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 millions of years, you don't perceive time passing at all.
Given an infinite amount of time, there will be a time where all of your atoms will recombine again in just the right away to bring you back to consciousness with all your memories in tact.
To you, it feels like you woke up in an instant. To the universe, it took an infinite amount of time to wake up you again.
My college gfs dad died after trying to accompany her on a hike, because I was too busy to go and he didn't want her to go alone. So he drove down on the weekend and went with her. He was an overweight man that never moved.
~24 hours after the hike, which he skipped most of and waited mid trail, he started having a heart attack in his home office. I have spent a lot of time thinking about what he was thinking those last minutes or seconds.
And I wish I just went on that hike with her.
Possibly so, possibly not.
I think this gets into a fundamental (and common) misunderstanding of what infinity implies.
I think the best way I could illustrate it is the concept of infinite non-repeating numbers. A fair number of people will think "Oh, because it's infinite and non-repeating, it must contain all possible number combinations". However, consider a number like `1.101001000100001000001...` This is a number that's infinite, non-repeating, and it only contains 1 and 0.
With that in mind, it becomes trivial to imagine an infinite non-repeating number where `7` occurs only once.
Said another way about time and the infinite. It's entirely possible that ultimately the universe decays into a proton vapor and once that happens, that's it. It stays infinitely as such a vapor cloud with none of the protons ever meeting one another.
All that's to say is infinite doesn't imply that all possible states will be created once again. It could happen, but it's not guaranteed to happen.
After all, are you really the same person that began your life? Do you have the same memories? Can you even remember what being 10 years old was like? Are those memories real? Are you experiencing the same universe as when you were born?
For all you know, you have died a thousand times and just don't remember it because those memories died in some other universe or some other body.
The best science can estimate, for now, is that heat death will occur in around 100 trillion years, probably closer to 1, and other universe ending outcomes can happen long before that. For the solar system, there's a few billion years before the inner planets get devoured by the sun.
In those timeframes, the only outcome you have is the one occurring now. There's no eternal endless reset waiting at the end of everything where things endlessly repeat - the number of things that occur and near infinite variety of outcomes means that even if there's a big crunch and a restart long after the heat death of the universe, there will never, ever, in any meaningfully cognizable period of time, be another universe where Earth exists, or even the Milky Way. Tiny perturbations at the beginning of time across the sum total of all particles and energy defined the state of all the things that could ever be within our universe. Across an infinity of infinities, a multiverse in which all things exist, there's no meaningful differentiation at the level of thinking about everything, so I don't think it brings anything to the table.
You get the one life - if science progresses to the point where we reach longevity escape velocity, or if they can guarantee preservation of your mind until such a time as they can revive or restore or fully emulate your embodiment, that's worth pursuing, even if somehow some weird mystical configuration of "you" traverses the eternal multiverse.
We're closing in on really weird changes in human technological trajectories, it's going to be one hell of a ride.
In terms of something happening after death, my only real thought on that is that it really troubles me that I came into existence in the first place and that I experience anything at all. I sometimes wonder if that was truly a one time thing or if it's something that could happen again.
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 one reason religion is so powerful. It's very hard and scary to comprehend our non existence. Religion provides a nice candy wrapped solution to all that.)
You don't have to wonder. After all, if it happens again, you will be asking yourself this exact question, won't you?
If time in infinite and there's a nonzero probability that random fluctuations could result in a conscious being with all your memories intact, then it's virtually certain that you are such a being right now, and not an original human actually present in the world that you perceive.
Some suggest time is an illusion. A nice linear construct to help conscious beings integrate in the material world. Eckhart Tolle advises there is no past and future, only now. And in some spiritual models time doesn't exist outside the material world, and takes on a hub and spoke model, where all of time is instantly accessible (think RAM vs tape).
Not saying any of this is true or positing materalism vs not, but it's interesting to ponder.
Do note that if nothing is done with this space -ever- then your data is not zeroed out, yet you don't exist anymore ?
Waking up up the equivalent memories requires a body with that arrangement of neurons that isn’t in ill health. That could easily be looking for a 3 on an infinite sequence of odd numbers.
n00b question, but if consciousness is a quantum effect[1], would mere atomic recombination really be enough to bring you back? Also, isn't entropy ripping the universe apart into a big glass cloud with energy equally distributed?
[1] I once asked somebody with a doctorate in neuroscience/biology about this and promptly received an eyeroll, so I'm playing theoretical here
A very long comic, but the punchline is relevant: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3
> would mere atomic recombination really be enough to bring you back?
I think we need to distinguish between "quantum effect" versus "quantum state". There are probably a lot of biological processes that are possible or efficient from quantum effects (vision, smell, photosynthesis) but that doesn't mean the machinery itself has a fragility beyond the arrangement of its atoms.
I imagine our brains/minds go through far greater levels of disruption in our daily lives, sleep-cycles, anesthesia, concussions, etc.
Apparently there's a name for this: the Lucretian symmetry argument. And I recently learned there are philosophers who argue the asymmetry in our attitudes is actually rational, and that fearing death while not fearing pre-natal nonexistence makes sense [1].
I find comfort in treating the two as being equal, and I'd be lying if I said I'm not a little hesitant to read their case.
