this episode is brought to you by skillshare benjamin franklin once wrote in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes and maybe he was wrong about that so today we'll be looking at resurrection restoration revivification and various philosophical and technological approaches to these including some concepts like quantum reincarnation and some thought experiments like roko's basilisk a type of a causal event that mimics time travel by threatening to resurrect people to torture them resurrection is the restoration of life to those who have perished and it is one half of the solution to the immortality or radical life extension problem for any machine or system part of keeping a body or machine alive is keeping it in good maintenance reversing or hardening it against decay and the other part is fixing it when it undergoes catastrophic breakdown or in this case when someone dies after all life extension doesn't protect you from somehow getting your darwin award the first thing we have to do in order to discuss resurrection is to define when someone is dead that's no easy task and it's in large part because we often move the goal post death is a bit of a gray area but since life after death and resurrection are traditionally the sole domain of the divine not doctors and scientists part of our problem is that talking about resurrecting folks through technology can be offensive so when someone is dead and we bring them back we tend to use terms like revive or resuscitate and essentially claim they were not dead at all one can make that argument of course but it is likely to be a definition doctors are going to need to increasingly stretch in decades to come as we get better at medicine we cannot use any definition that revolves around human intervention as in to say someone will be dead if we did not give them cpr as that works no better than if we said someone who was bleeding to death was already dead unless we applied a tourniquet we know someone is clearly not dead if their heart stops because not only can we often restart them we can outright repair or replace it either by transplant or some machine that does the job a man with a cybernetic heart is no more dead than a man with a pacemaker or transplant heart even if that hurt does not actually beat so we have gotten away from pulse or breath as measures of vitality and some folks suggest brain death but this seems destined to be an equally movable goal post indeed prior to modern science sleep was often regarded as a daily form of quasi-death i don't think you could say that death was a state at which a person cannot be revived by any known means as that's not a strong foundation for definition but to be honest this is pretty much how we define it currently and thus if resurrection is specifically the reversal of death it would be a fairly useless term of course death might be rather hard to define since we have to do it in terms of life and we still do not have a very clear definition of what life is either so for today we will be looking at ways in which we can bring folks back from what we would currently tend to consider irrevocably dead and let philosophers and theologians worry about the specific definition not that we can entirely escape the issue today either as an example if i resurrect someone by taking a recording of their brain states and running them on a computer i could say i resurrected them and some of the more found a way to repair their body afterward and got them breathing again possibly without brain damage or being able to repair it from the same recording then we have apparently resurrected someone twice now and they could either both or neither be the original person or two separate people and that's a lot more confusing and hard to find when you have two of them sitting there in a classic resurrection case like lazarus this is done by divine intervention so you presumably have an expert authority to turn to and ask if you're in doubt if this is the original person someone new or some demon or swordless abomination when we do it through technology it's a little hard to speak with philosophic certainty on the matter our real focus today is discuss how to bring people back from the dead indefinitely and from nearly anything and that is going to require a lot of contemplation of what we even mean by being alive or surviving indeed we have to contemplate survival in the context of preservation of identity and memory and what that even means not just how we keep our heart pumping or neurons firing there's also the question of having one continuous stream of consciousness like in the star trek transport or paradox it is easy enough to imagine resurrecting someone from a stab wound or gunshot that damaged a vital organ or caused them to run out of blood indeed this is well inside the realm of what we would already tend to consider me or medical revival it is also easy to imagine keeping someone alive if the injury were to the brain not their heart or some other organ so too i mentioned running out of blood life slowly draining from someone and that's an analogy i've heard years describe various types of mental wasting illnesses like dementia or senility and that the mind is dripping away even when the body remains okay and few of us would argue that a brain dead body is still alive if we were keeping the heart pumping and lungs breathing alternatively a person who lived with no heartbeat is easy enough to imagine nowadays even though we would have deemed such a creature a nightmare like a vampire or a zombie in pastimes of course a zombie is usually portrayed as not much short of brain dead probably why they like munching on brains but it's a term i've heard used when discussing folks who were essentially living life in a haze and that arguably fits someone who keeps losing their memory is to make room for more of them this is a problem we often contemplate as an issue with live extension how we extend the capacity of one's memories to