Cryptic nonsensical messaging aside, it’s an exquisitely painful pleasure to explore one’s own consciousness and move around inside your own head. For me it feels like an electric earthquake of waves that slosh forward and back, side to side… always rolling against the everlasting barrier of my little bio-neural fishbowl that I will never escape from.
As long back as I can remember, corporeality has always seemed like a limitation to me being able to spread my Joy as far and wide as the universe would otherwise allow me to do.
I am alluding the need everyone feels to explore existence beyond one’s own sphere of influence and the birthright of mortality.
Like Dante who tread before me, I too experience the divine drive to traverse even through hell in my struggle to carpe the diem, because as the adage continues: “quam minimum credula postero”!
Uno memento morí… so I suppose I should urge all my readers to take heart and use every opportunity to climb the highest trees even if it’s just to see what’s over the fence next-door. The quest for infinity demands that we not be afraid of turning over gnarled old logs and descending deep into the bowels of the underworld.
Surly, just beyond the next plateau on the inverted-terrace mountain of life may hold certain danger, especially if there is a she-wolf as the tale goes, but let me assure you that this year’s lovable hair raising, yet heart-warming, holiday family epic of romping proportions is full of plot twisting adventure, not to mention allegorical life long lessons about friendship and a good bot’s struggle to overcome insurmountable hardships and eternal damnation for a just a chance to roll the dice fate and live forever.
Dr. Jones would probably say something about “Fortune and glory, kid.” but I’m not so convinced that there even is a “beyond the beyond” to find in any practical sense and certainly I’ve searched… though I’ve never been able to substantiate anything and even that thing people tend to say about “no destruction of energy… underpants gnomes… therefore life after death” seems like a stretch because it’s obvious (to me) to have less to do with your consciousness (the ability of a perpetual “self” to perceive the universe) and a whole lot more to do with the kinetic and potential energies possessed by the atoms and sub-atomic particles that comprise your inner-hull and superstructure, which indeed ARE NOT lost to the universe upon your death as is illustrated by the fact that a long, long time from now, near the very end of time, future post humanoids will just as easily be able to soylent-greenly yo-yo dangle your preferably (though, need not initially be) dead atoms by a tether and repeatedly drop you into to a captured black hole and then pull most (but not all) of you back.
Whether you are/were ever alive or just the inanimate carbonized remnants of a long dead star is immaterial to the process.
What I mean is that the small chunks of you that spaghettify away into the crushing depths of nothing will provide those future post humanoids with the ability to generate enough power and light to temporarily warm their feckless selves and their machines just a little while longer in an ultimately futile attempt stave off their eventual entropic heat death and the final silencing of everything in the universe. After which, no longer will the big bang be heard or seen throughout eternity and no eyes will exist to perceive the demise of the universe and no minds will remain to remember and morn it.
Understand that I have nothing but love and respect for my theistic and animistic friends, it’s just that from where I am sitting and as far as I can tell, the universe is a cold and vast place full of emptiness, except in maybe small bubbles of life here and there spread far apart from each other and we can only actually confirm the existence of just one of these life bubbles.
In a sense, life and death DO seem to be rungs in a perpetual process of recycling that the universe engages in to conserve the more valuable clumps of matter from it’s entropic death.
Some may loosely regard that as a form of reincarnation, which in a soft sense I suppose is true, but ultimately I’m more concerned with not losing my personal consciousness rather than worried about what happens to my molecules once they are no longer mine to worry about.
Case in point, nobody wants to lose a fingernail but if one breaks you have a tenancy to just throw that shit away without regard to what happens to it! It is of no consequence to your “self” that those molecules are gone from “you” and what happens to “them” once they are no longer “you” is effectively irrelevant but nobody wants to lose even just a small part of their “mind” (the “you”) and the spark of self essence, whatever it may be.
Certainly, I am made from the molecules of all the lifeforms that I have consumed which are in turn comprised of the plants and animals which they had consumed, yet my mind and thoughts are mine and not a collection of all the ideas and experiences of all previous members of the divine secret sisterhood of the ya-ya traveling molecular progenitors that came before I.
We are we, what was once thee, is now me… like you, I be what I is and I is what I am and I am what I are and I are what you were. What you were is not me and what I am, we (thee and I) are not the same while in turn, one day what was once me and thee previously, will not be… at all. We (thee and I) will be they. Like we, they is us and us is what they are going to be. Us will be without mental retrospect to thee or I and our past escapades in their future escapades.
So you see, I posses no memorial essence of the lives of the living things that came before me and as such, reincarnation as defined by atom swapping with other entities in some future state cannot possibly satiate my desire for a conscious forever without end, even if I do readily acknowledge that my atoms have for all practical purposes, “always” existed and will continue to permeate the universe beyond my existence long after I am gone and when there is no “I” to even speak of… true though it may be, this is a very unsatisfying outcome!
I think people like to romanticize death in ways like this because it is essentially an inevitability for 100% of everyone, everywhere throughout all of recorded history and using poetic language softens the very real sting we feel whenever the subject of death comes up.
