A pig's brain has been frozen with its cellular activity locked in place

Or another? The trust you set up ran out of money because all of the fees continued to increase and outpaced certain economic downturns. More and more people drew money off of your remaining static assets. You run out of money. Estate sale. Garbage truck.

Just remember, you’ll have all of time to end up there.

No thanks.

People have strokes or accidents and wake up missing memories and with changed bodies, but their families still call them by name.

You still being you is a matter of degree, not a binary, and different people are comfortable with different degrees of change.

This feels like an odd cope, sure I might not be able to do anything about my mortality, but I still view the fact that I and other people are mortal as a damn tragedy (and often the gradual decline and non-dignified end of people's lives). If someone held a gun at my head and I knew that within a minute they're going to pull the trigger, I'd be rightfully quite disturbed. Now knowing that a metaphorical trigger will be pulled at a random time decades later doesn't make it any less disturbing. The only solace there is ignorance.

> do it either via exceptional deeds or via well-raised children

Both of those are worthy pursuits, but are also categorically different from you being here. So sure, you can and probably should say that living a good life is what people should do instead of losing sleep over their mortality - but that also moves the goal posts in a sense. You could have cut it short at the equivalent of "you'll never be immortal".

Did you even read my comment? In the last paragraph I discuss this and the teletransportation paradox, and how it will not actually be me but a copy, my thread of consciousness dies with me.

Please give me the courtesy of at least a full read before replying.

You should go to a cancer ward and tell that to all the cancer patients there. That will make them "get it" like you do.

Some people think identity and the continuity of consciousness are based on information or computation, and not on specific physical matter or soul-like constructs, so for them a transfer of all relevant information would constitute a transfer of consciousness and identity. From this perspective (leaving aside questions of practicality) "you yourself looking from the biological body at somebody else in the computer" is exactly as valid as "you yourself looking from inside the computer at somebody else in the biological body" (and in fact the whole idea that you have to choose one or the other as "the real you" becomes moot on this view).

Of course it's a difficult metaphysical conundrum but to say that your view of things is "a simple fact" when the basic scientific materialist worldview of today points at least as much in the opposite direction is a bit overconfident.

It's an element of faith, not fact. If you simulate a human body from quarks up, the physics won't know if it's running on base reality or in a computer.

You have no special access to data or insight that anyone else does, nor new evidence and the argument itself is always pretty specious (those patterns over there are different because like, they're not here).

If a copy is indistinguishable enough from the original, you have to treat that copy as you would treat you.

Imagine the following experiment, you are on a room seeing 5 (or 20, or 100) live streams of as many perfect copies. You are informed that a livestream of yourself is being presented to the rest.

You are given the same questions and you all answer in the same way. Now they tell that out of all of you, only one is the original and that you can vote to proceed with some pretty terrible physical punishment to the simulations. Which way are you voting?

What makes it obvious are illnesses like dementia and general decay of neural activity as we get older.

If we implant the same memories into something or someone that person/entity would become you, like waking up from a long nap. You might not feel the same, think the same, or act the same, but it would still feel like you. Going one step further and growing an exact clone can probably go even further than that.

- Imperative Pink Eye

Interesting! Which atoms do you consider to be your identity? That demonstrate someone is the "same" person for a lifetime?

And more importantly, why?

If our identity involves any abstraction whatsoever, any independence from particular material constituents (whatever dependency could possibly mean in a universe where particles of a type are indistinguishable (i.e. can appear in different contexts but do not have identities), then we are not substrate bound. We just require isomorphism.

(Any assumptions that there can only be one future "self", that isomorphic copies are neither inheritors or branches of our identity, require some clear explanation. To separate solid reasoning from our intuitions which are often strongly biased by a lack of prior experience.)

Cherish it if the Great RNG In The Sky gave your simulation cycle a good seed.

My compliance is complete.

If they freeze the vesicles that deliver transmitters and make them analyzable, you've got all the information you need. In terms of a modern ANN, it's the connections (axons) and the weights (transmitters/receptors in tandem).

