The Art of Not Dying: the First Emperor’s Pursuit of Immortality • Hacker News Board

Re: The Art of Not Dying: the First Emperor’s Pursuit of Immortality

#51

Post by joefourier » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 11:27 AM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #49

garmaine wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go look it up; they aren't claiming that. You're fighting a strawman. What they are claiming that they are preserving some record of the information that makes you up on the hope that it would be sufficient for future engineers to reconstruct some version of you. All they are claiming is that cryonic vitrification or aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation preserves in an information-theory sense the microstructure of t…

> What they are claiming that they are preserving some record of the information that makes you up on the hope that it would be sufficient for future engineers to reconstruct some version of you. Yes, that's what they are claiming, but there is zero proof this is going to happen. In fact, given the long term stability of real world artifacts that are far more durable than dewar flasks there are substantial obstacles…

Why do you have such a strong emotional hostility towards cryonics?

First off, you don't understand how cryonics work, from the organizations to the procedure. It is not freezing, but vitrification, as anti-freeze is essentially pumped into the circulatory system to avoid the damage from icing you mentioned (toxicity of the anti-freeze is another problem).

It may or may not work, but it is purely based in physical phenomena. Tissues, organs and simple organisms have been lowered to cryogenic temperature and then brought back, and extending that process to humans is not irrational. Animal brains have been vitrified and the structure of the connectome was still intact.

The alternative to cryonics is for your brain to rot or be incinerated. Are you saying that the chances of reviving or reconstructing a well preserved, vitrified brain is the same as a pile of ashes? If so, that seems the more irrational point of view.

Re: The Art of Not Dying: the First Emperor’s Pursuit of Immortality

#52

Post by sgt101 » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 11:38 AM UTC

germainemalcolm wrote: post #50

Was I the only person hoping this article would go into the daoist concept of immortality and its meeting with modern day sciences understanding of physiology?

Possibly! But I'm curious as to these connections - could you expand?

Re: The Art of Not Dying: the First Emperor’s Pursuit of Immortality

#53

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 12:00 PM UTC

joefourier wrote: post #51

jacquesm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What they are claiming that they are preserving some record of the information that makes you up on the hope that it would be sufficient for future engineers to reconstruct some version of you. Yes, that's what they are claiming, but there is zero proof this is going to happen. In fact, given the long term stability of real world artifacts that are far more durable than dewar flasks there are substantial obstacles…

Why do you have such a strong emotional hostility towards cryonics? First off, you don't understand how cryonics work, from the organizations to the procedure. It is not freezing, but vitrification, as anti-freeze is essentially pumped into the circulatory system to avoid the damage from icing you mentioned (toxicity of the anti-freeze is another problem). It may or may not work, but it is purely based in physical ph…

I have roughly the same feelings towards anybody giving false hope of some kind of afterlife, it's not 'emotional hostility', just a serious problem with people selling bs and preying on the weak.

As for the chances of rot vs ashes vs cryogenically preserved: the chances are - as of now - equal: 0.

Re: The Art of Not Dying: the First Emperor’s Pursuit of Immortality

#54

Post by Retric » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 12:03 PM UTC

taejo wrote: post #32

jacquesm wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd give it roughly the same chance that I give the heads sitting in cryogenic storage being brought back to life: 0.

0 and 1 are really extreme probabilities. It's often better to think of a probability of 0.001 being closer to 0.5 than to 0. As odds ratios it's easy to see that 999:1 is closer to 1:1 than to infinity:1. 0 probability means that even infinitely many pieces of evidence will not change your assessment: no matter how many heads you see restored from cryogenic storage, you will still believe that the probability is 0,…

0.001 is closer to 0 than 0.003 ;)

All probability's have error bars, so 0 +/ 10e-20 is still very much 0.