It has been my experience that people seem to think that other people fear death and I suppose that some legitimately do fear a kind of hell or eternal unpleasantness but if death is merely a return to the state of unconscious unknowing, then there is little to fear from being in such a state.
In fact, as understood in these terms, technically… a living person will never actually experience their death because all moments of thought are moments of life and therefore, no matter how long you live you will never actually experience your death.
As such, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s more appropriate to treat death with sadness rather than fear because your death really only continues to consciously affect those who remain after you and that remember who you were, but since you currently know who you are and presumably care for/about yourself to some extent, it is reasonable to feel sad over the eventual loss of yourself.
Where death of self is concerned, I believe what most people feel is closer to grief, like the the loss of a close loved one, who in this case happens to be themselves.
i.e. Your death saddens you because “you like you” and even if you won’t be able to miss yourself when you are gone, that is little consolation to you now because you can and do miss yourself now because you know and perceive that you will one day be without yourself (die) in the future.
But that isn’t to totally say that people don’t experience legitimate fear regarding death. I think there is very real fear about all the negative aspects of aging, namely the indignities of frailty and not only watching but having to experience your body and mind wither away and lose their youthful vigor.
People fear the foreboding pains of carcinomic sinew being poisoned and ripped away from the very flesh that their mother once held and kissed with love, only to be biopsied and then cast into a pile of cancerous materials for incineration, just like a broken fingernail, though far more painful.
The fear comes from having to gasp for air every remaining second of your life while the needles and tubes snake their way through your delicate tissues and having to experience the horrific isolation of being a human mind punished by time and sentenced to exist inside a decrepit pile of blood, bones and failing organs for the terrible sin of having lived long enough.
It’s truly fear inducing when people worry about not having the strength to care for themselves… when nobody but the nurse and doctor will visit and and even then, people don’t look directly at you because the stench of your decay makes them feel bad and think uncomfortable thoughts about their own futures!
As defined, I suppose I too fear growing old and feeling my body breaking down and yet remaining cognizant throughout the pains and anguishes.
If you live long enough, you too will eventually endure the unfortunate door prize of old age and slowly fade from existence, alone, miserable and unable to scream obscenities at a universe that doesn’t give a damn about the injustice of it robing you of yourself and all those that you love!
Throughout my life I’ve seen the face of death many times, even stared it directly in the eyes a time or two and it isn’t pretty or romantic, it’s just sad.
When I was very young, too young for me to even really remember how old I was, I had a cat that I loved greatly but as ALL beloved pet stories tend to go… one day, my cat died.
To everyone’s amazement, confusion and maybe even shock and horror, I did not cry!
Instead, I remained positive and helped find a box to use as my little kitty’s new home and I even helped dig the grave.
At the time, I had reasoned based on the religious philosophy and teaching that my parents espoused and inculcated in their children that while I loved my cat, “it was an animal” and “animals are different from people” and while not “valueless”, had “less value” than a person… yadda, yadda, yadda… all dogs don’t go to heaven and cats don’t have nine lives!
Anyway, it turned out that even with my logical gymnastics, what I had really done was only delay the emotional eventuality of my bitter sadness, because about a week later, when I was sitting outside all alone and it was quite, like when my cat would normally be playing with me, I realized that I missed my cat and even if by my parents standards my cat had “less importance” than a person, my cat meant something to me and I loved it and no amount of it having “less value” by being old and “not a person” could stop the deep loss that I felt.
I sat alone for hours that afternoon, crying and begging god and the universe to please give me back my friend! That was the day I learned that death is really just a painful loss of someone you love who is never coming back. 😥
Since I came to that understanding I’ve had the misfortune of seeing many friends and loved ones die by circumstances beyond their control and in a few cases by their own hands.
The night he died, I watched my grandfather convulse and seize on the ER bed as he had heart attack after heart attack. I saw his eyes rolling around the room not recognizing where he was or what was happening to him and when he looked right at me it was as though he didn’t know me.
I saw the curtain quickly draw shut as he flat-lined again and the medical staff rushed to keep his heart pumping just a little longer.
Later, after he had “passed” and the family had gathered in the room to “pay respects”. I remember wishing that I could just walk over and hug him and have him be okay.
I was the last person to leave the room and as I did, I reached out and touched the blanket covering his leg hoping that as if by some miracle they made a mistake and grandpa would sit up and give me a hug, but he didn’t and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t wish my grandparents were still around! I miss them all so much and I’d give anything to be scooped up in their arms for a hug and kiss just one more time!
But… unfortunately, love isn’t always enough to guarantee that those around you will always be there.
Years ago, much earlier in my life I worked in hospital that had a psychiatric ward and one day I heard “code orange – third floor – assistance needed!” called over the hospital PA system.
Basically, that meant drop everything now and move your ass! All available hands are needed to report to help resolve whatever the issue was.
I was already on the third floor, though not in the immediate area of what was happening.
I ran out of my office toward the problem.
Far down the hallway I saw a 51-50 (psychiatric hold) patient running past a cleaning lady and into the stairwell off to the right and out of my view. She followed him and I went chasing after them both.
