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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It's impossible to experience nothing. Spooky

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.

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.

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.

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".

Yes, at some point Boltzmann brains become higher likelihood but don't forget that interventions are not limited to prior history, e.g. someone builds a machine that performs whole-body surgery based on the timing of radioactive decay. Still more likely to end up with a functioning body than a Boltzmann brain. Most likely to end up with a weirder but more likely intervention (low expectation of it actually working, but not infinitesimal) (and from anthropic perspective)

The issue I was pointing to was a society with a higher technical standard isn’t going to naturally create a brain that remembers a vastly less technologically advanced civilization. It’s possible they would create such structures artificially, but now your dependent upon a civilization with the capacity that also happens to create this specific arrangement.

> 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?

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.

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

He should have hiked more often.

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.

Not his fault that he couldn't predict his daughter deciding to go on a hike alone, which triggered his parental protective mode.

I really hate the fat-shaming going on here.

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?

That makes no sense. Of course they have to wonder about something that hasn't happened yet, and might not.

If it does happen, then they can stop wondering. Now now.

We hope.

Not just surgery, but isn't that how you feel just after going to sleep at night or taking a nap? I guess as long as you don't have memory of your dreams from that time.

You’ll never know that you died

It is his fault that he made choices which resulted in him being unable to perform basic tasks in life that he would reasonably be expected to sometimes do, such as walking outside.

I have gone to the gym multiple times per week for many many years so that I can remain a physically capable parent to my children, and not inflict upon them my premature disablement or death.

I prefer the Buddhist interpretation of self. There isn't really a singular you. We are all interdependent beings. A four plus dimensional tree reaching back to the start of time. The "you" that you're experiencing right now is an illusion created by your brain. When the body you are currently experiencing with dies, there are still all the other bodies producing experience.

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.

Is it my fault that I've resulted in being unable to perform "basic tasks" such as walking outside? Have I somehow manifested osteoarthritis by my bad choices?

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.

>There has never been anything in my life before where 99% safe wasn't enough

Have there been about 75 where it was? If so, congrats on beating the odds.

Perhap he shouldn't have gone with her. Perhaps your gf shouldn't have let him go with her. Perhaps you face marriage into a family that has hereditary bad judgment!

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"!

> Is it my fault that I've resulted in being unable to perform "basic tasks" such as walking outside? Have I somehow manifested osteoarthritis by my bad choices?

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.