avoid the limits of a classical human brain with fixed storage and less than ideal archiving and recall options keeping folks memories is obviously pretty important to restoring their existence in brandon sanderson's novel warbreaker we have a civilization where very occasionally folks are brought back to life with no memory and they are called the returned but remember nothing of their past life making it rather debatable if that person has actually been resurrected though in the context of the novel it is apparently the direct action of a higher power and many folks worship they returned as gods so to them at least it is a secondary issue the returned have souls and the implications that their identity and personality follow their soul rather than their memory is also a good reminder that while nowadays we tend to view memory and experience in the form of data as a means for determining or continuing the identity of an individual it is not necessarily the best as an example if i get amnesia and forget an event like my wedding and someone else watches that event none of us debates who the groom was in that event or who it happened to which is handy since like mini grooms my own recollection of the event is probably a lot hazier than the folks who saw the video but that event even if i'd forgotten it due to amnesia doesn't necessarily affect the continuous stream of existence and consciousness from being alive it seems a simple and obvious example but it's a bit cloudier when we contemplate ideas like someone digitally storing their memory and transferring it to a clone or android body we would normally say that the new body was still them or close enough but we're also not normally assuming a case of theft like stealing someone's memories and leaving them an amnesiac while transferring those memories into a robot or clone in that case leaves us with a question of who is now the original person or if the transfer was only partial in one or both cases this matters a lot for resurrection technology as we need to be clear on what the objective is to discuss the usable technologies after all if we just meant biological as identified only by dna we can clone someone indefinitely with the same dna and achieve continuity of identity that way without continuity of consciousness given that dna mutates so that cells in different parts of your body have slightly different dna from each other or from when you were born we could probably do a better job with dna continuity through artificial means than natural ones anyway as we can store it digitally and print it too or find other lossless formats cloning someone is one option for resurrection but it's not a very complete one a basic clone is merely a baby who possesses your dna folks say that having children is a pathway to immortality and so a baby with 100 of your dna is presumably even more path to immortality than one possessing a random 50 selection of it and an erroneous one of that presumably this also qualifies a type of resurrection and a popular one in science fiction even when it is assumed no memories pass via cloning in frank corporate's dune where they have genetic memory this means of resurrection and serial life span is the principle method of life extension of the genetic wizards of the bene tilaksu and how one character duncan idaho is repeatedly restored to life in later novels but even without a memory transfer we tend to assume a clone would be very similar to the original person we cannot actually say how true that assumption is yet since we don't clone humans but twin studies would offer a clue that said we have very few cases where identical twins are separate at birth where we can document how much their dna really mattered for the development of their personality to usefully speculate how much a clone would resemble its progenitor in anything but appearance and even then there are plenty of factors in the growth of their clone that could affect its appearance we can consider this a type of resurrection if not ideal and we shouldn't focus on the assumption memory needs to pass on directly to qualify again an amnesiac is usually considered the same person and some belief systems that incorporate reincarnation for instance assume identity passes from body to body even though memory does not nor do we assume you are not you because your memory of your existence is imperfect it is very likely that in centuries to come possibly even within a decade or so cameras bandwidth memory and power will all become cheap and portable enough that folks will routinely record every moment of their existence or even just fairly large chunks of it a clone watching that recording might be very like you and indeed might more clearly remember major life events than you or i do we really do not remember our past in much detail or with much accuracy we will obviously be discussing ways to move memory on today but i just want to emphasize that while doubtless our own personalities are heavily formed by our experiences we probably do not want to assume our memory alone is the center and sole aspect of identity and continuity or restoration it is very likely that inside the next century or so medical science will get so good that we will be able to restore folks who are thoroughly dead by modern standards hours after they died or resurrect people who were frozen after death for centuries there are limitations this we will get to in a bit and one of those restoring damaged memory which is why we are focusing on whether memory is really crucial to our identity again it seems like it should be a component of our identity but maybe not the entirety of it as one more example if it turned out folks could only keep a couple centuries worth of memories in their heads then if science lets us keep the body constantly replenished someone might live thousands of years but only remember the last century or two or maybe the last thousand but the most recent century best and the most recent decade