Utilitarianism sometimes supports weird things: killing lone backpackers for their organs, sacrificing all world's happiness to one utility monster, creating zillions of humans living on near-subsistence level to maximize total utility, or killing all but a bunch of them to maximize average utility. Also, it supports gay rights, and has...
Abstract: in this post I propose a protocol for cryonic preservation (with the central idea of using high pressure to prevent water from expanding rather than highly toxic cryoprotectants), which I think has a chance of being non-destructive enough for us to be able to preserve and then resuscitate an...
At what moment are you dead? - Randall Hayes This is pretty much 101, and it leaves out some important considerations, but it had nice animation, and I think it may be a great starting point for introducing people to cryonics for the first time.
PA has a big advantage over object-level ethics: it never suggested things like "every tenth or so number should be considered impure and treated as zero in calculations", while object-level ethics did. The closes thing I can think of in mathematics, where everyone believed X, and then it turned out not X at all, was the idea that it's impossible to take every elementary integral algorithmically or prove that it's non-elementary. But even that was a within-system statement, not meta-statement, and it has an objective truth value. Systems as whole, however, don't necessarily have it. Thus, in ethics either individual humans or the society as whole need a mechanism for discarding ethical systems for good, which isn't that big of an issue for math. And the solution for this problem seems to be meta-ethics.
I agree with the first paragraph of the summary, but as for the second - my point is against turning applause lights for utilitarianism on the grounds of such occurrences, or on any grounds whatsoever. And I also observe that ethics haven't gone as far from Bentham as physics have gone from Newton, which I regard as meta-evidence that the existing models are probably insufficient at best.
Utilitarianism sometimes supports weird things: killing lone backpackers for their organs, sacrificing all world's happiness to one utility monster, creating zillions of humans living on near-subsistence level to maximize total utility, or killing all but a bunch of them to maximize average utility. Also, it supports gay rights, and has been supporting them since 1785, when saying that there's nothing wrong in having gay sex was pretty much in the same category as saying that there's nothing wrong in killing backpackers. This makes one wonder: if despite all the disgust towards them few centuries ago, gay rights have been inside the humanity's coherent extrapolated volition all along, then perhaps our descendants will... (read 716 more words →)
Is this a bit Silicon Valley Culture? Because those guys do the same - they have a software idea and work on it individually or with 1-2 co-founders. Why? Why not start an open source project and invite contributors from Step 1? Why not throw half-made ideas out in the wild and encourage others to work on them to finish them?
For one thing, because open source community isn't terribly likely to embark on a random poster's new project, and you'll end up developing it mostly by yourself anyway. Furthermore, there's this aspect of hacker culture, and especially open source culture, where it's actively anti-evangelistic, and dislikes developing user-friendly things like Ubuntu, preferring Slackware or Gentoo.
That's actually surprising: I thought yeast survives freezing reasonably well, and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC182733/?page=2 seems to confirm that. What was different in your setup so that even the control group had a very low survival rate?
Thanks so much for the detailed review and lots of useful reading!
Sure, I can easily imagine that by mentally substituting steel with jello - at some point you're tear it apart no matter how thick the walls are. However, that substitute also gives me the impression that most shapes we would normally consider for a vessel don't reach the maximum strength possible for the material.
Is that done to convert shear force to tension?
I wonder, how much can be achieved by merely increasing the thickness of the walls (even to such extremes as a small hole in a cubic meter of steel)?
Ah, that's true. I guess going back to normal vitals and motion is good enough for preliminary experiments, but of course once that step is over, it's crucial to start examining the effects of preservation on cognitive features of mammals.
Tardigrada and some insects are in fact known to survive ridiculously harsh conditions, freezing (combined with nearly complete dehydration) included. Thus, it makes sense to take a simple organism that isn't known to survive freezing, and make it survive. I suspect though that if you can prevent tardigrades from dehydrating before freezing, the control group won't survive, which means that some experiments can possibly be done on them too.
I'm sure I'm following why mammals should be less susceptible to this problem, can you elaborate?
Doing this with mammals has a lot of challenges though, which it'd make sense to bypass in initial experiments. The deepest dive (aside from humans in DSVs) is only 3km, which accounts for 30 MPa. I guess it's safe to say that no mammal can withstand 350 MPa with air or any gas in its lungs, so total liquid ventilation is required, which is just as challenging to do with sea mammals as with land mammals. Also, mammals are warm-blooded, and usually experience asystole at abnormally low body temperatures, which are nonetheless far above freezing. So there's... (read more)
Abstract: in this post I propose a protocol for cryonic preservation (with the central idea of using high pressure to prevent water from expanding rather than highly toxic cryoprotectants), which I think has a chance of being non-destructive enough for us to be able to preserve and then resuscitate an organism with modern technologies. In addition, I propose a simplified experimental protocol for a shrimp (or other small model organism (building a large pressure chamber is hard) capable of surviving in very deep and cold waters; shrimp is a nice trade-off between the depth of habitat and the ease of obtaining them on market), which is simple enough to be doable in... (read 1788 more words →)
At what moment are you dead? - Randall Hayes
This is pretty much 101, and it leaves out some important considerations, but it had nice animation, and I think it may be a great starting point for introducing people to cryonics for the first time.
If nothing breaks, we'll be live here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpUuPr5gYxk