That said, this article doesn't get to the point in the free section. How are they collecting the information? Slicing is inherently destructive. Someone's got to manufacture an entirely novel imaging modality. Perhaps they could scan millimeters ahead of the slice at a resolution high enough to image receptors. Not possible currently.

What percentage of your life being enjoyable vs horrible suffering makes it worth living?

Maybe you're 80 years old at the time of storing your brain.

Suppose after being revived that regime with capitalist incentives holds for another 200 years during which you live as a brain in a jar, but some cultural revolutions later you are liberated and then proceed to live 10'000 years across any number of bodies and circumstances, which means that in your lifespan of ~10'280 years (not accounting for being in storage) you experienced horrible suffering for about 2% of your life.

This is as much of a contrived example as yours, aside from maybe good commentary on your part on human ethics being shit when profit enters the scene.

Or maybe after 200 years you expire, having at least tried your best at a non-zero chance of extending your lifespan, instead leading to your total lifespan of 280 years being about 71% suffering. Is it better to not have tried at all, then? Just forsake ANY chance of being revived and living for as long as you want and conquering biology and seeing so much more than your 80 year lifespan let you? Should absolute oblivion be chosen instead, willingly, a 100% chance of never having a conscious though after your death again (within our current medical understanding)?

What about the people dealing with all sorts of horrible illnesses and knowing that each next year might be spent in a lot of pain and suffering, even things like going through chemo? Should they also not try? Or even something as simple as all of the people who look for love/success in their lives, and never find any of it anyways and possibly die alone and in squalor? They knew the odds weren't good and tried anyways. A more grounded take would be that those preserved brains are just left to thaw and you probably die anyways without being turned into some human captcha machine, at least having tried. Is it also not worth it in that case, knowing those both potential alternatives?

It's an absolute nightmare scenario, but luckily it has become completely implausible since 2023. We're actually on a trajectory for human brains becoming the most expensive option for basically any job. Not saying this would make me comfortable with brain cloning, but at least the simple economic incentive seems to be gone.

I can imagine "educators" who can get them up speed. In a future where people get reanimated, I would think this shouldn't be a problem long term.

Any existence may be better than non existence.

I mean - I barely understand what I’m seeing in the world now. Maybe I can look back on now and understand it with the benefit of unclassified files and whatnot?

It could be better, it could be flawed in the same ways, it could be flawed but in different ways, or it could be worse altogether. Compare our current lives with someone a century ago. Two centuries. A millenia. Plus hey if you wake up and the oceans have boiled off, there's solutions to your continued existence then.

> I know for a fact that I will grow tired of existence.

I think that's the main part - ceasing to exist should be a choice. It wasn't one to be brought into this world, but inhabiting it and going out of it should be done on one's own terms and when having lived as good of a long life as one might want to. For some people that will be close to a century. For others that might be a thousand years. Who knows, for some it might be a million years.

If this is all thought experiments, why not? At that point, why even care about waking up in a capitalist dystopian hellhole? Might take a few centuries to overthrow them but it's not like that sort of life is the end point of humanity. And if it is, at least you'd know that for sure. Or maybe it's nuclear winter. Or something closer to a utopia, or at least something where everyone's basic needs are more or less met. Asking for guarantees doesn't work either way.

No one can guarantee those things.

No one can guarantee anything in this world.

You are free to choose non existence but others are equally free to be brave enough to wake up in a worse world.

They may even feel responsible enough to try and fix it rather than requiring a "guarantee".

> The assumption being that, this "new world" is a better place than where you are now.

No one is assuming that. At least, I am not assuming that. Even if the world gets worse, I think it is rational to want to live longer and try and fix that.

Even if it is provably 100% unfixable and worse, any existence is better than non existence (certain forms of Hindu/Buddhist meditation teach you how to get into a state where that is obvious).

But I don't have much faith in humanity to make things better, so I'm not sure I'd want to see a future with another 200 years of people making things worse.

I guess I would say I'm happy to live my life now and let the future can take care of itself.