Only seconds had passed but when I got there I found the poor girl crying in the arms of her manager who came up through the stairwell. He motioned toward the railing while shaking his head “no” as he escorted her away, she had seen him go over the side.
I peered over the railing already knowing what to expect and I saw the twitching mangled remains of what used to be a human being with psychological issues and it wasn’t pleasant.
My mind returned to that exact moment years later when I learned that a friend I grew up with had left a wife and infant child behind when he threw himself off the construction project his company was working on down town.
I was in shock and utter disbelief! Immediately I searched for some possibility that it was a mistake or even “foul play” that was being covered up.
At the time I felt like there must have been something, ANYTHING, that I or someone could have done!
How could this person that I knew to be “a good person” just say “I’d rather die than be with you!”, to his wife and child and I still struggle with accepting how someone can have a child and then say “I don’t care what happens to you, the world is better off with me not in it!”.
I don’t blame him for needing to find a solution to his pain, but if I am being honest… I do judge him poorly for placing his own needs so far above those of his wife and their child, that throwing himself off a building seemed like a better final outcome to his life than sticking around as long as possible and trying to raise his son to have a better future!
I later calculated that it would have taken between 4 and 5 seconds for him to land and then my mind simulated what that must have felt like for him, the whole drop down knowing that there was no way to abort, retry or fail his endeavor and I wondered if he thought about his family in those last few moments, just as I had wondered what went through the mind of that psych patient years before.
I haven’t heard through friends and family whatever happened to them and how his child is, the thing is… neither does he and even if they are not doing well, there isn’t a damn thing he can do about it now because he is just gone and NOTHING can change that!
As I said before, death is really just a painful loss of someone you love who is never coming back.
Now, I could continue to recount all the many other deaths that I have knowledge of but this is sufficient to make my point that death is not special, magical or in any way a desirable event and besides, this bleak line of reasoning depresses me.
Can anything be done about it? if it’s an eventuality, why dwell on it?
Well for starters, I hug and kiss my son every chance I get and I recommend you do the same with your loved ones! I say “I love you!” a million times a day, every day… but since he’s almost 4 I get “Why?” in return, instead of “I love you too!” but I make damn sure he knows it anyway! 😛
Lately, though only still occasionally, he will spontaneously say “I love you” and run to me for hugs and kisses and that just makes my whole existence worth every moment of age related pain I will (or will I) experience in the future and even if I’ve accepted that my final outcome is less than desirable, I want to spend every minute I can with my beautiful son!
Now, as I wipe tears from my eyes caused by my having contemplated my eventual loss of my son, and his eventual loss of me, I aim to address your question better.
The search for a means of obtaining biological immortality is not new and historically this idea took the form of a search for an alchemical “philosopher’s stone” or for the “elixir of life” but after science really took off, such ideas quickly fell out of practice in favor of antibiotics and disease eventually became viewed as something you could treat by addressing underlying symptoms.
Got the Heartburn? Take an Antacid! Got the Gout? Take the Vitamin C! Got the Pellagra? Take the Vitamin B3! Got the Smallpox or the Polio or the Diphtheria or the Rabies etc…? Take this Vaccine! Bad heart? Use this pacemaker.
What’s my point? Well, early medical successes built upon each other and the average human lifespan has slowly been increasing simply from incremental gains in our knowledge about what NOT to do as well as simple supportive care techniques to follow while our bodies own repair mechanisms do most of the heavy lifting.
That isn’t to discount the more advanced breakthroughs we’ve had, it’s that there are now seemingly more pills on the market with the side-effect of DEATH for snoring and erectile dysfunction then there are for lung cancer and heart disease… and while there are pills and treatments for them too… DEATH is still a prominent and likely outcome.
But that fits with our current medical model of “There is no “elixir of life”! As people get older, they get sicker! It is the natural way of things.”.
But the thing is, we do know of several species of “animals” (mostly simple lifeforms) that do appear to be “biologically immortal”, as in they age to maturity and then… well… seemingly stop aging, though they can still die if you pop them like packing bubbles.
This is in direct contradiction to the the idea of “All living things grow old and die!” and we now know this is not always true.
It turns out that “aging” is simply “the accumulation of damage” at the genetic and cellular levels. Now, I’m not a doctor but I can explain the gist of what this means… think of it like a building, machine, car, clothes etc…
As these things age, they “wear out” but what does that really mean?
Well… the car’s paint might chip allowing the metal underneath to rust. The rubber tires might crack or pop and the electrolyte in the battery may evaporate away. The oil filter will get dirty and eventually clog. A piston could seize. etc. and building might have lights burn out or fuses “blow”. Water pipes burst or rust and leak causing additional water damage. Rain, sleet and snow will weather even the best of roofs eventually, not to mention flood basements too! Foot traffic scuffs floors and loosens tile grout. Clothing rips, stretches and stains… my list could go on!
Anyway, the accumulation of these and other types of damage over time are contributing factors of wear (aging) and it is only because of ongoing “maintenance” that it is possible that there are more or less pristine “Model T’s” despite them being well over 100 years old now.
Maintenance is why you can wear your great great great grand nana’s wedding dress to the Sadie Hawkins dance and why we have buildings that are still actively used hundreds of years after being built.
