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

Would you really want to be that first patient to be revived ?

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 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.

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 can't sue.

Counterpoint, what if it's not

> 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.

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

Never thought about the possibility that I AM the Boltzmann brain.

As with most science fiction, TNG did it better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_T...

Nah, you wake up in the pearly gates of Christian heaven.

I never thought about the possibility that my Boltzmann brain simulates other entities thinking they're the real Boltzmann brain. What arrogant solipsists I imagine into existence. :p

I don't think most people worry about the huge amounts of time after they have died. They worry about the 1-120 seconds while they are really dying and aware.

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.

> if consciousness is a quantum effect [...] promptly received an eyeroll

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.

Somewhat along that line of thinking, I've wondered if my visual perspective was similar to a 3D game engine camera. And if upon death, it switched to a new entity.

Not everyone.

It's not your fault.

Yes! I wouldn't want to be the last patient to not be revived, but that's just regular death anyway.

If the universe is infinite that should happen sometime (not really important) around 10^10^29 meters away. Of course, you don't actually have to die for that copy to exist either, and a copy of the local galaxy etc. is not too much further away (10^10^92 m), so waking up indistinguishably somewhere else after a good night's sleep would happen occasionally too.

As the late great Douglas Adams wrote, "There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

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.

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.

That's a way higher number than I expected.

These aren’t companies doing the patient storage. It is non profits setup and run by people who are signed up themselves.

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 that's not the number practitioners want to know about.

[0]: https://www.jefftk.com/p/breaking-down-cryonics-probabilitie... “Principles of Cryopreservation by Vitrification” https://gwern.net/doc/biology/2015-fahy.pdf

Ya know, ya really waited until the second comment here to add in the "pretending" lol

That's a good point, but the funds could be automatically released over time instead of a lump sum payment

Ha. That was more a play off the fact that most times "busy" is just relative.

I wasn't THAT busy, maybe I just had things to do that I wanted to get done more than go on a hike.

There's a news story about such a company where they basically throw the bodies in a chest freezer, or stuffed many of them together in one unit, etc. Nightmare fuel...

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..

I'd let them work the kinks out on your revival and follow several hundred thousand (or more) later. After all, death isn't the only complication to worry about.

It's basically the same thing. What's stopping them from eventually losing interest or the non profit getting hijacked. I personally think the whole thing is a huge waste of money and i can imagine some guys in 50 years will think so too.

Yeah, even the living can't collect much from a bankrupt corporation.

If that's the case why aren't we doing more to encourage them?

Like a shooter spectator mode or like reincarnation with extra steps?

You are the object the camera is bound to, which is elligible for collection when it become unreachable, allowing at some point in time for new allocations to be made with the amount of space you occupied during your life.

Do note that if nothing is done with this space -ever- then your data is not zeroed out, yet you don't exist anymore ?

Life is full of moments like that. For example on your way to work that same morning, had you left your house 30 seconds later than you did, someone might have had to wait at an intersection longer than they otherwise would have, causing them to narrowly miss being in an accident further down the road instead of being hit. Butterfly effect and all that. You can’t predict the future.

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

It's impossible to experience nothing. Spooky

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.

With enough money, at least here in the UK, it is possible to set up structures that endure for one sole purpose for many generations.

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!

Time is fun to think about. It seems to only matter if one has the facilities to perceive and quantify time passing.

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.

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), which would seem to lend it some legitimacy. But that isn't a fair comparison. Only critical care specialists and some surgeons and anesthesiologists have much experience with therapeutic hypothermia. GPs would typically have less experience and might not readily notice the inequivalence.

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.

You do have a little fault here, but it’s marginal vs his lifetime choices, and his lack of understanding of his limits. There should be enough room for forgiveness in all of that.

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.

I feel it's kind of a moot point. GP's intention or train of thought doesn't change the downstream effects. Busy or not, they didn't go, and that's the bool the universe went with.

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.

With no memories going with me, it feels just as scary.

I don't worry too much about the butterfly effect because it goes both ways. Sure one stoplight here makes a guy die, but another stoplight over there saves a guys life.

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.

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 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.

This is exactly how Companies are doing it… they put the money in a trust and pay for the ongoing costs by using interests from that trust.

That's how I see it. Ive always felt a lot worse for the daughter too.

Infinite does not mean everything happens.

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.

You wouldn’t have prevented it. You would have maybe unknowingly created a condition that would have postponed it. And then you would never have known that you had done so.

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.

The part of this that really makes me think is when you thought "I don't think that's going to work" about him going on the hike. That's really tough. In the past there have been times I didn't speak up about a concern I had, then found out that a warning would have been warranted. This is something I think about a lot since becoming a father. There has never been anything in my life before where 99% safe wasn't enough. When you're a parent, 99% safe is a nightmare. Risky situations happen every day. Like staying close enough to the kid on the sidewalk to grab her if the she sees a ball and wants to run into the street for the first time ever. As a parent you have to get comfortable just being a total square all the time, and speaking up about safety even if everyone in the room rolls their eyes. So yeah. It's not your fault, and this person's choice wasn't your responsibility. But you're right, if you were a square and spoke up about safety maybe it would have saved a life. That is a valuable lesson to hold on to.

Not quite - just because an infinite variety of things are allowed to happen doesn't mean that they will. You will never have been born with all your cells suddenly swapped out for pure gold. Your brain will never spontaneously spark a fission chain reaction and detonate, in all the infinite variety of outcomes through all time. The universe as we know it will also end long before any meaningful notion of infinity applies to the possible outcomes of various configurations of atoms.

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.

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 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.)

> 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.

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.

My fears of death have nothing to do with my death and everything to do with the people I leave behind. I certainly don't want to suffer, but more so I don't want my loved ones to suffer.

Mark Twain put it pithily (and perhaps apocryphally): "I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it."

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_...

I default to statistics a lot more now, even if ballparked and made up in my head.. and it all stemmed from a different gf asking me "how dangerous do you think that was???!!?!" while giggling and high off adrenaline after taking her to around 155 mph on a Yamaha R1.

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".

The way I think you'd set this up is you'd create a trust with the millions and then the trustees would pay the company its monthly fee from the trust's funds.

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.

Arthur C. Clarke explored this cultural shock as well in the final book of the Space Odyssey series:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3001:_The_Final_Odyssey?useski...

Isn't the UK also the home of the "Rule against perpetuities" [1] specifically stopping dead people from exerting control over the ownership of private property? To stop some duke in the 1600s setting inheritance rules for "their" land 6 generations into the future?

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities

Let's say there was a power cut and the backup generator failed. The corpse is gone.

What happens to the money in the trust?

Some 20 years ago French Planete documentary channel (back then that channel had some good stuff - often shocking, unlike Discovery that slowly marched towards flashy popsci, aliens and WW2) was showing this piece about cryonics, and there was a segment about company that did indeed went bankrupt. Bodies of their clients due to unpaid bills de-thawed and started decomposing. And since that happen there was nothing else that families could do but just bury their beloved ones.

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.

Wasn't OpenAI a non-profit?

Whatever you define when you set it up. Donate to charity, give to your descendants, etc.

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.

That they and the people they care about are stored there. This is a far stronger incentive than any profit motive.

The second part of that sentence was the important bit.