better if memories getting replaced with something more like a half-life rather than a recording that overwrote the oldest memory with the news is this the same person in many ways yes and this notion of identity that of continuity is central to john locke's philosophy of identity for those who don't know john locke was a famous british philosopher in the 17th century and his political writings were one of the biggest influences on the american founding fathers however his writing on the topic of personal identity interests us today as one way to think of resurrection and to gauge a method's level of success at achieving it is to ask if the personal identity of the individual being resurrected was maintained which raises the equally tricky question of what identity is especially the identity of a person we have many definitions or explanations for that but lox is probably the most familiar for modern speculations on the topic lock did not feel identity was founded on the physical substance or sore but unconsciousness or memory and we have already discussed some of the problems with this approach the two big ones are forced that you can make an imperfect copy of someone and claim they were a continuation of the original and point out that the original was constantly undergoing change including loss or distortion of memory indeed your copy may be a cleaner copy than the nominal original as if i make two copies of me both identical with memories and freeze one for 20 years the one that experienced those 20 years is a much worse copy of me than the frozen one seemed as if i copied a sheet of paper twice set one inside safe box for decades while making you appeared serial copies of the other war memory alone how he judged identity a clone of someone complete with their memories made one minute after they signed their will and kept on ice should have a cleaner claims their property than that person does if they live for some decades indeed that clone would have a legitimate claim to nullify any wills made after its creation and second that personal identity gets rather dubious if i make two simultaneous versions of someone who are sane and who are demonstrably that same original person either their memories or personality aren't perfect matches i don't care what philosophy says i'm still me if i forget a whole year of my life any definition that says otherwise is simply wrong and the same if i undergo a significant personality change of course we often think of such events as rebirths or new lives and while we say that in a metaphorical context these days it doesn't mean it isn't valid either after all everything to do with identity is pretty metaphorical and metaphysical we have three major reasons why all this matters in our conversation today first if resurrection is the restoration of a person it matters a lot how we define what a person is and what specific things need restoring to achieve that continuity of the person second a lot of the techniques will not produce either a perfect copy or a unique one so a mouse a lot of either of those are necessary for determining if the resurrection was successful are you still you and you once more if you are missing a memory inside a cloned body inside a robot entirely digital accidentally have some of someone else's memories too or he made two of you after all a resurrection is arguably twice as successful if it accidentally made two copies third we need to consider a given method in contemplating all more duties or rights with the resurrected person and this will lead us into discussing roku's basilisk vocals basilisk is an a causal thought experiment an example of a method by which a person can influence the past before they existed without a time machine that's principally what it's about but it has taken on more discussion and thoughts since then how can an entity influence the past before it ever exists the usual notion is that a super intelligent machine can develop the technology to restore personal life and thus he can make a copy of anyone and torture to death restore it do it again and again again this is already a pretty horrifying potential application of resurrection technologies but the a causal concept here is that the machine need not be a vicious sadist to have a motive to do this although it doesn't hurt if we accept the premise that such a machine's rise is inevitable then anyone who attempts to prevent that rise could be discouraged from that by reasoning that such a machine could restore them to life much like freezing people which we discussed earlier this year one way to get the technology to restore people when you don't have it yet is to develop the technology to wait until you do or to free someone this goes the other direction and assumes at some point in the future the technology to restore people will be so good we won't need a well-preserved frozen brain to work from now roku's basilisk argues that such a machine has a reason to torture resurrected copies of people in the future in order to influence people existing today to assist in its eventual creation or at least not to interfere with them there are a lot of reasons why this is nonsense but that's not really the main point as a thought experiment it works just fine in establishing a way in which you could influence the past prior to your existence without time travel thought experiments don't actually have to be particularly probable to be valid for contemplation though it is a bit of a stretch since you could also argue parents would rather have a child who could take care of them in their old age rather than dump them in the worst out of care facilities they could find and thus have a murder to treat their child well and bring about their existence as a prosperous and ethical entity so a super-intelligent machine can resurrect the dead as a reward for good behavior or to punish bad behavior this also leads the notion that in a distant future everyone will be resurrected by sufficiently advanced