
Is Death Reversible? - LinuxBender
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-death-reversible/
======
RcouF1uZ4gsC
Neurosurgeons have been using hypothermia (cooling down the body) and
circulatory arrest (stopping the heart) to treat complicated brain aneurysms
since the 1980's. Some of the outcomes have been very good.

[http://ether.stanford.edu/library/neuroanesthesia/SNACC%20Re...](http://ether.stanford.edu/library/neuroanesthesia/SNACC%20Reading%20List%20articles/Spetzler_Aneurysms%20of%20the%20basilar%20artery%20treated.pdf)

When a person is in that state, they have no signs of life - no heartbeat and
no blood to the brain, yet a significant portion of the time, they do well.

From the article, it looks like they have done this for up to 50 minutes. "
The median duration of complete arrest in our series was 11 minutes; the range
was 7 to 53 minutes. This is consistent with reports from other neurological
surgeons who have employed extracorporeal circulation for intracranial
vascular surgery "

~~~
nefitty
I wonder how different the experience of waking up from induced hypothermia is
from, say, a coma. From my understanding, in a coma there is sometimes brain
activity, up to the point that some people end up with Locked-in
syndrome(LIS).

An example is Martin Pistorius, who has vivid memories of his time in his
pseudocoma. That means his sense of self was intact throughout that
experience. That colors what it feels like to "escape" from the coma. In
dreams, we usually have a sense of self, i.e. we "come back" to reality.

There are also people who experience the subjective Near-death experience
(NDE) which sometimes involves bodily detachment, etc. but presumably this NDE
feels like it's occurring to that person's self. When under anaesthesia,
waking up from it is more like waking up from a really deep nap, and from my
experience, is easy to integrate.

Now, when waking up from induced hypothermia, does the brain slowly kick on
different modules? Does the brain snap back to the last thought the person was
having? To use a programming analogy, does the brain save state in a physical
way? Or is it like restarting a computer fresh?

This is such a cool technique. Thank you for sharing info on it.

~~~
pmoriarty
_" An example is Martin Pistorius, who has vivid memories of his time in his
pseudocoma. That means his sense of self was intact throughout that
experience."_

Or they could just be false memories.

~~~
thrownblown
6 years of false memories? (edit: corrected the duration of his LIS)

~~~
asveikau
If 6 years had passed with limited sensory input, and you were pretty sure you
remembered all of it, how would you know if that's true?

How much detail do we really remember of _our own_ last 6 years of fully
awake, conscious existence not spent in such a state?

I feel like once you get to such a length of time you can't trust your own
memory of it. Obviously he could know enough to say "I was conscious during
some point of that time window" but measuring it would be hard.

------
dTal
Definitionally, no. If you can come back, you're just ill.

It's like asking, "can erased data be recovered?" If it can, it's not erased.

~~~
felipemnoa
If we ever invent time travel that will mean that, relatively speaking, we all
live forever. That would also mean that the universe is continually recording
every single instance of time.

If I were a sci-fi author I would write that the reason the universe is
expanding and accelerating is to record all of the new data being created.
Just like a needle writing on a record. To record more data it needs to move
the needle farther away from the center. And the farther away from the center
it moves the faster the needle, relative to the disc, moves.

~~~
irrational
I'd actually like to read that sci-fi story. Its a fun premise.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
You are - for limited values of "read".

------
equalunique
I chose to celebrate Halloween by binging on an HP Lovecraft audiobook, the
Necronomicon. Of the short stories contained within, the second one,
Reanimator, is my recommendation for anyone in search of spooky entertainment
on this topic. I have to warn however that it's set in the 1920s, back when
the N word and eugenics were both considered hip.

------
Razengan
Is copying your brain into another body == bringing you back to life?

The game SOMA explores a lot of the topics being brought up in this
discussion:

[https://www.gog.com/game/soma](https://www.gog.com/game/soma)

~~~
asaph
This is the human version of the philosophical Ship of Theseus[0] question.

[0]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus)

~~~
SteveNuts
My thinking is, my brain is almost entirely what makes me "me". The rest of my
body is just a container. I do understand the analogy though.

~~~
UnFleshedOne
Sense of self is quite possibly an illusion a bunch of separate processes in
the brain use to organize things. If this is true, changing some of those
gradually enough will preserve your sense of self. This is what any experience
does to you in various degrees. (Changing them rapidly might conflict with
previous memory though.) Even remembering something rewrites that memory and
you end up with a slightly different one.

So it is possible that not only your body gets completely replaced many times
over, but your identity and memories and thinking processes get replaced by
imperfect copies.

------
mirimir
> “All right. He’s dead. Go ahead and talk to him.”

[https://www.gregegan.net/DISTRESS/DISTRESS.html](https://www.gregegan.net/DISTRESS/DISTRESS.html)

~~~
alanfalcon
Good ol' Greg Egan. Thanks for sharing.

