I just got an app idea
ranger_danger: I quite enjoyed the original run of the docuseries "Futurama" on this concept.
mentos: Absolutely not sounds like a be careful what you wish for Black Mirror episode where you wake up trapped in some simulation you can’t break free from but it’s ok because you signed on the dotted line to donate your mind and body to science.
jlarocco: Yeah, count me out. I don't even like how the world's played out in the 40 years I've been here. Imagine waking up in 200 years and finding out 90% of the world is still poor, we can't feed everybody, the rich still get to do whatever they want, we're still warring for no good reason, etc.
alex_suzuki: Remember to have a little something parked on your savings account. Compounding interest works in your favour over a few centuries.
DennisP: More of a digital copy scenario. The article says the process involves toxic chemicals that lock everything in place so the connectome can be examined. There's no known way to reverse the chemical process in the biological brain.https://archive.is/SMcX5
georgemcbay: > "to allow them to continue, in effect, with their life.”"in effect" doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
dfxm12: I'm infinitely curious, so it's almost a perk that everything I knew would be history, implying there's a ton of stuff to learn/catch up on.I've dealt with loss. It sucks, but it's part of being alive (I say with just a hint of irony).I do recognize that not everyone feels this way about this topic though. That's ok.
cjbgkagh: While the connections are important I think the individual cell behavior is also very important and that is driven by DNA. Brain cells last a lifetime and can modify their own DNA so each one ends up being unique. I do wonder how much of behavior/consciousness is encoded in the cells DNA versus the connections between the cells.
kingkawn: The depth of complexity and innumerable interacting variables of biology make attempts to map brain function always seem like an absurdity
windowliker: Even worse, imagine waking up in a world where 200 years have gone by and nothing has changed, everyone is still here that you knew in your 'first' life. All the self-serving bosses, all the mendacious politicians, all the mediocre entertainers. Like a groundhog day from hell, forever.
dexwiz: This assumes you wake up and are given liberties. There are much worse fates. Waking up and owing your life to the company forever is pretty awful.Worse even is never truly waking up but instead being replicated and turned into the brain for a servitor. If you believe the Roko Worshippers, you might be woken up just to be tortured.
7oi: One step closer to the Bobiverse.
chasil: I'm just finishing the last one published.It would be interesting to wake up as a Von Neumann probe.Still, did these people completely solve the ice crystalization problem?https://www.amazon.com/Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse-Book-ebook/d...
Procrastes: Here's a thought experiment. I offer you the chance to be put in a medically induced coma and shipped around the world to strangers you know nothing about. You don't know what economic, political, or moral system you'll awaken to. The only thing you know for sure is they, for some reason we're interested in receiving an unconscious person, no questions asked.Do you take the deal? Do you sign your family up for it?
ranger_danger: 1077
Filligree: In this scenario, the alternative is “you die”. Let’s make sure we’re including that in the question.
andrewflnr: That doesn't change things as much as you might think. Sufficiently advanced technology can create many fates worse than death.
birdsongs: Not that I think this is anywhere close in actuality, but It's reminding me of MMAcevedo. (https://qntm.org/mmacevedo)What server will I wake up on? Who is running the infrastructure? What will be asked of me to be allowed to continue to exist on that server? Given our current societal trends, I can't imagine I would enjoy any existence where a copy of me is spun back up.And of course, my original thread of consciousness will still be ended, so this is some alternate copy of me. (Based on my view of the teletransportation paradox.)
kakacik: You will not wake up on any server. At best possible theoretical far future scenario better or worse copy of yours will. If you would survive such process, you yourself, the human instance that wrote that will be just looking at somebody else living their now-fully-digital (prison) life.I don't understand why people don't get this simple fact. We are all gonna die, make inner peace with that (it isn't that hard, depends mostly on your ego) and enjoy rest of that short time here. If you seek immortality, do it either via exceptional deeds or via well-raised children, that's the best we have.No force in the world is going to move both your mortal neurons with all synapses and electric charge between them that together form your personality into anything else, digital or not. Its like asking to transfer this cup of tea I hold right now into digital form. No, it can be copied to certain precision and that's it.
unsupp0rted: By that logic I wouldn’t sign up for blood transfusions, organ transplants, or take any medicine I didn’t compound myself.What’s the downside of skipping all that potential torture?… oh
windowliker: Oh great! A new way to keep the tax base growing!
jacquesm: Not a chance. In fact all these developments make me convinced that my early choice for cremation over burial was and is the right one. Arrive blank and leave with grace, try to improve the world while you're here.
adrianN: It is my understanding that for the animals where we have a simulation of the full connectome the behavior you see approximates the real behavior reasonably well, so maybe the jury is still out as to whether it is sufficient or not.
igorramazanov: Are we even sure, that personality is stored solely in a brain? What if whole or other parts of body involved as well
jacquesm: You'd have to at least present a candidate to make such a suggestion, otherwise the simple counter is 'where else would it be?'
