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.
maxikov
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.
High energy ethics and general moral relativity
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 the issue of making it survive the time it takes to go form cardiac arrest to freezing, which is also probably just as hard to do with sea mammals as with land mammals. So although the ultimate goal is to develop a protocol for humans, it’d the much easier to start with an animal that’s already capable of surviving 100 MPa of ambient pressure and +4C of its own body temperature.
Hmm, I wonder what the exact biochemistry that prevents life forms (including, apparently, vertebrate fish) in Challenger Deep at 111 MPa from experiencing these problems is, and whether it can be replicated in mammals.
They also mentioned that blebbing first appears at 90-120 seconds, but that’s way too short even for the fastest protocols possible. Theoretically, it’s not unthinkable to cool the body to just above 0C, and then go straight to 632 MPa and above, to make it instantly freeze, before blebbing occurs. And then, if total liquid ventilation allows one to drop the pressure that quickly as well, just go from solid directly to a non-dangerous pressure range. But for any protocol that involves temperature changes under pressure, tens of seconds is positively too short to allow the temperature to stabilize.
As for toxicity though, I though it was entirely due to the increased partial pressure of oxygen (which thus creates too strong of an oxidizing environment) and having too many nitrogen atoms dissolved in tissues, physically messing with fine-grain biochemistry like ion channels. Is there another chemical component of toxicity beyond that?
That’s an interesting observation! When I was looking into this, I found several suppliers[1][2][3][4] that claim to produce pressure vessels, tubing, and pumps all the way up to 150′000 psi (1GPa). If 300MPa are already pushing the boundaries of steel, do you know what they could use to achieve such pressures?
Yep, fixed that, thanks.
It seems like the approach of cooling the organism to −30C at 350MPa, and then raising pressure further to ~600Mps to freeze it could actually solve that. As far as I understand, the speed of diffusion in water it far slower that the speed of sound (speed of sound at 25C is 1497 m/s, while diffusion coefficient for protons at 25C is 9.31e-5 cm^2/s, which corresponds to 1.4e-4 m/s − 8 orders of magnitude less), which is the speed of pressure gradient propagation. So if we use raising pressure as a way to initiate phase transition, it will occur nearly simultaneously everywhere, and the solutes won’t have time to diffuse anywhere.
ETA: I just realized that since diffusion propagates according to inverse square law, while sound is linear, they should be compared to each other at the shortest distance possible. So I checked the time it takes for a proton to cover 0.1nm (hydrogen atom diameter) in water − 5.37e-13s, which gives us 186 m/s. It’s far greater than the original number, but still an order of magnitude smaller than the speed of sound. And if we take 4nm (the thickness of a cell membrane) we have 8.59e-10s—only 4 m/s, so it decreases very quickly, and we’re pretty much safe.
Even better cryonics – because who needs nanites anyway?
If you only observe by absorbing particles, but not emitting them, you can be far enough away so that the light cone of your observation only intersects with the Earth later than the original departure point. That would only change the past of presumably uninhabited areas of space-time.
So where exactly do I go for that? Googling “freeze your cells” gives me the information about technical details of that, rather than a company that provides such service, or completely irrelevant weight loss surgery information.
What is the probability of having afterlife in a non-magical universe?
Aside from the simulation hypothesis (which is essentially another form of a magical universe), there is at leas one possibility for afterlife to exist: human ancestors travel back in time (or discover a way to get information from the past without passing anything back) to mind-upload everyone right before they die. There would be astrong incentive for them to not manifest themselves, as well as tolerate all the preventable suffering around the world: if changing the past leads to killing everyone in the original timeline, the price for altering the past is astronomical. Thus, they would have to only observe (with the reading of brain states as a form of observation) the past, but not change it, which is consistent with the observation of no signs of either time travelers or afterlife. But if will happen in future, it means it’s already happening right now. How do you even approach estimating the probability of that?
If the effect of RF doesn’t go beyond thermal, then you probably shouldn’t be concerned about sitting next to an antenna dish any more than about sitting next to light bulb of the equal power. At the same time, even if the effect is purely thermal, it may be different from the light bulb since RF penetrates deeper in tissues, and the organism may or may not react differently to the heat that comes from inside rather than from outside. Or it may not matter—I don’t know.
And apparently, there is a noticeable body of research, in which I can poke some holes, but which at least adheres to basic standards of peer-reviewed journals, that suggests the existence of non-thermal effects, and links to various medical conditions. However, my background in medicine and biology is not enough to thoroughly evaluate this research, beyond noticing that there are some apparent problems with that, but it doesn’t appear to be obviously false either.
If nothing breaks, we’ll be live here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpUuPr5gYxk