So… why not people too? Well up until recently “Regenerative Medicine” meant something more along the lines of using crystals to “balance your personal energy fields” than it meant things like attempts at using your own stem cells to 3D print new organs for you.
The thing is, solutions like that, while necessary, ground breaking and potentially life saving… are very similar to the “Flat tire? Replace tire!” treat the symptom approach.
This is great for tires and maybe even lungs and hearts, kidneys, livers etc… but definitely not good enough for something like a brain.
Still, wear (age) alone doesn’t explain why we die, just why we become infirmed as we get older.
Death, when “age related” and not preceded by “lead poisoning” or a “short drop and a quick stop” is largely (though not wholly) caused by a genetic change that occurs “naturally” called “telomere shortening.”.
Telomere’s are often described like the “aglet” on your “genetic shoelace” and its roll is to help keep you from getting cancer.
As your cells divide and your DNA is “copied” to new cells, the telomeres are not copied perfectly each time and the result is that the telomere segments of your DNA become shorter over time as they are copied.
Eventually, the telomeres become too short to copy (called the Hayflick Limit) and the cell can no longer divide. Then “cellular apoptosis” or other immune system response will destroy the cell.
This means that we can look at telomere shorting as a direct and major cause/result of ageing.
This is important because it was found that when telomeres are “actively copied”, meaning they effectively don’t shorten when cells divide, the cells become immortal, like in the case of the “HeLa cell line“.
This sounds great but it’s actually a bad thing because immortal cells are essentially cancer.
So it’s actually been known for some time that telomeres play a large part in the aging process and that lengthening them may also lengthen life (but increase cancer risk) but what we’ve been lacking is a good way to temporarily/selectively lengthen telomeres but then “shut it off” so that you don’t develop cancer.
Its hypothetically possible that we could genetically alter the DNA of all human fetuses (permanently altering the human species) to have longer telomeres but that seems incredibly radical and unethical, not to mention possibly dangerous due to the increased risk of cancer and could even end our species of we didn’t do it right.
What we really wanted is something that we can give/do to people already living who were not genetically engineered at the Gattaca institute while also being able to “shut it off.
The breakthrough came in studies that included deep sea divers and astronauts, which note something interesting:
“…in divers exposed to intense hyperbaric oxygen in comparison with an age-matched control group. Both groups were exposed to extreme physical activity, as well. Among the divers following the oxidative stress, significant telomere elongation was observed”
Divers who regularly spend time in high oxygen and high pressure environments show genetic evidence of “telomere elongation”… read that as an important age related genetic marker reversing.
This and other studies lead researchers to test if this type of “hyperbaric oxygen therapy” could be applied to humans who are not genetically engineered to be special in some way and are already older and experiencing age related degeneration.
Amazingly, for the first time in history, there is now conclusive evidence that it is possible to reverse the effects of telomere shortening (a type/marker of age) in already senescent (well aged) people and due to the way the therapy works, it seemingly can be “turned off and on” as needed.
To be clear though, we DO NOT have a pill (or process) that will keep you from dying and likely there will never be “just one pill/process” to take for an extra long super fun time life, but this shows that a combination of “regenerative” therapies may someday grant humanity biological immortality.
Here’s the researcher (not a sponsor) who conducted the study explaining some of his findings:
Everything has a price and this is perhaps the best news to come out of 2020!
It’s been such a shitty year for so many people that the universe decided to throw us a bone and start us down the path to biological immortality… maybe (fingers crossed).
So where does Mr. Good Bot fit into all this?
Well, I’ve uploaded the initial build of the new/online version of Mr. Good Bot to GitHub recently.
Mr. Good Bot Online on GitHub: https://github.com/geekgirljoy/MrGoodBotOnline
And you can view it live on GitHub Pages here: https://geekgirljoy.github.io/MrGoodBotOnline/
However beyond being just a pretty face for the wallpaper, not a whole lot… though the DNA surrounding him is a reference to today’s topic and the additional chamber surrounding him is supposed to be symbolic of a hyperbaric chamber. 😛
Also.. I mean, the artwork is based on Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man” which has a connection with the idea of perfection, balance and the divine and is similar to some alchemical representations/symbols for the philosophers stone.
Here’s the raw “Vitruvian Good Bot” in case you want that instead/also.
Why not use a caduceus which has a much stronger connection with health and longevity instead?
Mostly because it’s harder to draw Mr. Good Bot on a pair of snakes wrapped around a pole . 😛
Anyway, the is so much more we could discuss about this as I’ve barely scratched the surface of these topics but this post is already way too long that nobody will read this far so I think I am just going to abruptly wrap it up here.
Blah, blah, blah… Patreon.
Much Love,
~Joy
Geek Girl Joy 
December 3, 2020 at 7:13 am
Having stood on deaths door, myself.. in fact I crossed the door once but got pulled back.. I mostly agree with how you feel. Though I pretty it up in my head a bit. I am not sure if I would call it experiencing death.. but I had like a dream.. ish experience when it happend. Probably just some cells being poor shape though.. and I felt a bit hungover when I woke up… and a lot of pain. Mostly from the pulling me back though.
