Live data from Hacker News

‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

theguardian.com

41–50 of 499 posts

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? We have already decimated any semblance of natural selection so death is no longer a necessity from an evolutionary standpoint. Maybe immortal humans would be more beneficent because they wouldn't be scrambling to get ahead in their short time here. If I didn't only have 30-40ish productive years to achieve whatever I will in this life it would be much easier to donate money or time to charitable pursuits.

I like knowing that the worlds biggest assholes sometimes lie awake at night fearfully pondering their own death. I don't want to deprive them of that.

The Great Equalizer

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#42
post #2

I think that immortality would be a disaster, personally. That we die is a critically important aspect of life. I'd prefer that we work on ways to make the death process less traumatic.

Why? We have already decimated any semblance of natural selection so death is no longer a necessity from an evolutionary standpoint. Maybe immortal humans would be more beneficent because they wouldn't be scrambling to get ahead in their short time here. If I didn't only have 30-40ish productive years to achieve whatever I will in this life it would be much easier to donate money or time to charitable pursuits.

Well. How would you like a 290 years old Putin keeping a tight grip on Russia in the 23rd century?

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#43
post #2

I think that immortality would be a disaster, personally. That we die is a critically important aspect of life. I'd prefer that we work on ways to make the death process less traumatic.

Why? We have already decimated any semblance of natural selection so death is no longer a necessity from an evolutionary standpoint. Maybe immortal humans would be more beneficent because they wouldn't be scrambling to get ahead in their short time here. If I didn't only have 30-40ish productive years to achieve whatever I will in this life it would be much easier to donate money or time to charitable pursuits.

Wouldn't any change we make to who dies when also be natural? How is that not natural selection? Did earlier generations not attempt to stay alive?

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#44
post #2

I think that immortality would be a disaster, personally. That we die is a critically important aspect of life. I'd prefer that we work on ways to make the death process less traumatic.

I don't know why you're getting so much pushback... Planetary resources are finite. If you give up dying, you have to give up reproducing beyond the replacement rate. People like to imagine they'll be part of some small tribe of a lucky few immortals, but the reality is we'd be in exactly the same situation as today, but with a population rapidly screeching beyond all known sustainable limits far faster than it is to…

> but the reality is we'd be in exactly the same situation as today, but with a population rapidly screeching beyond all known sustainable limits far faster than it is today

I don’t think this is a given. Most developed nations have bad birth rates for example

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#45
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For example, it’s widely reported that organ transplantation, especially heart transplants, may cause personality changes associated with the donor. https://www.mdpi.com/2673-3943/5/1/2 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31739081/

Do we think the personality changes are due to the heart itself, or just due the minor brain damage accompanying an incredibly invasive surgery?

General anesthesia is not good for the brain.

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#47
post #2

I think that immortality would be a disaster, personally. That we die is a critically important aspect of life. I'd prefer that we work on ways to make the death process less traumatic.

Imagine people like putin pouring billions in, easily sacrificing millions to achieve such thing for themselves, and ideally nobody else. A truly terrible scenario worth fighting against.

Some folks are scared of rogue AI, when biggest threat to mankind always was, is and will be other, properly messed up humans with certain capabilities.

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#48
I wish we'd reframe the way this gets talked about. It's pedantic, but we can't escape death. All matter in the universe will eventually decay or transmute into something very different from what it now is. And my answer to the question posed of when you'd want to die is unknown. I can't say 150 years. I can't imagine a specific age I'd hit at which I'd want to die. But at the same time, while I might want to outlive the Earth, I don't want to outlive all baryonic matter and somehow persist into the age of the universe in which all other matter is black holes, and there is neither light nor sound, nothing to touch, and all I would ever experience is quadrillions of years of utter loneliness. There is no immortality and nobody would want it if they really thought about what it would entail.

But cessation of aging would be wonderful. I'd love to live indefinitely and not have my body or mind noticeably decay. Research like this should be done, but we need to be honest about what we're trying to accomplish. Nobody will ever escape death, and when you start getting large enough numbers, I'm not sure it would make any difference to live longer. Even if we somehow achieve brain uploading, which I don't see entails you living longer so much as making copies of yourself with different identities, every storage medium has a capacity limit. At some point, the only way to form new memories to evict old ones, and the experience of living 90 trillion years won't be any different than 1 trillion years if 1 trillion years of experience is all you can store.

That said, we need to also be humble about what is even achievable. The very idea of a high resolution scan capturing the entirety of your brain state is already science fiction. We have another home page story right now about controversy over whether the brain has a microbiome. The only reason that's a question is because we have no means of opening up a living brain to see. We can't even accurately measure a person's body fat without dissection. The limitations of non-invasive remote imaging that don't kill the animal being imaged are quite severe and constitute a large reason medicine isn't more effective than it is. There is no technology we are on a known arc toward achieving that will make it possible to capture molecular-level detail of an entire brain as it is still running. I don't see how you can base an entire research project on a premise that doesn't exist and we have no idea if it ever will exist.

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#49
What if the constituent of the brain changes, would you feel you or would it be like another person just go on being conscious. If you don’t know what makes consciousness, most likely you just “die” after the brain freeze. This ain’t like sleeping or coma where your system is kept running continuously

Re: ‘With brain preservation, nobody has to die’

#50

Jeroen Lanier in his book "You Are Not a Gadget" uses the example of a MIDI file: they can describe music, but even though they sound like the real thing, they are limited by the digital world. E.g. according to ChatGPT the minimum interval between 2 MIDI messages is 0.77 milliseconds. And then he asks what sort of limitations might we have if our minds are software, and how would we not notice it?

> according to ChatGPT the minimum interval between 2 MIDI messages is 0.77 milliseconds.

Thank you for stating your source. However, ChatGPT isn’t deterministic. I asked it the same thing and it responded it depends on several factors, including the MIDI protocol version and the device or software used, and that the minimum between two messages is between 1 and 2 milliseconds.

Which of those is true? Perhaps neither. A quick web search didn’t provide a straightforward answer. Point being that we should avoid propagating even more wrong information, especially since it’s not relevant to your point (which makes sense).

Post reply on HN