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Comment by martin-adams | Hacker News Reader

I find cryogenics such a thought provoking field. If you're going to be frozen after death, you would probably want the restoration process to be fully mature before you are restored. But yet, someone has to go first (outside of shorter frozen trials).

But then again, who is to say that the restoration process will take the form of thawing out the brain. An advanced digital scanning technique could imprint the brain image onto an organic robot, thus making it possible to have many copies of the same person.

I also find the concept similar to the teleport. You may be the person who goes in, but are you the same person who comes out the other end? Indistinguishable from you, only you are not the observer of your own reality.

[Edit: A couple of really obvious grammatical errors]

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Is there any name for this puzzle? I've been thinking about this for a while now.

Cloning the particles (and their states) that make you up would most likely produce a separate mind, as I think would teleporting where v1 is destroyed and v2 consisting of different particles, although in the same configuration. But what about separating said configuration, transporting them somewhere else and putting them back together? Cryogenics is in my opinion the only possible way to give a chance in preserving an original mind well beyond natural human lifespan without actually extending it.

Not only can't others tell a clone apart from the original: the hypothetic clone, as I understand it, couldn't do that either. Now what if this process, due to cellular regeneration in the brain, happens constantly? Your mind is not the same it was a minute ago: that mind is dead and gone. Would it even matter?

The thing is, unless you have certain metaphysical beliefs, the very concept of "identity" is a flawed one and doesn't really represent the reality of us being actually a complex aggregate structure of cells. The concept of "self" is in my opinion just a rough approximation or a framework that we use to quickly assess reality, much like time, as we commonly think of it, does not fully represent the complexities of relativistic time, however it is useful to manage our daily life[1]: the sentence "I'll be with you in 5 minutes" could open a whole lot of possibilities if we consider time in a relativistic scenario, whereas it is fairly unambiguous in our daily life. Similarly, the concept of "self" would be very ambiguous with regards to e.g. annelid worms (who can be split in 2 and survive as two separate individuals[2]) whereas it sums up fairly well the way we think of ourselves as individuals.

[1] See http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2166333... [2] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragmentation_(reproduction)

It was called "Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?" in a poll of philosophers:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/what_do_philoso....

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2009/12/15/who-are-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox

>someone has to go first

Probably there'll be animal experimentation first. Then when Fido's still able to fetch they'll give humans a bash.

That's assuming humans would be performing the resuscitation, which I doubt. If general intelligence has been solved, it will probably be an AI doing the work.

Well there's a scary thought. Sending your loved ones into the future full of machine whose motives may not exactly be the same as ours.

Not saying machines will be running the show, just that they'd likely be handling the logistics of the resuscitation itself.

If general intelligence goes sideways and takes over, the probability it'd care about resuscitating preserved humans is extremely low.

That said, waking up into some sort of Roko's Basilisk-esque eternal torment would kind of suck.

Only if the observer were some metaphysical being, rather than simply the inside view of a particular computation. If you reproduce the computation faithfully, you have reproduced the observer.

Lets hope that part of science is discovered before the restoration part.

Where my thoughts end up more in the personal beliefs rather than scientifically backed is down to what the observer is defined as. Could this be the same as a soul?

One thought that I have is whether the physical state is bound with a non-physical state, like you (non-physical) controlling a remote controlled car (physical). By freezing the subject you could detach this binding, and by thawing you could reattach another observer, maybe based on proximity, with the memories and physical mind of the original.

Hollywood has pretty much covered all these concepts in one shape or another.

[1] The Prestige - Teleportation

[2] 21 Grams - Existence of a soul

[3] The Matrix - AI controlled future

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1

A long (but relevant) web comic.

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