The Ends Of Life?

Tech Central Station ^ | July 30, 2002 | Rand Simberg

[NonZeroSum]

A thought-provoking piece...

[LadyDoc]

But nonsense. YOu see, the present day cryonic techniques result in micro crystals in the cell matter, and destroy the internal structure of the cells. They haven't bothered to experiment to see if lower animals can be frozen and revived, because there is no way to do so. Essentially, they are making mummies.

[NonZeroSum]

So your hubris is like theirs. You don't know how to fix it, so no one in the future will be able to do so, either?

And with vitrification, that doesn't occur. You're kind of behind the times.

[beckett]

Cryonics aside, and possibly contrary to the author's intention given the theological subtext I read into it, the porous boundary between life and death is described quite intriguingly in this piece.

Death is not the end.

[NonZeroSum]

I doubt if the author intended that meaning. The argument was a materialistic one.

[JMJ333]

Cryonicists believe, not without some justification, that no one is truly dead until his body is completely beyond recovery and repair. This doesn't occur until a person undergoes "information death," that is, a loss of all the information that constituted the physical and personality characteristics of the deceased. (For example, allowing the body to rot in a coffin for a few days or months, or burning it and scattering the ashes -- which are the currently most-popular methods of treating bodies -- would inevitably result in this.) Anything short of that is not death -- it is just a temporary state of extreme disability until the technology can catch up to repair and revive, as it has (for example) in the simple case of drowning and electrocution victims, who can be salvaged via CPR.

Too bad no one devotes any time determining when your really alive. Of course, we already know that moment begins at conception. They should champion that instead of trying to play God by declaring you not dead until your in the rotted stage. And there is no way I would want their help in doing any of this freaky stuff. I have faith.

[beckett]

The argument was a materialistic one.

By adopting the term "information death" to describe the end of life, the author blurs the boundary between materiality and non-materiality. We are only just beginning to appreciate how truly blurred and porous that boundary is. Among erstwhile hardcore materialists in the physical sciences, at least among the best of them, to say it is blurred and porous no longer elicits the guffaws one might have expected a few decades ago.

[PatrickHenry]

This article reinforces my intention to be interred in a block of lucite, which will become the base of an attractive coffee table in my family's home. Gone, but not forgotten. And some day ...

[narses]

Ping

[Junior]

The popular and conventional view of death is that it's a discrete condition; now you're living -- now you're dead.

Dunno. Wesley was only "mostly dead."

[Aquinasfan]

I wonder if they've figured out how to freeze the soul yet.

[droberts]

Yeah, you make it work in a cubicle for 40 hours a week until it's 65.

[NonZeroSum]

By adopting the term "information death" to describe the end of life, the author blurs the boundary between materiality and non-materiality.

Not at all. The point is that the basis of life is the information that composes it. If that information can be reconstructed, then life can be reanimated, but it still requires a physical matrix on which to do so. The author certainly isn't assuming a soul.

[Consort]

Death is thus not an absolute, but a relative state.

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To borrow someone's answer: "That leaves only one absolute certainty in life: Taxes."

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The reality is that life and death are not binary states -- from one to the other is a gradual transition.

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That gradual transition is called.....a lifetime. Death is an immutable truth in the universe and dead people are living proof of it.

[beckett]

The point is that the basis of life is the information that composes it.

I see. You've held this "information" in your hand, have you? And did you then hand it off to someone else?

Information by definition is non-material. Even Pinker and the modular cognitive scientists who put such great stock in algorithmic brain structures admit as much. It is a basic error to confuse information with its material carrier.

In GEB, Hofstadter talks about enzymes which "create new information by blindly (emphasis mine) shunting symbols in [DNA] strands. An enzyme, like a rule of inference in a formal system, blindly (emphasis mine) shunts symbols in strands without regard to any meaning which may lurk in those symbols. So there is a curious mixture of levels here. On the one hand, strands are acted upon, and therefore play the role of data; on the other hand, they also dictate the actions which are to be performed on the data, and therefore play the role of programs." (Gödel, Escher, Bach p 513) This curious self-reference, part of Hofstadter's theory of strange loops in both molecular biology and consciousness, constitutes a deep mystery.

Chaos theory, as it probes nature's norm --- nonlinearities --- is chipping away at the processes Hofstadter called strange "blind" loops, and finding Mandelbrot's order underneath.

I repeat my original claim. The boundary between material, linearly reducible phenomena and the non-materiality on the other side chaotic noise is blurring. The fun has just begun.

[NonZeroSum]

Perhaps, but until we can see (and experience) life absent of a physical substrate, information will remain a necessary, but not sufficient condition.

[LadyDoc]

like a liberal, you use ad hominem attacks rather than to answer my question.

Brain tissue deteriorates within 4 minutes of death due to the accumulation of lactic acid and other waste products. So essentially these people are mummies.

Of course, if you want to clone grandpa from his testicular tissue and sperm, fine. But this will be the twin of grandpa, not grandpa.

Or are you proposing that we kill people prematurely by freezing their brain before they die?

[Aquinasfan]

Yeah, you make it work in a cubicle for 40 hours a week until it's 65.

LOL. I actually like the cube I'm in now because I like my job. OTOH, if you don't like your job, it's hell.

Read a funny cartoon in Groenig's "Work is Hell" the other day. Two rabbits are talking to each other over the cube wall.

First rabbit: "I don't know how much longer I can last in this place."

Second rabbit: "I don't know how much longer you can last in this place either."

[Aquinasfan]

Information by definition is non-material.

And the word itself comes from Aristotelian/Thomistic philosophy. The process of acquiring knowledge is the process of in-forming, of adequating the form of the knower and thing known.

[NonZeroSum]

The answer to your question is in the article. It begs the question of "when you die."