------
pnutjam
So we're finally finding out where the zombies are going to come from.

~~~
HenryKissinger
Unfortunately (chuckle), not really. The brain sustains permanent damage after
a few minutes without oxygenated blood.

~~~
jagged-chisel
Most zombies appear to have much less than a fully functional brain.

------
primroot
"Evolution equipped our species with powerful defense mechanisms to deal with
this foreknowledge—in particular, psychological suppression and religion."

Religion is a result of evolution?

~~~
vermilingua
Isn't, arguably, all of society a result of evolution?

~~~
buboard
cultures are created and die at a rate much higher than evolutionary
timescales

~~~
vermilingua
But the structures that give rise to cultures are a direct result of the
evolutionary process.

~~~
buboard
yeah but culture doesn't need to wait for natural selection in order to
evolve.

Incidentally this phrase " cultures are a direct result of the evolutionary
process" is a apparently taboo for anthropologists today. I tried to ask such
a question on reddit's askanthropology, about which aspects of genetic
differences contribute to cultural artifacts, like alcoholism differences,
lactose intolerance differences etc. the question was apparently racist and
removed

------
RickJWagner
It is reversible, if the decedent is only _mostly_ dead. I've seen it in film.

------
sudhirj
Whether or not death is reversible, this lends a lot of credence to cryo-
suspension when near death. This proves clearly that an inactive brain reboot
is possible, though to what extent memories or identity will be retained is
unclear.

Even if the brain is restorable with about as much damage as stroke victim
(which is a lot) this is still interesting.

~~~
lisper
> an inactive brain reboot is possible

You don't need to die to demonstrate that. General anesthesia suffices.

(FYI, for the benefit of those who have never experienced it, GA is a very
different subjective experience from sleep. Even in dream-free sleep you wake
up with a subjective sensation of time having passed. Not so with GA. The time
you spend in GA is just completely gone. It feels like you went through a time
warp.)

~~~
Andrew_nenakhov
Exactly, I was under GA once. If felt like sugary vapor, and I started to feel
funny. Then I blinked, just for a second, and when I opened they eyes, I
suddenly felt that I can't focus my eyes and everything is blurry. They told I
was out for 6 hours, but to me it was just a blink.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
I've been under GA several times, the experience differs pretty drastically
actually. When I had my wisdom teeth out it was much like you describe, as
though a period of time had simply been excised from my reality. Other times
the awakening was so slow that it was like I was slowly piecing reality back
together from its base components.

~~~
Andrew_nenakhov
My hospital mates told me that sometimes people go from GA to real sleep.
Probably in that case they do feel some time passing and have difficult
awakenings. Probably that's what happened to you.

------
rafaelvasco
Well. I believe it's totally possible to animate the body to an extent after
death. But the totality of the individual, the consciousness, is gone. No
going back; Either it merges back with the Universe, or goes to heaven, or
fades away to nothing. Whatever you believe, it's gone. As someone famous
(Lavoisier) said though: "Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is
transformed." I guess the "fades away to nothing" is the only impossible
option;

~~~
izzydata
As in the neural pathways of the brain degrade to the point that no longer
resembles human intelligence?

I don't think most people here are going to believe in a spark of
consciousness that breaths life into the brain.

~~~
TaupeRanger
Neural pathways are just pathways. The electrical patterns that reside in the
interactions between neurons are necessary for conscious experience. Once the
patterns are gone, information is lost. It is like taking a snapshot of a
table of moving billiard balls. You only have the position of the balls, but
not the velocity, acceleration, etc. And those are necessary to recreate the
motion. The "motion" in the case of the brain is what creates the person (as
far as anyone currently knows). Having the dead neurons and their dead
connections is not enough.