[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-015-9868-2_...
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 can't sue.
[0]: https://www.jefftk.com/p/breaking-down-cryonics-probabilitie... “Principles of Cryopreservation by Vitrification” https://gwern.net/doc/biology/2015-fahy.pdf
Covers the second term, "freezing" (quibble quibble) speed and delays in the procedure cover the first.
Your team seems not to be trying to maintain either normally solid/fluid tissue maintaining recoverable gradients or vitrification through an entire cycle below the triple point (with just removable or bio-compatible vitrifying mixtures) so your "goal" might be easier. Is the future AI just going to say you didn't do well enough even if you meet your "goal"?
On the other hand if there's never any point in the cycle where any volume is not either recoverable to health or vitrified, all the AI can say is that cryonics doesn't work period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_T...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3001:_The_Final_Odyssey?useski...
I can't help but wonder whether they changed the protocol after the survey was designed and only interviewed general practitioners. Or, worse, perhaps they selectively excluded a portion of the interviewed population.
Experts in a related field were asked to guess how successful something no one has ever done would be, if it could be done.
That's like asking a bunch of certified mechanics how fast George Jetson's flying car could go. I mean, there are mechanics in The Jetson's universe, so... same knowledge base, right?
https://readcomiconline.li/Comic/Transmetropolitan/Issue-8?i...
It was quite common for rich Victorians to donate their grounds/houses to be used for the public good and still today they are owned by the original trust and money from the trust can only be used in a certain way etc... we have many parks because of this (that otherwise could have been developed to extract money).
Obviously the longer the technology takes to develop, the higher the chance something goes wrong; though the concepts of trusts have existed for some 800 years so if it takes only 200 years, I think your chances are good!
There may be exceptions to the rule against perpetuities for charities, but I don't imagine any sane court would consider keeping a corpse frozen to be a charitable activity.
I think we have too many trusts already. Let the living decide what's important in life, not the dead.
What happens to the money in the trust?
With enough funds, the trust should be able to both pay for your preservation and grow its balance. You'd even be able to inherit the remaining funds when revived.
Of course in practice there is still the possibility of the trustees being corrupt.
And one day he just wakes up.
I have doubts that such a company could keep the power on for the next 200 years, with an increasingly unstable planet (climatically and politically).
Maybe sending your body in a lead coffin into the coldness of space is a better preservation method, maybe that's why the loser billionaires are so interested in going to space..
Some of the experts speaking argued that it's impossible to preserve and then revive human bodies with available technology because ice crystals do irreversible damage to body tissues.
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.
If it does happen, then they can stop wondering. Now now.
Preferably the company would also have liability, giving the trust standing to sue. Then the trust spends some of their money on the lawsuit, and if they win, applies the proceeds as above.
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.
And the Nobels might not be awarded exactly as originally intended, but they are still awarded every year. Nobody has swiped the funds for executive bonuses, as the commenter above suggested.
Fortunately, "future technology" handwaves all problems away.
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.
But in this case, when it's a clear "either I put off changing my oil and washing my car, or this 250 lb senior citizen with gout tries going on a hike", it's a lot more clear.
I get it, I got friends and family that have completed suicide and it’s hard to not think about what I could have done differently.
Yeah, he died. Yeah, he was out of shape.
He wanted to keep his daughter safe, and trying to do so cost him his life. He did something heroic.
What have you done at that level of importance?
He should have hiked more often.
Have there been about 75 where it was? If so, congrats on beating the odds.
I thought for a second and said "idk, probably like 1 in 100 we would have died... Maybe even worse than that.. I don't think I could pull that off 100 times"
And that weird realization made something click and I've stopped doing stupid things.
The new me would have thought "hey, if 100 65 year old obese men with gout go hiking, at least one of them isn't making it back". 22 year old me thought "eh, he's just going to be slow".
I wasn't THAT busy, maybe I just had things to do that I wanted to get done more than go on a hike.
As others have already stated though it's really not GP's fault and they're not responsible for managing other's decisions. Could they have saved a person? Maybe. Or maybe the late father would have died a week later anyways.
In any case, obesity is the result of a lifestyle and going on the hike was a choice that he made and that his daughter accepted when she chose to go on the hike with her father knowing his condition.
Tragic, but there it is. The clock is ticking for us all. Any day now.
Changing your oil and washing your car may be the luckiest decision you've made in your life!
I once did not marry a (beautiful) daughter of a family with an overweight heart-diseased patron. Turned out to be one of the best accidents of life for me. Saw her years later and she was almost as big as her Daddy was when he had his second heart bypass! Glad I missed that "iceberg in the night"!
I suppose it could be considered a bad choice that when my knee ligament snapped, I went to a hospital which was horrendously busy (thanks NHS!) and the doctor didn't care to do more than a cursory exam and send me away (bad choice on my part trusting an expert, I suppose!) which then lead to a (slow) avalanche of problems which eventually destroyed almost every part of my knee?
Yeah, probably all my fault, you're right.
I don't know, maybe. But I wasn't commenting about your knee. I was commenting about the father's congestive heart failure which is usually, and sounds like in this case, caused by sloth. There are plenty of fit people even in wheelchairs.