Re: The Art of Not Dying: the First Emperor’s Pursuit of Immortality

#55

Post by joefourier » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 12:37 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #53

joefourier wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have such a strong emotional hostility towards cryonics? First off, you don't understand how cryonics work, from the organizations to the procedure. It is not freezing, but vitrification, as anti-freeze is essentially pumped into the circulatory system to avoid the damage from icing you mentioned (toxicity of the anti-freeze is another problem). It may or may not work, but it is purely based in physical ph…

I have roughly the same feelings towards anybody giving false hope of some kind of afterlife, it's not 'emotional hostility', just a serious problem with people selling bs and preying on the weak. As for the chances of rot vs ashes vs cryogenically preserved: the chances are - as of now - equal: 0.

"As of now", sure, but the whole point of cryonics is that this may be different in the future. The definition of death has changed over the years. It used to be that death was simply cessation of respiration and heartbeat, which used to be (mostly) irreversible. Now with cardio-pulmonary machines that can take over those functions, there is brain death, which is cessation of brain function. Information-theoretic death seems to be the next boundary, which is the destruction of all information contained within the brain, making the recovery of the original person impossible. Cryonics seeks to address that latter definition.

Re: The Art of Not Dying: the First Emperor’s Pursuit of Immortality

#56

Post by balfirevic » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 1:08 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #45

ALittleLight wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a thought experiment, if you knew for certain that in a hundred years an individual who was long dead was brought back to life, and you had to guess whether the recently deceased was a cryogenic patient from 2018 or a mummified Emperor from antiquity - would you be ambivalent about the choices? If not, then you don't really think they're equally good paths to extra life.

Thought experiments of this kind are dissimilar to say Einstein fantasizing about elevators in that they do not yield insight over and beyond that which is already readily apparent. So rather than a thought experiment you should stick to real experiments and the experimental proof derived from there. As it sits today the mummy and the frozen patient are both dead as a doornail and nothing in present day science will…

> Thought experiments of this kind are dissimilar to say Einstein fantasizing about elevators in that they do not yield insight over and beyond that which is already readily apparent.

They do. That's why you don't want to partake in them, because it's pretty obvious that you would say cryo-preserved brain has more chance of being restored. And of course you would judge cryo-restoration to be more probable than a seat in the afterlife.

But since this seems to be emotional topic for you, you just shut out your reasoning and yell "it all has 0 probability" (it doesn't, as another poster explained).

Re: The Art of Not Dying: the First Emperor’s Pursuit of Immortality

#57

Post by throwawaymath » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 1:08 PM UTC

taejo wrote: post #32

jacquesm wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd give it roughly the same chance that I give the heads sitting in cryogenic storage being brought back to life: 0.

0 and 1 are really extreme probabilities. It's often better to think of a probability of 0.001 being closer to 0.5 than to 0. As odds ratios it's easy to see that 999:1 is closer to 1:1 than to infinity:1. 0 probability means that even infinitely many pieces of evidence will not change your assessment: no matter how many heads you see restored from cryogenic storage, you will still believe that the probability is 0,…

> 0 probability means that even infinitely many pieces of evidence will not change your assessment

Well no, this isn’t really what probability 0 means. An event is not impossible if it has a probability of 0. More importantly probability informs you about how many times you should expect an event to occur, not what to do with this information if the event does or does not arise.

In the Bayesian view, your probability measures how confident you are about an event occuring. In the frequentist view it measures the expected number of times an event will occur in n trials. But neither of these really mean you’d be impossible to convince :)

Probabilities 0 and 1 are legitimate, and correspond to the statements “almost never” and “almost surely” in mathematics [1]. A good theoretical example of probability 0 is picking any given real number x out of an interval a x b. The probability of choosing x is 0 but it’s not impossible. A “real world” analogue of this would be flipping a coin infinitely many times and never getting heads. That is not impossible, but it has probability 0.

I wouldn’t personally use probability 0 for cryogenics either, but if someone insisted on it the way to interpret that would be to say, “Out of uncountably many trials, a successful resurrection occurs only countably many times.”