~~~
Felz
That doesn't seem true? Short-term memory is encoded in transient electrical
patterns, but long term memory definitely is not. You definitely don't lose
your personhood if you suffer an interruption to short term memory, or else
everyone who's ever had a seizure is already dead.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory#Long-
term_memory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory#Long-term_memory)

~~~
TaupeRanger
We actually have no idea how memory is encoded in any way - but that is
irrelevant. When a person has a seizure, the electrical activity continues and
is able to revert back to previous patterns through self correcting/preserving
measures. My comment was referring to a completely dead brain with no activity
whatsoever.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> In my case, it was only as a mature man that I became fully mortal. I had
wasted an entire evening playing an addictive, first-person shooter video
game—running through subterranean halls, flooded corridors, nightmarishly
turning tunnels, and empty plazas under a foreign sun, firing my weapons at
hordes of aliens relentlessly pursuing me.

Strange how the definition of "mature man" has also changed over the ages.

------
tulunsutao
A sci-fi tale in which a man is resurrected using technology:
[https://knowingless.com/2016/08/20/you-wake-up-on-a-
table/](https://knowingless.com/2016/08/20/you-wake-up-on-a-table/)

------
xaedes
The Last Answer - Isaac Asimov [https://highexistence.com/the-last-answer-
short-story/](https://highexistence.com/the-last-answer-short-story/)

Murray Templeton was forty-five years old, in the prime of life, and with all
parts of his body in perfect working order except for certain key portions of
his coronary arteries, but that was enough.

The pain had come suddenly, had mounted to an unbearable peak, and had then
ebbed steadily. He could feel his breath slowing and a kind of gathering peace
washing over him.

There is no pleasure like the absence of pain – immediately after pain. Murray
felt an almost giddy lightness as though he were lifting in the air and
hovering.

He opened his eyes and noted with distant amusement that the others in the
room were still agitated. He had been in the laboratory when the pain had
struck, quite without warning, and when he had staggered, he had heard
surprised outcries from the others before everything vanished into
overwhelming agony.

Now, with the pain gone, the others were still hovering, still anxious, still
gathered about his fallen body –– Which, he suddenly realised, he was looking
down on.

He was down there, sprawled, face contorted. He was up here, at peace and
watching.

He thought: Miracle of miracles! The life-after-life nuts were right.

And although that was a humiliating way for an atheistic physicist to die, he
felt only the mildest surprise, and no alteration of the peace in which he was
immersed.

He thought: There should be some angel – or something – coming for me.

The Earthly scene was fading. Darkness was invading his consciousness and off
in a distance, as a last glimmer of sight, there was a figure of light,
vaguely human in form, and radiating warmth.

Murray thought: What a joke on me. I’m going to Heaven.

Even as he thought that, the light faded, but the warmth remained. There was
no lessening of the peace even though in all the Universe only he remained –
and the Voice.

The Voice said, “I have done this so often and yet I still have the capacity
to be pleased at success.”

It was in Murray’s mind to say something, but he was not conscious of
possessing a mouth, tongue, or vocal chords. Nevertheless, tried to make a
sound. He tried, mouthlessly, to hum words or breathe them or just push them
out by a contraction of – something.

And they came out. He heard his own voice, quite recognisable, and his own
words, infinitely clear.

Murray said, “Is this Heaven?”

The Voice said, “This is no place as you understand place.”

Murray was embarrassed, but the next question had to be asked. “Pardon me if I
sound like a jackass. Are you God?”

Without changing intonation or in any way marring the perfection of the sound,
the Voice managed to sound amused. “It is strange that I am always asked that
in, of course, an infinite number of ways. There is no answer I can give that
you would comprehend. I am – which is all that I can say significantly and you
may cover that with any word or concept you please.”

Murray said, “And what am I? A soul? Or am I only personified existence too?”
He tried not to sound sarcastic, but it seemed to him that he had failed. He
thought then, fleetingly, of adding a ‘Your Grace’ or ‘Holy One’ or something
to counteract the sarcasm, and could not bring himself to do so even though
for the first time in his existence he speculated on the possibility of being
punished for his insolence – or sin? – with Hell, and what that might be like.

The Voice did not sound offended. “You are easy to explain – even to you. You
may call yourself a soul if that pleases you, but what you are is a nexus of
electromagnetic forces, so arranged that all the interconnections and
interrelationships are exactly imitative of those of your brain in your
Universe-existence – down to the smallest detail. Therefore you have your
capacity for thought, your memories, your personality. It still seems to you
that you are you.”

Murray found himself incredulous. “You mean the essence of my brain was
permanent?”

“Not at all. There is nothing about you that is permanent except what I choose
to make so. I formed the nexus. I constructed it while you had physical
existence and adjusted it to the moment when the existence failed.”

The Voice seemed distinctly pleased with itself, and went on after a moment’s
pause. “An intricate but entirely precise construction. I could, of course, do
it for every human being on your world but I am pleased that I do not. There
is pleasure in the selection.”

“You choose very few then?”

“Very few.”

“And what happens to the rest?”

“Oblivion! – Oh, of course, you imagine a Hell.”

Murray would have flushed if he had the capacity to do so. He said, “I do not.
It is spoken of. Still, I would scarcely have thought I was virtuous enough to
have attracted your attention as one of the Elect.”

“Virtuous? – Ah, I see what you mean. It is troublesome to have to force my
thinking small enough to permeate yours. No, I have chosen you for your
capacity for thought, as I choose others, in quadrillions, from all the
intelligent species of the Universe.”

Murray found himself suddenly curious, the habit of a lifetime. He said, “Do
you choose them all yourself or are there others like you?”

For a fleeting moment, Murray thought there was an impatient reaction to that,
but when the Voice came, it was unmoved. “Whether or not there are others is
irrelevant to you. This Universe is mine, and mine alone. It is my invention,
my construction, intended for my purpose alone.”

“And yet with quadrillions of nexi you have formed, you spend time with me? Am
I that important?”

The Voice said, “You are not important at all. I am also with others in a way
which, to your perception, would seem simultaneous.”

“And yet you are one?”

Again amusement. The Voice said, “You seek to trap me into an inconsistency.
If you were an amoeba who could consider individuality only in connection with
single cells and if you were to ask a sperm whale, made up of thirty
quadrillion cells, whether it was one or many, how could the sperm whale
answer in a way that would be comprehensible to the amoeba?”

Murray said dryly, “I’ll think about it. It may become comprehensible.”

“Exactly. That is your function. You will think.”

“To what end? You already know everything, I suppose.”

