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Doctors' estimates of the feasibility of preserving the dying for future revival

medrxiv.org

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Re: Doctors' estimates of the feasibility of preserving the dying for future revival

#71

Post by aio88 »

marcher wrote: post #48
polishdude20 wrote: post #3

I thought about death the other day and how maybe it's akin to the feeling of going under before a surgery. When you go under and then wake up some hours later, often you feel like no time has passed at all. What if death is just that same feeling or lack thereof for Millenia, an infinite amount of time, but at some point from your perspective, you wake up instantly far in the future. Like a photon travelling for mil…

As someone who once came extremely close to death and was unconscious for days after eventually receiving medical care, my take on death is that it's probably similar to what you're saying about going under for surgery. I'm somewhat neutral to mixed on having been revived, but I no longer fear death. I still have a fear of suffering and having painful final moments, but death itself seems peaceful if nothing else. In…

> I sometimes wonder if that was truly a one time thing or if it's something that could happen again.

You don't have to wonder. After all, if it happens again, you will be asking yourself this exact question, won't you?

Re: Doctors' estimates of the feasibility of preserving the dying for future revival

#73

Post by marcher »

CommenterPerson wrote: post #55
marcher wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who once came extremely close to death and was unconscious for days after eventually receiving medical care, my take on death is that it's probably similar to what you're saying about going under for surgery. I'm somewhat neutral to mixed on having been revived, but I no longer fear death. I still have a fear of suffering and having painful final moments, but death itself seems peaceful if nothing else. In…

Well. Good that you were revived and shared your experience with us! Being born can be compared to a one in billions lottery win. We're given this time. "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us". I hope you get to feel more positive about being around. My belief is, when you're gone, you're gone. All this religion and quantum mechanics speculation about coming back is wishful thinking (it's…

I'm not negative on it exactly, but the idea of not being revived doesn't really bug me. If that had happened, then it's whatever, I guess?

But I agree with your sentiment about using the time we're given. I don't put much thought into what happens after death other than in a purely self-entertainment, "oh that'd be a cool what-if scenario..." type of way. My goal now is to minimize my suffering and maximize my happiness to whatever extent I can. If I can make others happy too in some way as I do that, that'd be neat too.

Re: Doctors' estimates of the feasibility of preserving the dying for future revival

#75

Post by Gud »

throwawaylaptop wrote: post #20
peacebeard wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not your fault.

Its obviously not my 'fault'. But it's pretty close to a death I could have prevented for a while if I wasnt pretending to be busy probably. I remember when she said her dad was going to go instead and I thought "uhh, I don't think that's going to work.. I should just go" but I didn't really like her that much at that point and figured it would just be a lame wasted hike, not that the dude would die.

Not your fault your girlfriends dad was so out of shape a hike (potentially) killed him.

He should have hiked more often.

Re: Doctors' estimates of the feasibility of preserving the dying for future revival

#76

Post by exe34 »

polishdude20 wrote: post #3

I thought about death the other day and how maybe it's akin to the feeling of going under before a surgery. When you go under and then wake up some hours later, often you feel like no time has passed at all. What if death is just that same feeling or lack thereof for Millenia, an infinite amount of time, but at some point from your perspective, you wake up instantly far in the future. Like a photon travelling for mil…

I don't get this "infinite amount of time" thing. in a steady state universe, yes, sure, but if the expansion continues and no new incidents like the big bang happens, then it just gets colder and colder, right? and even if atoms were to come together in that way again, the CMB would be lower, so that fragment of timeline would lead to Pensias and Wilson to finish work earlier that day and never get the Nobel prize - so that history would be very different.

Re: Doctors' estimates of the feasibility of preserving the dying for future revival

#77

Post by arielzj »

overtone1000 wrote: post #43
DennisP wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a way higher number than I expected.