technology the notion being that you can reassemble any broken object by tracking its pieces backward in time by calculation so we could open up some historical figures grave and raise them from the dead by examining their skull centuries later this might take a lot of calculation but hey computers double in power every couple years so eventually we would be able to do that right wrong superintelligent machines will doubtless be capable of many wonders and terrors including resurrecting the recently dead or sustaining life for a time longer than we enjoy now but it is not possible to perfectly reassemble something centuries gone past by back calculating where all the atoms wore it is just not possible to create a computer big enough to calculate atomic trajectories of an entire planet back centuries like that even ignoring quantum uncertainty and its apparent randomness which we'll get to in a bit and remember this is me saying that a computer that big is impossible and we have casually discussed turning the entire solar systems into computers before or whole galaxies so we're not just being lazy about how big we can scale things up in the future you die and get buried and something comes and eats your brain exhaling and excreting bits of it which other things will further consume absorb and scatter cremating someone ends any chance of putting them back together again within minutes of that act no matter how much computation you throw at it decay begins in minutes but decay is a lot different than random motions of incineration or material is being carried off as food so a regular burial can probably permit a solid restoration of an individual for many days and more preservative acts like cryogenics extend that time frame out a lot further this is why it matters how much we care about how perfect that restoration needs to be because if someone puts a bullet through someone's brain it is probably possible to back calculate where a lot of the bits and pieces were and we probably do not need atomic precision as neurons are much bigger than atoms in the same way cities are bigger than bricks with decent enough preservation though it only requires nanotechnology to get in and repair the damage and sufficient computing and detection gear to assess and calculate the repairs needed this is technology i would expect to be developed inside the next century or so we probably have a lot of margin for error for recreating someone given that a perfect copy of someone can only ever be of a single instant anyway and not even that given that signals propagate your brain much slower than light travels which is still not instantaneous meaning the various neurons in your brain have already changed their state before another neuron receives a signal from them and this instantly does not defeat roku's basilisk in and of itself an ethical person can be swayed by what is done to another person so while we may not need to be worried about what some monstrous super ai might do to us personally in the future via resurrection it could threaten to torture or offer to reward other people besides us and achieve the same level of threat but there are plenty of other decent arguments against this thought problem of course that's only in the present future folks are likely have plenty of options for storing or preserving their minds such as mind uploading or digital archiving and even nowadays it's somewhat possible by freezing i personally can't really avoid the warrior what a roko's basilisk ai might do to me because i would like my mind extended indefinitely and would like to be frozen if i died tomorrow which means some future benevolent or malevolent super ai does have a threat to dangle over my head and probably would to most folks alive now and in the future are prior to its hypothetical existence we can also posit technologies that get around the whole issue time travel or observations of previous times being the most obvious again though we also have that question of how close is close enough given that our brains change from moment to moment as do all bodies there are countless versions of you that wore from the moment you were born to the day you die and the moving of a single atom to a single different place so even a million of them should generally have an effect far tinier than the changes brought about by every single thing in your life you could even recognize as being an event even just whether or not there were five pieces or six pieces of cereal on your spoon for the seventh bite you took this morning and this brings in the whole concept of multiverses of course since the mini world's interpretation of quantum mechanics holds that there are two distinct universes for any given event so one where you ate five pieces and one with six indeed it argues there is a separate universe for the one where you ate five and another where you also ate five but did so a microsecond later or were you ate five but a single atom of uranium decayed in the earth's core now that did so a thousand years from now in another universe i don't think we could have any sane definition of the word year that didn't include all those versions as the same person this offers a different version of identity or individuality influenced by memories but not reliance on them which is that a person is fundamentally their personality or behavior and how they respond to things of course that is not limited to just the immediate moment that there are virtually infinite number of minor variations of you that are basically still you two atoms rearranged in your pinky finger cannot possibly be considered a cause for contemplation of separate identities but even at war there should be an infinite number of times various atoms arrange into a perfect copy of you in a universe that is infinite in space and time this is quantum resurrection and it relies on no technology or conscious effort by some person or agency in a big enough sample size any event that can happen will happen