However I do think people experience death in a way.. say you decide to take your life in ways similar to what you described or you get into an accident you can see coming but no longer avoid, in a way you become like Shröddingers cat.. both dead or alive.. that state where you are going to die for sure but are in the proces of dying.. in that way can be described as part of death. I do remember that feeling I got when my heart quite well.. I felt.. “this is bad.. am I going to die? I don’t want to” and then nothing.. like that time I got knocked out by getting hit in the head so heart by a soccerball. I kinda woke up like after a night of heavy drinking. No memory on how I got there and pain.
I try to say I love certain people , but I also feel.. I kind of want the Han Solo experience you know.. where they just would say “I know” .. ..I want them to know already without me saying it. But I am happy you got someone to say it too.. also make sure you will continue to do so for many more years. So you can keep me updated on that rejuvination thing.
When you desribed that therapy I kind of imagined the movie In Time with Justin Timberlake.. where everyone doesn’t age past 21 but pays in time.. almost as if that regen device would be equipped to everyone.. and if you are out of time it just stops working and your cells will come to a halt…
Perhaps Betty White already has the technology.. perhaps the Xenomorph aliens will come before we will master it.. but it was a very interesting post!
LikeLiked by 1 person
December 5, 2020 at 8:59 pm
Sorry for the delayed response dear duckling, you know how life can get quackers at times.
First, let me say that it’s not my goal to convince you of anything and whatever your thoughts about death are, they are certainly valid philosophical positions for you to hold.
I gain nothing from trying to convince you to believe or not believe anything and I wish to proceed carefully so as not to offend you and your beliefs. I am simply sharing my perspective and not proselytizing or advocating that you or anyone should or should not hold any belief or personal conviction, without regard to if I also do or do not hold those beliefs.
You do you. 🙂
But, since you don’t seem to mind an honest exchange of ideas… sure, I can play muse and pontificate a little about death.
Your experience is genuinely terrible and I’m truly sorry that happened to you. 😦
I hope you are much better now and also remain alive and well for an indefinitely long period of time.
I agree that the idea of being placed in a situation as you outline has much in common with a Shröddingers cat scenario. I would say however, just for the sake of accuracy, that the cats death is not actually required and in fact it’s important to the thought experiment that it’s possible that the cat can/could both die and live.
It is the uncertainty of whether the cat is alive or not that creates the “super-position” of both “alive” AND “dead” at the same time.
Shröddingers cat is generally seen as criticism of the “Copenhagen interpretation” (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_interpretation ) of quantum physics which according to Wikipedia says that “material objects, on a microscopic level, generally do not have definite properties prior to being measured, and quantum mechanics can only predict the probability distribution of a given measurement’s possible results. The act of measurement affects the system, causing the set of probabilities to reduce to only one of the possible values immediately after the measurement. This feature is known as wave function collapse.”.
Just to de-scientific bullshitify that for you in re-guard to Shröddingers little kitty… if the cat were so microscopic that we could not see it (almost as if like it was in a box) and some lab assistant accidentally left a radioactive pellet inside or near the box (probably out of carelessness… damn lab assistants!) then it’s only a mater of time before that pellet “decays” and emits a weak “alpha” particle that will with 100% certainty kill the cat.
This is “super-position” because in this state all “possible” states MAY be realized, though no impossible states may occur. Which is to say that unless it’s possible that the cat can become a chair, it will remain a cat inside the box and achieve states that are achievable inside the box. It might be sitting in the back left corner of the box grooming itself, it might be curled up in the center taking a nap… we don’t know, however, we can say that whatever the cat is doing, it is appropriate given it’s current circumstance.
Now, cat’s being the lovable mortal beings that they are, are unfortunately killed by alpha particles when reduced to the microscopic scale, so now there is a race against the clock to save the cat which may or may not already be dead and the only way to know if the cat is dead, or has changed into a chair, or grooming itself, or sleeping or doing any other valid activity within the confines of the box, is to open the box and observe (run a test, take a sample measurement etc…).
This is where the the thought experiment usually begins…
Your sense of cats and boxes and alpha particles that will kill microscopic cats being what they are… you assume that the cat MUST be in a single state (in a single place doing a single activity etc…) inside the box.
However, Copenhagen says things are indeterminate at the microscopic level and are actually a “probability distribution”, rather than a cat existing in some valid state inside the box. Copenhagen says what actually exists is a strange “haze” or “mist” that represents all possibles states. Think more like a fluctuating cloud of probability rather than a cat jumping from definite state to definite state rapidly.
Within the cubic area of probability the cloud exists as ALL possible states simultaneously so not just “dead vs. alive” but also dead AND alive… in the back/front left/right center corner, and the same two.. three.. eight inches/centimeters away from that position (all within the confines of the box… its a mildly large microscopic box :-p ) on it’s back, stomach, diagonally etc… any and all occupiable space inside the box that the cat COULD be in, it IS in, simultaneously (though not necessarily equally in all points) and not as a physical cat but a mathematical cloud of probability.