~~~
xaedes
The Voice said, “Even if I knew everything, I could not know that I know
everything.”

Murray said, “That sounds like a bit of Eastern philosophy – something that
sounds profound precisely because it has no meaning.”

The Voice said, “You have promise. You answer my paradox with a paradox –
except that mine is not a paradox. Consider. I have existed eternally, but
what does that mean? It means I cannot remember having come into existence. If
I could, I would not have existed eternally. If I cannot remember having come
into existence, then there is at least one thing – the nature of my coming
into existence – that I do not know.

“Then, too, although what I know is infinite, it is also true that what there
is to know is infinite, and how can I be sure that both infinities are equal?
The infinity of potential knowledge may be infinitely greater than the
infinity of my actual knowledge. Here is a simple example: If I knew every one
of the even integers, I would know an infinite number of items, and yet I
would still not know a single odd integer.”

Murray said, “But the odd integers can be derived. If you divide every even
integer in the entire infinite series by two, you will get another infinite
series which will contain within it the infinite series of odd integers.”

The Voice said, “You have the idea. I am pleased. It will be your task to find
other such ways, far more difficult ones, from the known to the not-yet-known.
You have your memories. You will remember all the data you have ever collected
or learned, or that you have or will deduce from that data. If necessary, you
will be allowed to learn what additional data you will consider relevant to
the problems you set yourself.”

“Could you not do all that for yourself?”

The Voice said, “I can, but it is more interesting this way. I constructed the
Universe in order to have more facts to deal with. I inserted the uncertainty
principle, entropy, and other randomisation factors to make the whole not
instantly obvious. It has worked well for it has amused me throughout its
entire existence.

“I then allowed complexities that produced first life and then intelligence,
and use it as a source for a research team, not because I need the aid, but
because it would introduce a new random factor. I found I could not predict
the next interesting piece of knowledge gained, where it would come from, by
what means derived.”

Murray said, “Does that ever happen?”

“Certainly. A century doesn’t pass in which some interesting item doesn’t
appear somewhere.”

“Something that you could have thought of yourself, but had not done so yet?”

“Yes.”

Murray said, “Do you actually think there’s a chance of my obliging you in
this manner?”

“In the next century? Virtually none. In the long run, though, your success is
certain, since you will be engaged eternally.”

Murray said, “I will be thinking through eternity? Forever?”

“Yes.”

“To what end?”

“I have told you. To find new knowledge.”

“But beyond that. For what purpose am I to find new knowledge?”

“It was what you did in your Universe-bound life. What was its purpose then?”

Murray said, “To gain new knowledge that only I could gain. To receive the
praise of my fellows. To feel the satisfaction of accomplishment knowing that
I had only a short time allotted me for the purpose. – Now I would gain only
what you could gain yourself if you wished to take a small bit of trouble. You
cannot praise me; you can only be amused. And there is no credit or
satisfaction in accomplishment when I have all eternity to do it in.”

