Ask A Genius 789: A Frozen Head
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2022/09/06
[Recording Start]
Rick Rosner: It’s day eight of the LA heat wave where we’ve had temperatures in the San Fernando Valley of more than 43 degrees probably for the past eight days, we got two more days to go until it temperatures drop below, high temperatures drop below I guess 40 maybe. So it’s been miserable. I tweeted it’s a good day to be Ted Williams’ head. Are you familiar with Ted Williams?
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: I think so.
Rosner: One of the greatest baseball players of all time and also a lunatic who had his head Frozen when he died. So you could do worse right now than to have your head at like 30 degrees above absolute zero. But it made me wonder if any of the information in Ted Williams’ head survived. His head didn’t get treated that well. There were delays; his heirs fought his last wishes in court. I think his head remained frozen for most of this but who knows. We should talk about what kind of resurrection would be possible for somebody who gets their body or head frozen. It’s much cheaper to get your head frozen than your whole body and it makes sense.
So thing one is I’m guessing that it’s not reasonable to think that you’re body can be resurrected after having died and been frozen, not frozen but vitrified. I keep saying your body frozen but it’s not really freezing, it’s vitrification; it’s turning your body to low temperature glass. Glass doesn’t have crystals, you don’t want crystals. Crystals are like knives slicing your corpse at a microscopic level to ribbons, puncturing all your cells. So you want to be turned to glass but even if you do this and even if you do it well, I think it’s more likely, if you’re going to be resurrected, you’ll be resurrected by having your brain scanned and replicated than by having your brain made funk, made so it works again. That just seems super unlikely. I think it’s more likely that they pull the information out of it and use the information to build you again. So that’s thing one.
Maybe the other systems in your body, your other organs are resurrect-able. I think the brain is much tougher to jump start after thawing out. It seems like your brain gets shut down and then even if you make it back from a coma you’ve got pretty big deficits but I might be confusing shit.
Jacobsen: This raises questions of personal identity in the self. So let’s assume that the self is a non-virtual and natural construct. Let’s say you replicate your consciousness 100% and you have one of you and you have another one of you and those two cells go on divergent paths. From the next moment onward those cells have begun to accumulate different experiences and so they more and more become less what you consider you at that moment.
Rosner: So if you look at it, that’s like the Star Trek transporter fuck up problem. The transporter works but you’re destroyed on one end and you’re replicated on the other end. So it’s only one of you.
Jacobsen: Was it the basis of an episode where number two was replicated a bunch of times?
Rosner: I don’t know because I don’t watch Star Treks because it annoys me, it’s not a dirty future enough. Anyway, so there’s a pretty famous science fiction story about somebody who doesn’t get destroyed on the one end. The person gets transported but still is alive at the origin, so now there are two of them and somebody has to tell one of them that well they need to be killed because you just can’t have two of you running around. If you think about it, if somebody comes to you one minute after the transporter fuck up and says “Sorry, I have to kill you. Your other person will survive” if you think about it, if you’re in that Star Trek world you’re going to be like “Okay,” because all you’re losing is the one minute. You’re still you someplace else and it’s no big deal. It feels like a big deal because you’re being killed but if you think about it, the transporter rep should explain to you you’re only losing this conversation with me, there’s still you someplace else. Then you say, “Yeah but you’re killing me” And then the transporter rep says, “Just fucking deal with it. We’ve been talking for 90 seconds now. The longer you talk to me, the more experience you’re going to have to feel bad about losing, but it’s still only going to be two minutes.” And then the guy should just kill you because no more talking.
So anyway, it’s not a tragedy to kill one of you if two of you have been made and it’s still not even a tragedy if you live a week, if there are two of you, the one of you says “I want to talk to a lawyer, a Star Trek lawyer” and said “Look there’s a fuck up. Now there are two of me, I don’t want to be killed,” and the Star Trek lawyer like takes a couple days and maybe there’s some emergency legal session and the court says “Sorry, it’s the policy” The whole case is taken five days, so you’re still only losing the five days of experience that you’ve had and your other you just goes on. So, it’s not that big deal. It’s the divergent experience that each of you live for 30 years and losing that 30 years of experience, that’s the sad part. That’s thing one.
Thing two is, we don’t replicate our experience. We don’t carry ourselves forward 100% from day to day. Our brain’s bad at holding on to every single thing. So we forget shit. It would be great if we could be replicated with 100% fidelity but less than that level of fidelity would be okay with us too. We are fine with the kind of crappy fidelity that we have where we remember most of the stuff we think we need to remember and we’re okay with forgetting the stuff we forget. We evolved to be this way; we’re okay with it even though in some ways we’re short of great fidelity. All right, comments.
Jacobsen: In some sense, nature has solved this problem a long time ago. I mean how significantly different is one brain to another. I don’t know how different sort of a prime age brain is one from another on average in terms of the functionality. So in a lot of ways nature provides a little bit of variation among everyone.
Rosner: So, I go to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned every three months and the TV has the screen saver on which is if Apple or Google, but it’s just video. Sometimes it’s a shot slowly something of you’re going over Dubai and you’re approaching the Burj Khalifa and then it switches to sea lions and then it switches to some other city and then it switches to a school of fish that the camera is swimming through and watching these fish it’s like how different can their individual narratives be from each other. They’re fucking fish in a school of fish swimming around together. I can’t imagine that their consciousnesses are very much different from each other. Human consciousnesses seem a lot different from each other because we have individual identities and names and histories of the people we’ve known and loved, hated, the things we’ve done.
You look at chimpanzees, they seem like they’ve had different experiences compared to fish. At the same time we probably have roughly the same amount of genetic instructions that build our brains as compared to the genetic instructions that build a fish brain. So, I don’t know. It’s a similar question as to where the information is and what the information is. Is most of the information in our brains interchangeable with other humans? Every human has the knowledge of how space works; three-dimensional space. Everybody is able to walk, move through, do all the shit they do, which we all do in three-dimensional space. That data set, not just data but whatever the experience and knowledge, that seems like that would be a big app and we all share that app. So, is it different in everybody?
Say, 100 years from now you can buy the resurrection package where we’re going to replicate you and you can live in virtual space or you can build a brain so you can have some kind of body and walk around the real world or you can go as perfect a replication as we can do or you can go for the cheap package where we do a pretty full replication of your last 10 years but we do a crap replication of you in high school. We mostly replace your high school memories, we take a few but we’ve got like a hundred different high school memory packages and we just fit a few of your high school memories into the generic set of high school memories. Would that really be that big a loss? Would losing a bunch of seldom access to memories be that big a loss?
It’s the same kind of general question as that you have to ask when where the information is in your brain, whether brains are replicatable. We’ve decided in our discussions that dendrites are a huge element of your changing consciousness, that you can have thoughts, you can remember those thoughts and you’re changing over time probably because dendrites are growing anew or forming new connections or strengthening connections weakening other connections; that’s a fairly durable brain personalized brain architecture. But we know that if your brain goes without oxygen for five minutes, you can’t get it back and we don’t know why, maybe brain scientists know why but are the information still there? Is the information really at the dendrite level? Is it just the dendrites? Is it at the junctions of the dendrites with the synapses and is that what gets lost when your brain goes without oxygen?
Anyway, is any of that replicatable once your brain is turned to low temperature glass? Is the layer of individuality really where most of our information is or are the underlying apps that could be generic? They’re not exactly generic because our experience of 3D space is based on personal experience but it seems like you could switch it out with anybody else’s, could you? Anyway, there are all these questions about where the information is and whether it can be surmised in a preserved brain. I guess that’s it for me talking.
[Recording End]
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