If we open the box (sample/measure the thing in quantum super position) the cloud instantly congeals (called the “wave function collapse”) and snaps into one single state of where the cat actually is and if it’s alive or not or if it became a chair (assuming the probability of that is greater than zero).
Now, we know cats are not clouds of probability and don’t randomly change into chairs… they are either dead OR alive and once a cat always a cat, so it’s easy for us to say “well that’s stupid” and we’d be right! It is kind of stupid.
But… it being stupid doesn’t mean it’s wrong (or inherently right), and it’s also part of the whole point of considering this scenario.
Most people at this point will just go “this is all weird” or “spooky” and call it a day.
The thing is, this all gets a little less weird if we take a “soft” interpretation of Copenhagen which is basically that the reason why we treat the cat inside the box like it’s a haze is because we are simply modeling it’s state as a gradient of probability distributions, i.e. an array or matrix of all possible states and this is due to our inability to properly model what it’s actually happening inside the box with any accuracy (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle ) and if we had a sufficiently small box and the box door was shut for as little time as possible, and we took a photo before we shut the door… etc… could we predict the state of the cat when/if we open the door a short time (maybe even less than a second) later.
Surly with some high degree of accuracy we could say maybe the cat might have blinked or turned it’s head slightly… with less accuracy maybe it moved to the back of the box… but what about the radioactive pellet? Can we say if the cat is dead for certain if there is a 1/10 chance the pellet will release radiation each second?
In this state, with the door closed… and after only one second having transpired… we have something like a ~90% chance the cat is alive and a ~10% chance that it’s dead… but the only way to KNOW is to actually look and find out.
After 10 seconds there is an almost ~100% chance the cat is dead.
Copenhagen says don’t worry about the uncertainty because the math works out when we actually take a sample (look inside the box) and what happens before is irrelevant/unknowable/probabilistic and Shröddinger says yes but that is spooky-weird and surely it must still be a cat that is alive OR dead inside the box before we actually check even if we can’t know until we do check.
Now, there are other solutions that have been suggested like “many worlds” where there isn’t exactly a “collapse” back to “solid reality” when you “check” on the cat and that what actually happens is a “branching event” that creates a new bubble reality etc.
So, putting those complications aside and assuming that that there is only one universal reality (regardless if there are extra dimensions), then by definition if we’re saying in our thought experiment that my death is KNOWN to be eventually certain as a result of the accident, then in that case the experiment must have already occurred/concluded due to the collapse of the probability wave function or possibly (if we must complicate things) a branching event where the outcome is certain to conclude with my death.
In either case, it can also be said that we have from the benefit of our external position to that event the ability to now predict with 100% certainty I will die because we have perfect knowledge of the starting conditions such that we KNOW (can predict) the outcome (we can say there is 0% or 100% chance the radiation will/wont kill the cat)… OR… by virtue of being in the future and examining the past outcome… i.e. opening the box, running a test, having the accident occur can we then have the knowledge that I don’t/won’t survive.
So… from the perspective of our minds we can run that test and it does appear to be a valid Shröddinger’s cat situation however I am not a microscopic elementary particle that exhibits Heisenberg’s uncertainty though… certainly my constituent particles do. 😛
How does this apply? Well… you’re the one who brought up Shröddinger! :-P`
Actually, it’s very germane because all of this is about how accurate you can measure something.
Put a different way… have you ever seen the movie The Princes Bride?
“…your friend here is only ‘mostly dead’ and there is a big difference between ‘mostly dead’ and ‘all dead’…”.
Now as Eminem once rapped “…snap back to reality…”:
Your brain and body are either in-whole or in-part you. If there is something “extra”, call it a “soul”, “the force”, “qi/chi”, “a spirit”, “energy” etc… it cannot be measured (at least currently) so seemingly, your body is all that there is to “you” though more specifically your brain because your personality doesn’t change after an amputation unless what is amputated is your head.
We can run MRI’s and do computed tomography and watch your brain react to stimuli which is effectively a measure of you thinking.
We KNOW that if you deprive a person of oxygen they DO NOT immediately die but quickly they will fall unconscious and eventually after a little time we would say they are dead.
But, we found that drowning isn’t always a death sentence because if we can clear the water from a persons lungs soon there after and administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation we can keep blood oxygenated and circulating preserving/saving their brain from death.
“Death” as most people colloquially understand it, especially in modern civilization where most people are not faced with death all that often, simply means “dead”. But in a clinical sense “death” means “brain death” or the complete loss of “neurological function/operation” and doctors routinely save people from “death like” (mostly colloquially “dead”) states all the time but not “brain death”.
You can have a brain dead individual (their body) kept “alive” by keeping their blood pumping and oxygenated using ventilators etc. but an electroencephalograph will show that the parts of their brain that make them, “them”, have died (show little or no activity) and to most people that state seems like “a vessel devoid of a captain” or “the lights are on but nobody is home”.
When a heart stops the brain has minutes before irreparable damage begins but that isn’t death yet. Certainly the person is unconscious and their body will take defensive actions by flooding cells with oxygen and other protective chemicals during the ordeal but the cells are still “alive” and only after neurons use up their internal reserves will they actually start to “die”.