The Voice said, “And you do not find thought and discovery worthwhile in
itself? You do not find it requiring no further purpose?”

“For a finite time, yes. Not for all eternity.”

“I see your point. Nevertheless, you have no choice.”

“You say I am to think. You cannot make me do so.”

The Voice said, “I do not wish to constrain you directly. I will not need to.
Since you can do nothing but think, you will think. You do not know how not to
think.”

“Then I will give myself a goal. I will invent a purpose.”

The Voice said tolerantly, “That you can certainly do.”

“I have already found a purpose.”

“May I know what it is?”

“You know already. I know we are not speaking in the ordinary fashion. You
adjust my nexus is such a way that I believe I hear you and I believe I speak,
but you transfer thoughts to me and from me directly. And when my nexus
changes with my thoughts you are at once aware of them and do not need my
voluntary transmission.”

The Voice said, “You are surprisingly correct. I am pleased. – But it also
pleases me to have you tell me your thoughts voluntarily.”

“Then I will tell you. The purpose of my thinking will be to discover a way to
disrupt this nexus of me that you have created. I do not want to think for no
purpose but to amuse you. I do not want to think forever to amuse you. I do
not want to exist forever to amuse you. All my thinking will be directed
toward ending the nexus. That would amuse me.”

The Voice said, “I have no objection to that. Even concentrated thought on
ending your own existence may, in spite of you, come up with something new and
interesting. And, of course, if you succeed in this suicide attempt you will
have accomplished nothing, for I would instantly reconstruct you and in such a
way as to make your method of suicide impossible. And if you found another and
still more subtle fashion of disrupting yourself, I would reconstruct you with
that possibility eliminated, and so on. It could be an interesting game, but
you will nevertheless exist eternally. It is my will.”

Murray felt a quaver but the words came out with a perfect calm. “Am I in Hell
then, after all? You have implied there is none, but if this were Hell you
would lie to us as part of the game of Hell.”

The Voice said, “In that case, of what use is it to assure you that you are
not in Hell? Nevertheless, I assure you. There is here neither Heaven nor
Hell. There is only myself.”

Murray said, “Consider, then, that my thoughts may be useless to you. If I
come up with nothing useful, will it not be worth your while to – disassemble
me and take no further trouble with me?”

“As a reward? You want Nirvana as the prize of failure and you intend to
assure me failure? There is no bargain there. You will not fail. With all
eternity before you, you cannot avoid having at least one interesting thought,
however you try against it.”

“Then I will create another purpose for myself. I will not try to destroy
myself. I will set as my goal the humiliation of you. I will think of
something you have not only never thought of but never could think of. I will
think of the last answer, beyond which there is no knowledge further.”

The Voice said, “You do not understand the nature of the infinite. There may
be things I have not yet troubled to know. There cannot be anything I cannot
know.”

Murray said thoughtfully, “You cannot know your beginning. You have said so.
Therefore you cannot know your end. Very well, then. That will be my purpose
and that will be the last answer. I will not destroy myself. I will destroy
you – if you do not destroy me first.”

The Voice said, “Ah! You come to that in rather less than average time. I
would have thought it would have taken you longer. There is not one of those I
have with me in this existence of perfect and eternal thought that does not
have the ambition of destroying me. It cannot be done.”

Murray said, “I have all eternity to think of a way of destroying you.”

The Voice said, equably, “Then try to think of it.” And it was gone.

But Murray had his purpose now and was content.

For what could any Entity, conscious of eternal existence, want – but an end?

For what else had the Voice been searching for countless billions of years?
And for what other reason had intelligence been created and certain specimens
salvaged and put to work, but to aid in that great search? And Murray intended
that it would be he, and he alone, who would succeed.

Carefully, and with the thrill of purpose, Murray began to think.

He had plenty of time.

------
amriksohata
There have been studies that shows the mind is working after death

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mind-works-
after-...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/mind-works-after-death-
consciousness-sam-parnia-nyu-langone-a8007101.html)

In Hinduism, the Garuda Purana details this as not the physical mind, but the
detached soul can see the body as it floats above it and watches its relatives
weep. But it can reattach it self in some cases. Some Yogis also talk of being
able to detach their body from their soul using breath alone.

~~~
buboard
that was only because "Death is defined as the point at which the heart no
longer beats, and blood flow to the brain is cut off."

Superstitious beliefs about mind-brain duality are not relevant