and a bigger one will happen again whether the sample is very large in size like rolling a couple million dice or large in recurrence like rolling a cup of dice a million times the universe is a very big place especially if we mean multiverses or beyond the observable universe see our episode on parallel universes and alternate realities for a thorough discussion of that and again we don't need a perfect copy we do not need that one in 10 to 10 trillion chance that atoms should have aligned perfectly as they are in you now or will be in a moment or next year just close enough to be you again but even if we did need that level of perfect replication in an infinite universe it will happen and will happen an infinite number of times too see our infinite and probability issues episode for some examples of exactly how crazy this sort of thing can get that close enough really does matter too because we mostly want to resurrect other people to interact with them making the definition of personality-based prints beyond behavior more pertinent i can't resurrect john locke or benjamin franklin to ask them their views on things because they are too long dead for the computer to back calculate their atoms but we could only guess the simulation authenticity by comparing their behavior to record behavior of theirs and reaction to historical events we could probably do a decent job at making something close enough to fool others and we have more of a court history on most folks living nowadays than on them all those photos all those posts and tweets all those internet sources databases of purchases from online stores etc probably make a very potent forensic tool for recreating someone even if you lack a copy of their brain in a decent state of preservation it is strange to think of it but even without bringing multiverses and eternity into play there is a good chance you will be back again one day and we bring multiverses or simulated realities into play then you will be back again one day and you already have been before and we've had this conversation before you and i and we'll have it again and again and again we'll get to the schedule in just a moment but first i want to note that this is the fifth anniversary of when we switched over to doing weekly episodes for the show and i often think of the roughly 20 episodes produced in the year and a half before that as more like a full runner to the show rather than part of it it's also when i really started thinking of it as a show and partially because that's when folks started asking me how to start their own shows or vlogs i've been asked more this year than all the others combined though about how to start a show or if you should and my advice remains the same give it a try whether it's writing a book or painting a mural or starting a garden or doing a vlog you won't know if it's for you unless you give it a try and my only usual caution on that is to check your reasons first you will probably do a lot better at writing or vlogging or what have you if your first love is the content you want to share and gideon shared not if it is that you love folks who are listening to you write a book because you have a story to tell not because you want to be a bestseller but a lot of folks are looking for new paths in life and i entirely encourage that it's a very different sort of resurrection av birth than what we looked at today but very much as real of one and this last year has left a lot of folks feeling a need for a change i'd always encourage folks to be looking to try out new experiences grab new skills and reinvent themselves better than before if you're interested in learning new skills then skillshare is a great place to do that and they have a ton of useful classes on virtually every topic and that includes video editing if you're thinking about giving youtube or vlogging a try and i'd recommend ally abdul's video editing class from beginner to youtuber ali is a great example of someone who took an area of expertise he's a doctor and turned it into a show and he also does some great lifestyle and productivity videos too perhaps you're trying to adjust to working a new environment or just looking to pick up some new skill or hobby skillshare has a course for it whether you're a beginner a pro a dabbler or a master skillshare has thousands of classes on a wide variety of topics from experts to help you learn skillshare is an online community for creatives where millions come together to take the next step in their creative journey and members get unlimited access to thousands of inspiring classes with hands-on projects and feedback from a community of millions if you'd like to give it a try the first 1000 people to click the link in my episode description will get a free trial of skillshare premium so you can explore your creativity act now and start learning today so today we looked at restoring life and next week we'll be asking what intelligent life is as we discuss sentience sapience and notions of consciousness then we'll close the month out with our monthly livestream q a on sunday march 28th at 4 pm eastern time then we'll jump into april with a look at how artificial intelligence might be used in government or how it might govern before returning to the fermi paradox on april 8th for the long requested topic of drake's equation for searching for extraterrestrial intelligence or seti if you want to know us when those and other episodes come out make sure to subscribe the channel and if you'd like to help support future episodes you can donate to us on patreon or on our website isaacarthur.net which i'll link to the episode description below along with all of our various social media forums where you can get updates and chat with others about the concepts in the episodes and many other futuristic ideas you can also follow us on itunes soundcloud or spotify to get our audio only versions of the show until next time thanks for watching and have a great week [Music] you
2021-03-19