[HN Gopher] Doctors' estimates of the feasibility of preserving ...
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Doctors' estimates of the feasibility of preserving the dying for
future revival
Author : arielzj
Score : 18 points
Date : 2025-12-08 22:06 UTC (53 minutes ago)
(HTM) web link (www.medrxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.medrxiv.org)
| boznz wrote:
| Would you really want to be that first patient to be revived ?
| stavros wrote:
| Yes! I wouldn't want to be the last patient to _not_ be
| revived, but that 's just regular death anyway.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| 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.
| willguest wrote:
| Counterpoint, what if it's not
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| > 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
| Terr_ wrote:
| [delayed]
| zingerlio wrote:
| Never thought about the possibility that I AM the Boltzmann
| brain.
| Terr_ wrote:
| I never thought about the possibility that my Boltzmann brain
| simulates other entities thinking they're the real Boltzmann
| brain.
| tekla wrote:
| Nah, you wake up in the pearly gates of Christian heaven.
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| Not everyone.
| throwawaylaptop wrote:
| 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.
| peacebeard wrote:
| It's not your fault.
| withinrafael wrote:
| 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.
| benlivengood wrote:
| 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.
| wat10000 wrote:
| 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| 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.
| baxtr wrote:
| _> Conclusions and Relevance: US physicians assigned a median
| 25.5% probability to preservation retaining neural information
| under ideal conditions in a manner potentially compatible with
| future patient revival. The majority support for pre-mortem
| anticoagulation and substantial support for pre-cardiac arrest
| initiation indicate that many physicians would consider
| accommodating patient requests for preservation-enhancing
| interventions. These findings may inform development of clinical
| guidelines, though the speculative nature of the estimates
| warrants consideration._
| overtone1000 wrote:
| As with most science fiction, TNG did it better.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Neutral_Zone_(Star_Trek:_T...
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