I agree, and I am a US physician! Curiously, their paper was sponsored by an entity that funds cryopreservation research. The paper asserts that those surveyed were general practitioners, but the actual survey itself had quotas for various subspecialties. The survey also has an introduction section that frames cryopreservation (not used in medicine) in the context of hypothermic protocols (commonly used in medicine),…

First author here to provide context:

1. We had both general practitioners and various specialists. We set a minimum quota for each so that we'd get some sense of what all the various groups thought. We aimed for and obtained 180 specialists along with the 150 general practitioners. See figure 1 c.

1a. We absolutely did not change the protocol after the survey was designed, or selectively exclude sections of the population. The inclusion/exclusion criteria are as per the methods, and this was a one-shot survey (no piloting beyond initial validation on colleagues). I'm all for open and reproducible science!

2. The introduction does not claim an equivalence between induced hypothermia and preservation, just that induced hypothermia does provide some precedence that preservation may work.

"Some surgical operations, such as repairs of aneurysms of the aortic arch, are performed using deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (Connoly et al., 2010). In this procedure, a patient’s body is cooled to ~20°C, experiencing both circulatory arrest and complete electrocerebral silence on EEG. Patients can survive 30+ minutes in this state with >90% survival rates and intact post-surgical cognition (Percy et al., 2009).

This demonstrates that long-term memory and personality can persist through prolonged cessation of brain activity - a finding which builds upon other neuroscience data showing that these depend on structural properties such as neuronal connectivity, rather than requiring uninterruptible electrochemical dynamics (Stecker et al., 2001).

Some terminally ill patients, based on this medical evidence and their personal beliefs about future medical advances, have requested procedures to preserve their brain structure after legal death..."

3. I was also surprised the probability estimates were as high as they were! I think doctors just think this has a greater chance of working than is commonly perceived.

Re: Doctors' estimates of the feasibility of preserving the dying for future revival

#78

Post by arielzj »

nyeah wrote: post #37
DennisP wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a way higher number than I expected.

I worry that there's a selection bias: physicians who even bothered to respond to a survey on this topic.

These were physicians who were being paid to complete surveys - no reason to think they were more likely to select/reject this one over any of the others available to them at the time.

Re: Doctors' estimates of the feasibility of preserving the dying for future revival

#79

Post by arielzj »

Vecr wrote: post #23

This is optimistic, I see "The cryonics people make a mistake in freezing you (how do we know they don't make lots of mistakes?)"[0] and "The current cryonics process is insufficient to preserve everything"[0] resulting of a product 10% already, seemingly matching the questionnaire as well as possible. They say "under ideal conditions" in the survey, so maybe that rules out cracking of brain tissue or ice growth, but…

...I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Asking about ideal conditions is a reasonable starting point for establishing a baseline, and high-quality preservation is definitely something that can be achieved under laboratory conditions with animal models (e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001122401...)

Re: Doctors' estimates of the feasibility of preserving the dying for future revival

#80

Post by vintermann »

DennisP wrote: post #40
michaelt wrote: post #4

When it comes to cryopreservation the thing I find infeasible is the idea a provider would bother with the preservation, under the incentives of capitalism. If someone pays millions of dollars to a company that promises to freeze their corpse for 200 years, the company can simply freeze the corpse for a decade or two, take the millions of dollars as dividends and executive bonuses, then declare bankruptcy. The dead c…

One way to mitigate that would be to put the money in a trust which pays the preservation company a monthly dividend. If the trust stops paying, the company can sue it. If the company goes out of business despite its ongoing revenue, the trust can try to find someone else to take over the storage. We already have trusts that manage wealth for multiple generations.

And how can you trust the trust? We also have plenty of trusts which are questionably aligned with their makers last wills, among them the Nobel peace prize (Nobel didn't just want the prize to go to anyone working for any kind of advancement of peace. He had a very particular instrument for peace in mind, namely peace conferences, which I don't think any laureate has arranged for fifty years.)

I think we have too many trusts already. Let the living decide what's important in life, not the dead.

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