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What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

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Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#431

Post by Tepix »

brap wrote: post #384
Gatsky wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what I think is the most likely outcome is that we realise there are better ways to preserve the dead for reanimation, and nobody will ever bother working on how to salvage the crudely frozen/vitrified. I personally think the way forward is to derive the neural connectivity and transcriptional state map of the brain on a single cell level. This can be done today, albeit at great expense, on tissue that is chemical…

So is it really the same person you're reanimating, or is it someone/something that simulates that person perfectly to the outside world? I mean, suppose you could do that while the person is still alive. Assuming the reanimated person even has consciousness, then surely(?) the two won't share the same experience, like some hive-mind with two bodies. I don't think the original person being dead makes any difference.…

> is it someone/something that simulates that person perfectly to the outside world

what difference does it make?

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#432

Post by renox »

pavlov wrote: post #250
UberFly wrote: post #234

I wanted to know the state of Ted William's head, so I did a search. This is what I found: In "Frozen," Larry Johnson, a former executive at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Scottsdale, Ariz., writes that Williams' head was abused at the facility. Johnson claims a technician took baseball-like swings at Williams' frozen head with a monkey wrench. What?

As the pharaohs already discovered, an immortality plan that depends on generations of low-paid underlings to maintain the dead elite's physical bodies is fundamentally flawed.

Uh? They already knew that which is why they tried to hide their tombs..

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#433

Post by vanderZwan »

xg15 wrote: post #412

Assuming all of this doesn't just end with the bodies being dumped at some point, I wonder if future medicine will use the frozen bodies and brains more like a kind of reference to construct an AI from, instead of really trying to revive them. Sort of how historians can read badly damaged ancient documents, but usually copy over their results to a new medium instead of trying to repair the original document. A lot of…

I have a vague memory of watching a sci-fi mini-series in the nineties with a similar premise… something with "Lazarus" in the title. Ah, found it: Cold Lazarus.

[0] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0115140/

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#434

Post by Tepix »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #64

How long before SpaceX starts up a service to dump these into a lunar lava tube for hyper-long term storage?

Wouldn't it be better to be put into a crater that never sees sunlight? Ideally with some protection against micro-meteorites. There's still the radiation issue...

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#436

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

xg15 wrote: post #412

Assuming all of this doesn't just end with the bodies being dumped at some point, I wonder if future medicine will use the frozen bodies and brains more like a kind of reference to construct an AI from, instead of really trying to revive them. Sort of how historians can read badly damaged ancient documents, but usually copy over their results to a new medium instead of trying to repair the original document. A lot of…

One of the big cons of this brand of immortality is that there is a pretty reasonable probability that if you manage to get uploaded at all someone will use copies of the result for horrific experiments or even just entertainment. You could wake up in hell, basically.

Seems to me anyone who thinks this option is strictly better than death lacks imagination.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#437

Post by kubanczyk »

neuronic wrote: post #373
wintorez wrote: post #168

Never understood the quest for immortality. We are the children of our time. When our time passes, we will live as strangers in a strange land, drowning in the sea of nostalgia. Death will simply takes us back to where we came from before our birth. Don’t fear the reaper.

There are definitely reasons to fear the reaper. When we go return to where we came from before our birth it simply means the absence of consciousness. In this universe, you can either be conscious or not. There is something mysterious and magical about this phenomenon that seemingly differentiates our lives from simpler or even single celled organisms which seem more like biological robots. It may very well be that…

I think you use the word "consciousness" as a thought stopper.

A though experiment: Imagine I have no consciousness, but I can run circles around you, outperform you, outpredict you, game you, have a better intuition (gasp), or be more creative (gasp squared). What's left of the magic now?

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#438

Post by grishka »

wintorez wrote: post #168

Never understood the quest for immortality. We are the children of our time. When our time passes, we will live as strangers in a strange land, drowning in the sea of nostalgia. Death will simply takes us back to where we came from before our birth. Don’t fear the reaper.

The problem with death and aging in its current form is that it's non-consensual. Of course there will be people who would like to expire, and of course they will always be able to do so — the same way today someone who was diagnosed with a bacterial infection can refuse to take antibiotics and die exactly like everyone did in the 19th century.

It sickens me when people romanticize death. There's nothing romantic about the world being taken away from you at the time when you've understood so much of it and found your place in it — and could have contributed so much more to it, and enjoyed it so much more. It's an artificial limit imposed on us by the nature that needs to be fought with all available resources. It should definitely not be accepted.

It's about time humanity stops being humble about this stuff, ffs.

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#439

Post by userulluipeste »

yreg wrote: post #260
sangnoir wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm absolutely shocked that more money and time is not spent researching how to cure death by aging. Faced with their own mortality, a bunch of aging billionaires and multimillionaires tend to pour money into longevity research. I'd be very upset if governments increased spending on fighting senescence today, instead of lower-hanging fruit .

When Elon was asked why longetivity research didn't pick his interest as worthy of an investment, he said: >It is important for us to die because most of the time people don't change their mind, they just die. If you live forever, we might become a very ossified society where new ideas cannot succeed.

I'm just confused about why he didn't followed his train of thought further (i.e. first principles thinking) on that. As I see it, people don't change their mind mainly for two reasons. One is that no compelling new information reaches them, and the other is that as people age, they have to be more conservative on their own diminishing energy, which affects them in multiple ways (avoiding the challenge of their current beliefs, which can be tiresome and not that necessary compared to someone younger that has to find out more about the world in order to grow and gain competence; or increasingly limiting the circle of people that is one's idea exchange medium, which can devolve into something where politeness becomes more important than other things; etc.), then there is just the custom of leaving the elderly be as their change is not worth the cost. (On the last one it's not only the elderly, as many aspects that people give up on attempts to "fix" each other starting from much earlier ages.) Now, if only that aging and age related energy decay could be solved, there would be an entirely new game, looking for a new homeostasis! ...or maybe one has to be young enough to be curious enough about something like this?

Re: What happened to the first cryogenically frozen humans?

#440

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

wintorez wrote: post #168

Never understood the quest for immortality. We are the children of our time. When our time passes, we will live as strangers in a strange land, drowning in the sea of nostalgia. Death will simply takes us back to where we came from before our birth. Don’t fear the reaper.

I understand it, even if I think it is a bit silly and probably evidence of a mental sickness. The survival instinct is an important one for getting life to where it is.

Problem I have with immortalists isn't that they have some desire to live forever, it's that they rarely are able to articulate what lives forever. Self is a construct, an narrative abstraction created by our minds that has utility as regards our functioning in the world, but is ultimately not real. I am not the same person I was 5 years ago, nor will the version of me that exists 5 years from now be the same as me. There are probably several people out there who are more like 5-years-ago me than I am currently, but for some reason they aren't considered to be the same person.

What is it that makes me me? It can't be memory, because memories are extremely fallible, and often confabulated. If we are our memories then we have forgotten most of who we are and will continue to forget ourselves as time passes. If you erased my memories somehow, you'd still likely consider me the same person anyway, so clearly memories aren't me.

Of course, even forgotten experiences leave some kind of mark on our being, but just by existing we leave our mark on the people and world around us but we don't consider those things us, do we?

And clearly anyone who imagines a digital-self in their future doesn't consider their physical form to be them either, so what's left? Illusions and abstractions, a heuristic notion of self that has utility but not reality.

Sure, go ahead and solve "immortality", I don't have a philosophical objection to the concept. What I have a problem with is the insistence that death is some kind of fundamental evil we must place a high priority on solving. Some would go so far as to preserve their own lives at the cost of many others, so terrified they are of something that has basically already happened to previous versions of themselves. Its perverse.

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