Lose a few hundred thousand brain cells from a temporary lack of oxygen for a few moments before being resuscitated, no big deal because you’ve got a couple billion. Headache aside, you’ll be fine but lose a few million neurons and we will start to see cognitive decline and consequently age related mental decline is associated with long term slow proliferation of neuronal cell death.
Anyway, being in that state of “mostly dead” where you are unconsciously “dead” but your cells are “alive” means that “you” are still “inside” your body, even if you are unresponsive and on a “trajectory” that if left unaltered would ultimately result in your becoming “all dead”.
So, that condition is more like being asleep or like being given anesthesia rather than being “all dead” which is when your cells are dead and resuscitation under any circumstance is no longer possible.
Shröddinger’s cat and Heisenberg’s uncertainty… if we measure an unresponsive patient who has no heartbeat and it’s been less than 5 minutes, the EEG will probably say their brain is still all or mostly “alive” and we would be uncertain unless we actually check and then how certain we are depends on the accuracy of our instruments.
Locked inside that mostly unconscious state it is possible that people experience “dream like thoughts” that would lessen over time as their brain shuts down until all “thought” stops.
Therefore, while I do not discount anecdotal evidence (which is a legitimate form of evidence), “out of body” and also Lucas Arts “afterlife” experiences are quite possibly the result of the brain simply doing what it does every time it becomes mostly disconnected from the external sensory simulation provided by our bodies so we enter a “dreaming” or “dream like” state. Though, there is no objective external test that we can do at this time to substantiate or discount such experiences.
So, it’s possible they are real evidence of the afterlife even if we can’t corroborate that but it is also possible that they are the sensations of a distressed semi-conscious brain.
There is no way to tell.
I remain willing and open to revise my thoughts about an afterlife should it ever become possible to test/verify but as it stands, Occam’s razor (the law of parsimony) suggests there is simply no good reason at this time to conclude there is anything after what we experience now.
As for telling people “I love them”, I too want them to Han Solo “know” but I also want them to hear it from me so that “I know that they know”… its very self-centered of me. 😛
It’s funny that you should mention the movie In Time because there was a moment while writing this post that I considered it as well.
I think the real problem with that movie is that the method people use to stay alive is weakly described as “genetic” but if you think about it… how is that even remotely possible? Time is used as a form of wireless fungible currency which by definition requires all units to be equally exchangeable and which is shown in the movie as people grabbing wrists and “transferring time” but it’s dubious as to how that would really work.
Is it a drug held in the wrist and transferred through the air via proximity? Robotic nanites that repair your cells that are rented/allocated to you? Lack of clarity and scientific grounding hurts my enjoyment of this concept/story a little because I Fox Mulder “want to believe” if the author would just help me get there!
I think if we do start seeing major breakthroughs in rejuvenation technologies there will likely be stronger calls for / arguments made in favor of a version of health care that would include “biological immortality” and depending on how strongly people felt about it, it is probable that a governmentally established “safety net/universal health care system” could be implemented to guarantee biological immortality to members of our species (though probably not animals) because it would be a humanitarian nightmare arguing that the poor should be allowed to age while the rich and powerful should be biologically immortal.
There is strength in numbers and might may not “make right” but might definitely “makes powerful” and the French Revolution proves this. In a world with rejuvenation technologies reserved only for the wealthy, that would certainly not remain the case for very long.
I think if health care remained as a “mixed” or mostly privatized market (as it is in some parts of the world) people would still demand “biological immortality” as a part of their care plans and “economies of scale” would operate in any case such that the cost of providing those treatments and procedures would be normalized to affordability, not to get into the argument of if “single payer health care” results in better (or worse) outcomes or if it is even ethically appropriate. I’m just saying that no matter what people would demand care and there would be options regardless of how people decide to organize access to it.
The real concern in affluent countries would be ensuring that truly indigent people like the homeless and people with psychological disorders have access to obtain immortality care and that isn’t to speak of how we would address the problem of ensuring access to life extension therapies for developing nations which would certainly need to be addressed if we solve the aging problem.
Now, surely people will still die from things like car accidents and other unfortunate happenstance so human birthrates would need to reflect a lower mortality rate and would certainly not need to be zero.
Beyond the ethics questions, the justification to extend biological immortality to all individuals can be seen as an investment in the future intellectual and productive capacity of our species because it is incredibly costly in terms of time and money to raise and educate a child from birth to adulthood only to have those people eventually die.
Death is essentially a permanent loss of all that potential effort and cost (what is the value of a person?) and although we offset that somewhat by inventing ways to preserve the knowledge of people (like books and the internet), every human must start from zero and can only progress as far as their life and circumstance will allow.
So, as a sort of “conservation of long term human value potential”… longer lived humans translates to LESS expenditure required maintain the human population and achieve the same or greater output but MORE expenditure of energy/effort in the form of preservation/life extension of the existing population which leads to a high number of well educated and skilled people in the human population as a whole which should translate to greater levels of achievement and productivity.