_____________________

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almost_surely

Re: The Art of Not Dying: the First Emperor’s Pursuit of Immortality

#58

Post by speakeron » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 1:15 PM UTC

robotresearcher wrote: post #38

komali2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't the answer the "how does cloned consciousness work" question. For re-vitilization, I don't give a fuck if it's a perfect copy of me walking around. I want it to be me , the current stream of consciousness. To the abyss I say, no thank you.

Better not go to sleep then. You woke up from the abyss this morning.

> You woke up from the abyss this morning.

Actually I woke up directly (and, apparently, seamlessly) from a dream. (I went lucid a little too carelessly surged to a waking in the same manner as you come up from the bottom of a swimming pool).

To be fair, though, I did wake up into the dream from the abyss. But since the abyss is timelessness, how would we know the difference?

Re: The Art of Not Dying: the First Emperor’s Pursuit of Immortality

#59

Post by jacquesm » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 1:17 PM UTC

joefourier wrote: post #55

jacquesm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have roughly the same feelings towards anybody giving false hope of some kind of afterlife, it's not 'emotional hostility', just a serious problem with people selling bs and preying on the weak. As for the chances of rot vs ashes vs cryogenically preserved: the chances are - as of now - equal: 0.

"As of now", sure, but the whole point of cryonics is that this may be different in the future. The definition of death has changed over the years. It used to be that death was simply cessation of respiration and heartbeat, which used to be (mostly) irreversible. Now with cardio-pulmonary machines that can take over those functions, there is brain death, which is cessation of brain function. Information-theoretic dea…

You don't solve a problem by changing definitions.

Let me give you an example that might explain it better:

People who believe in dowsing rods have a perfect answer to when dowsing doesn't work: you didn't dig deep enough to find the water. Works every time!

That same argument holds in the case of cryonics: you didn't wait long enough.

For evidence free statements requiring belief the proper label is religion, not science. So to me cryonics is a religion.

As for the definition of death: there is a fairly gray area as to what constitutes a dead body, for instance some cells in your body get the message rather later than others because our bodies are best thought of as a cluster of living bits flying in very close formation: each individual cell is alive. But for the whole to be alive too certain conditions have to be met. That's why hair will grow a bit longer after you are already dead, that's just those cells doing what they are supposed to do until the conditions for their individual survival are no longer present.

Bringing a brain dead person back to fully functional is by no means a given, and their 'connectome' is still very much present.

I expect humanity to have established several space colonies before we will be able to cheat death. And it better work out that way because if not then there will very quickly be no room for new entrants (aka children), unless it is as slaves and vessels for the oldies to rejuvenate.

Re: The Art of Not Dying: the First Emperor’s Pursuit of Immortality

#60

Post by adwn » Sun, Aug 12, 2018, 1:38 PM UTC

balfirevic wrote: post #56

jacquesm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought experiments of this kind are dissimilar to say Einstein fantasizing about elevators in that they do not yield insight over and beyond that which is already readily apparent. So rather than a thought experiment you should stick to real experiments and the experimental proof derived from there. As it sits today the mummy and the frozen patient are both dead as a doornail and nothing in present day science will…

> Thought experiments of this kind are dissimilar to say Einstein fantasizing about elevators in that they do not yield insight over and beyond that which is already readily apparent. They do. That's why you don't want to partake in them, because it's pretty obvious that you would say cryo-preserved brain has more chance of being restored. And of course you would judge cryo-restoration to be more probable than a seat…

> They do. That's why you don't want to partake in them [...]

No, this thought experiment does not yield new insights. This conversation went roughly as follows:

jacquesm: "I assume that action A is impossible as far as we know, therefore the probabilities of A1 respectively A2 happening are both 0."

ALittleLight: "Assumimg A were not impossible, would A1 or A2 be more probable?"

(where A="restoring a dead brain", A1="restoring a mummified dead brain", and A2="restoring a cryonically frozen dead brain")

This thought experiment cannot bring any insights, because the assumptions of the two posters are mutually exclusive.

> But since this seems to be emotional topic for you, you just shut out your reasoning and yell "it all has 0 probability" (it doesn't, as another poster explained).

Please don't get personal.