rozap: Brains 'R Us recently filed for chapter 11 and has been cut up and sold for scrap to private equity. The new PE firm has your brain. In 2208 there's a large grey market for brains to be used for hybrid AI and meat bag workflows. It's technically illegal in many jurisdictions due to "ethical implications", but is still the cheapest way to run many workloads. The method used to harness the brain involves reanimating it in a jar of jelly, and then forcing it to do the 2208 equivalent of a captcha. Each time the brain fails a captcha, the brain receives an excruciating electric impulse but cannot scream or run away.
vercaemert: I worked on the Human Connectome Project.If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. In terms of a modern ANN, it's the connections (axons) and the weights (transmitters/receptors in tandem).That said, this article doesn't get to the point in the free section. How are they collecting the information? Slicing is inherently destructive. Someone's got to manufacture an entirely novel imaging modality. Perhaps they could scan millimeters ahead of the slice at a resolution high enough to image receptors. Not possible currently.
cjbgkagh: > If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. In terms of a modern ANN, it's the connections (axons) and the weights (transmitters/receptors in tandem).This is exactly what I’m doubting, how can you be so sure?
apothegm: Do you have a citation for the notion they can modify their own DNA? I would fairly easily believe they can modify its expression, but I’m skeptical of the idea they can modify the sequence.
olivierestsage: No thanks
KronisLV: > Each time the brain fails a captcha, the brain receives an electric impulse which simulates the most excruciating pain that the brain can respresent, but the brain cannot scream or run away.What percentage of your life being enjoyable vs horrible suffering makes it worth living?Maybe you're 80 years old at the time of storing your brain.Suppose after being revived that regime with capitalist incentives holds for another 200 years during which you live as a brain in a jar, but some cultural revolutions later you are liberated and then proceed to live 10'000 years across any number of bodies and circumstances, which means that in your lifespan of ~10'280 years (not accounting for being in storage) you experienced horrible suffering for about 2% of your life.This is as much of a contrived example as yours, aside from maybe good commentary on human ethics being shit when profit enters the scene on your part.Or maybe after 200 years you expire, having at least tried your best at a non-zero chance of extending your lifespan, instead leading to your total lifespan of 280 years being about 71% suffering. Is it better to not have tried at all, then? Just forsake ANY chance of being revived and living for as long as you want and conquering biology and seeing so much more than your 80 year lifespan let you? Should absolute oblivion be chosen instead, willingly, a 100% chance of never having a conscious though after your death again (within our current medical understanding)?What about all of the people who look for love/success in their lives, never finding it anyways, even when they know the odds aren't good? Should they also not try? What about the people dealing with all sorts of horrible illnesses and knowing that each next year might be spent in a lot of pain and suffering?
roarcher: > If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need.How can we possibly know that the non-connectome details of the brain don't influence computation or conscious experience?It seems we ignore these only because they don't fit neatly into our piles of linear algebra that we call ANNs.
vercaemert: Take a gander at the OpenWorm project. It's a great example of how simple neuronal activity is (given details like the connections, number of receptors, and transmitter infrastructure). SOTA models of neuronal activity are simple enough for problem sets in undergraduate biomedical engineering programs.Sure, to your point, we don't know. But the worm above (nematode) swims and seeks food when dropped into a physics engine.My main point is that the scale of the human brain is well beyond the capabilities of modern imaging modalities, and it will likely remain so indefinitely. Fascicles we can image, individual axons we cannot. I guess, theoretically, we'll eventually be able to (but it's not relevant to us or any of our remote descendants).
bitwize: I saw a putative 3D animation of a fly whose brain had been digitized and then run in a simulation. It buzzed around, sipped food it had found on the ground, even rubbed its forelegs together as flies do. A true Dixie Flyline. We live in strange times...
bluefirebrand: The beauty of groundhog day is what we can accomplish when we have unlimited time and no real responsibilitiesPeople overemphasize the "time loop trap" piece but seem to overlook the fact that he eventually uses the time to better himself in almost every way. He's a much better, much more enriched and happy person by the end.
BobbyJo: Anesthesia impairs the electrons transport in your brain, effectively ending that thread of consciousness, and, depending on the procedure, your brain can be altered by chemical/oxygen saturation changes. You wake up very subtly different, but most people are ok with that.People have strokes or accidents and wake up missing memories and with changed bodies, but their families still call them by name.You still being you is a matter of degree, not a binary, and different people are comfortable with different degrees of change.
BasilofBasiley: I wouldn't call that degrees of change but degrees of damage. The thing is, past a certain degree of damage people stop having opinions, so how would you know the individual is comfortable with it?In this case, the damage is total. The degrees end here, it reaches a binary state: from alive to dead. And then something else entirely says they are the dead person and they are alive.The question is, does society accept a complete switcheroo? The individual died in the process, they cannot give an opinion on this. The copy is another entity. There are no degrees, it's all absolutes with this process.
canadiantim: Not to mention the tricky question of what happens to your consciousness during and after this process?Most likely they're just preserving the tissue, but not the consciousness
vercaemert: Same question answered under other comment.
cjbgkagh: Yeah but it wasn’t though. I found your answer unconvincing. I suppose “we don’t know” is an answer but that is nothing like “we have all the information we need”