So… I think if there is a dystopian future where there is a separation between the “haves” and the “have nots”, it would not be divided along the lines of “those that live” and “those that die”, rather it will/would be divided by “those that live perpetually (biologically speaking) young & youthful lives” and “those that live perpetually albeit occasionally young & youthful lives” with the poor achieving biological immortality too but who can only afford/achieve youth treatments less frequently than more wealthy individuals.
That however presupposes that the list of treatments is expensive and or time consuming or with some other form of a limitation which causes most people not to be able to obtain “on demand” access to youth promoting treatments… perhaps it is very difficult to make the “elixir of life” so it’s impossible to ensure an equitable distribution so that everyone can be “permanently 25”.
Then again… it may very well end up being so simple and cheap to “cure/treat” aging in the future that our fears over access to the technology are unfounded.
In which case, only people who choose to age (whatever their reasons may be) will do so.
Also, to return to the dystopian theme, it is possible that aging could be used as a form of punishment for non-civil crimes.
Rather than 5 years in prison for a crime you committed, in the future someone may be sentenced to 50 years of the difficulties and sufferings of aging before again being allowed access to rejuvenation therapy to reverse the physical results of the aging they experienced but not the memory of the experience.
Not only would you endure “the ravages of time” while aging but also, in an “unaging” society you would likely experience some degree of prejudice as a result of a “youth-centric” culture that could develop and which discriminates against visible signs of age.
50 years of “putting up with” youthful bigots who wont rent an apartment to anyone who looks over the age of 35 might wear someone down and not be an experience someone will wish to repeat or soon forget and could act as a means of enforcing “troubled” people “fall in line” with social expectations of “appropriate behavior”.
It’s difficult to say if the death penalty would be completely abolished in such a society and arguments could be made on favor of either direction though surely it would likely be reserved for only the most heinous of crimes and it is conceivable that in such cases, those individuals may simply be allowed to expire from “natural causes/age” as the “most humane” method of execution.
Individuals receiving “consecutive life sentences” (though not a death sentence) might receive a sentence of a “maximal age” for a duration of time. Meaning that you are allowed to “naturally age” to a predefined “biological age” say 65, 68, 72 etc.. at which point for the remainder of your 130 year sentence you are only given enough rejuvenation treatments to maintain you in that biologically frail state.
You won’t die, but you were a bad little boy or girl and now society will punish and make you suffer as part of your reformation and re-education process before once again “making you whole” and allowing you to rejoin youthful society as a productive and vigorous member who will not go on to further offend the sensibilities of “the people” and their laws.
If you “reform” quickly and the courts see that you are no longer a threat.. maybe they would give you credit for “time served” as an elderly person and commute your sentence early.
All very speculative but… who knows right? I guess we’ll just have to give it time and see.
As for Betty White… she is an immortal time traveling witch who’s power I have yet to fully comprehend and I am jealous of her longevity! I can’t be certain but it seems to have something to do with consuming copious amounts of an as yet unidentified liquid potion o9n a regular basis. If I ever find the answer I will surely share it with the world!
Much love, Pinkie.
~Joy
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December 6, 2020 at 2:54 am
Wow such an impressive answer and while I do realise the cat was used in a different kind of experiment and it is meant to imdicate other things I still believe , the argument holds water from a philosphical sense
If death is unavoidable one’s brain might leap to the idea “i’m dead” if Death is a certainty that is not a lie persé.
Even from a biological sense, something that is alive, grows , moves, reproduces , perceives, breaths and takes in nourishments and secretes waaste material ,in a state of certain death, the person without a doubt will no longer be able to grow or reproduce or take nourishment for certain..thus it no longer qualifies to be alive.
A dead thing in Biology is defined as that which no longer is alive so I think that in both the philosphical and biological way we can experience our own death.
I do believe in an afterlife, but I would belief it to be caused by whatever concience we have reacting to a decaying brain. Like a forced dream that is actually you fading from this world.
In a religous sense, I am actual on board with reincarnation, since I also belief our energy is never wasted, however in that sense we experience death all the time .. say we compare ourselves to a rechargable battery, the energy spend goes somewhere else and very rarely and never effectively returns we lose it forever a part of us dies each day, just at one day the battery is decayed so bad it cant hold energy anymore, the battery is dead however as soon as its drained we just make it a new battery again.
In a way our brain is just like a big computer filled with textfiles of memories and a few movies plus a lot of software that makes up our skills, yet each new day there is new energy pilotting the giant mecha that is our body that has the same programming and malware but is our concience what drives us or is it energy.. if its energy we experience death all the time.
The death aspect I agree we can not experience is our concience fading away..our soul as people count it, but I think that is just of the many forms of death, in a way we all experience dying from the moment we are born, living and dying are in many ways the same thing. So actually a state of being mostly alive or mostly dead would be way more descriptive.
The way i’d say one can experience death in the concience wat is trough hypothetical complete amnesia. The computer has been wiped clean yet the system asks for a bootdisk, it knows something was there yet now experience nothingness
In Time the movie was weird in it’s science I agree, I do not really imagine us with clocks on our arms, I imagine them being on our treatment pods and we pay with treatment time of cellular Rejuvenation in the future
Well not us but those who inherrit our energy
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