Just want to plug Pantheon as a TV series exploring this idea with excellent storytelling. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series))
‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’
121–130 of 499 posts
Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’
#122Once the brain has been powered off and the back on, is it even "you" anymore? Hasn't that person died and a new one was "born"? Used to go a little bit crazy thinking about this when watching people getting transported in StarTrek.
See the Bobiverse books for some fun sci-fi on this.
Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’
#123I used to buy into this kind of stuff, but I've become more and more skeptical of the idea that you would still be yourself if your brain could be preserved/emulated/transplanted/whatever. Our nervous system extends into our bodies. We feel emotions in our bodies. People with certain kinds of brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotions normally also experience trouble making rational decisions. More recent…
As a neuroscientist working on brain computer interfaces, it's painfully clear to me that we are absolutely nowhere close to understanding the full complexity of the human brain in a manner required to simulate or reboot someone's consciousness. It's not even clear yet what level of abstraction is required. Do we need to map all of the synapses to get a connection graph, or do we need to map all synapses plus the syn…
Losing half neurons caught my attention. I believe we had a post about how LLM weights being trimmed by 1/2 still had them functional. Interesting.
Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’
#124I used to buy into this kind of stuff, but I've become more and more skeptical of the idea that you would still be yourself if your brain could be preserved/emulated/transplanted/whatever. Our nervous system extends into our bodies. We feel emotions in our bodies. People with certain kinds of brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotions normally also experience trouble making rational decisions. More recent…
I’m not sure I actually believe in quantum immortality but I think it is slightly suspicious—out of all the people you could have been be born as, you just happen to be born in a timeframe where brain preservation might be possible before you die?
Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’
#125Once the brain has been powered off and the back on, is it even "you" anymore? Hasn't that person died and a new one was "born"? Used to go a little bit crazy thinking about this when watching people getting transported in StarTrek.
LOL, "we're not married, your husband died in the transporter".
"Ah can I have his laptop? He's got some saved games he wanted me to have"
Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’
#126Once the brain has been powered off and the back on, is it even "you" anymore? Hasn't that person died and a new one was "born"? Used to go a little bit crazy thinking about this when watching people getting transported in StarTrek.
If all the theory is correct, yes you are still you. Maybe damaged you, but you nonetheless.
Imagine the ship of theseus thought experiment, but instead of replacing part by part you store it on a dry dock (lost its function), some time after you put it in the sea again (recover the function), for all effects this still is the ship of Theseus
Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
replying to myself to provide more context. In my PhD work, I helped conduct the human portion of a study on this topic, contributing to some discussions at the FDA [1]. The idea was a bit controversial then, and I've had a few anesthesiologists get mad at me for it, but the general pattern has now been replicated quite a few times now, such that the field has largely moved on from 'Is something bad happening?' to 'W…
Is there any reason to suspect that adults suffer the same effects as infants? (Not asking to be combative, just curious whether children are uniquely affected because their brains are still cooking.)
You and the other commenter bring up good points. Developmental neurotoxicity (with lesser or no effects in older children and young adults) is, I speculate, probably due to differential gene expression during early development versus later when genes related to development are suppressed and genes related to maintenance are more abundantly expressed. The developmental neurotoxicity probably works through different mechanisms than what is termed "postoperative cognitive dysfunction" in the elderly after general anesthesia dysfunction [1][2], which, all I know is that it is a thing. If I were to speculate it would be that in the elderly there are fewer redundant cognitive resources, and so detrimental effects to cognition are magnified. I know that it used to be thought that post-operative dysfunction is temporary, but it seems likely to me (again speculation) that there is both recovery and permanent dysfunction, but the dysfunction becomes a little more difficult to detect. Going back to my paper, where we used a method to disentangle two types of memory processes i.e. recollection (explicit recollection of experiential details) and familiarity (a general feeling of familiarity with things you've seen previously) which contribute to memory performance but tend to be differentially affected by neurodegeneration (recollection is more affected, and generally more hippocampal), so that sometimes, when not accounting for these processes, a memory test will fail to find differences because patients rely on familiarity to answer memory questions.
[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_ylo=2020&q=postoperati... [2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo...
Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’
#128I don't want to live more than 100 years and I don't want to come back from the dead either. Make way for the next generation and their wants.
Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’
#129I used to buy into this kind of stuff, but I've become more and more skeptical of the idea that you would still be yourself if your brain could be preserved/emulated/transplanted/whatever. Our nervous system extends into our bodies. We feel emotions in our bodies. People with certain kinds of brain damage that prevents them from feeling emotions normally also experience trouble making rational decisions. More recent…
Why would you want to go on in a world that has either left you behind or keeps making the same mistakes over and over in a cycle and won't listen to you because you're too old to understand? And conversely, I think Kim Stanley Robinson puts it best in the Mars trilogy. Scientific progress often has to wait for the old guard to die so new ideas can be tried. Sometimes there are actually new things and they need to be…
A questionable assumption.
A scientist like Einstein experienced scientific revolutions within his lifetime. That's hardly going to be the norm in the history of science, and also a horrible assumption to think revolutions would endlessly be occurring and reoccurring.
Also, we know when we're on the edge of knowledge, especially in cosmology and physics. We're waiting for revolution there. There's dark energy and dark matter. It doesn't matter if you're old or young, you knew that your theories isn't good enough to explain whatever these are.
Scientific knowledge don't get swept away especially if they're rock solid. Newtonian physics still has a lot of relevance after all. It's just that relativity is even more accurate.
Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
Way older https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rip_Van_Winkle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sleeper_Awakes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Door_into_Summer and for anything fantastic you can find it in mythology and ancient literature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Sleepers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muchukunda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Immortals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranka_(legend) A good re…
Several other books pop into mind, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Live_Forever
I oughta read this one again
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21617.Buying_Time
particularly since my esteem for Haldeman has gone up (https://sff180.com/reviews/h/haldeman/worlds.html changed my life)