Comment on thread on bioprinters and agelessness

Neurons in mice, iirc, last over twice as long as mice limited only by new host lifespan, think it was [in] rats [when transplanted].  In humans neurons last at least 50% longer than average as evidenced by the longest lived human.   Some have hypothesized that neurons may not exhibit signs of aging in and of themselves, but that their decay may be the result of aging supporting cells.    Therapies are underway to try and rejuvenate supporting cells, and if these ideas are right, they may reverse signs of brain decay if caught on time before neural loss occurs.

Right now bowhead neurons, unless we find there's regeneration throughout their brains, these neurons likely exhibit high metabolic activity, have over 200 year lifespan, and do not likely differ too much from our neurons in terms of maintenance and repair.   That additional virtual century likely came without nature having to implement ever more elaborate solutions as hypothesized by those who believe extensive engineering is necessary to achieve agelessness.

The longer lived a species the closer it is to agelessness, the more minute the necessary changes should be, and perhaps they may be inducible even by drug cocktails.

Now as for bioprinters, the issue of need for vasculature, for nutrient exchange and waste removal, the problems with deep 3d printing, could be solved in part if we used genetic modification to imbue the ability to vastly reduce metabolic rate perhaps even suspend it whie conditions improve and become adequate.   

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Comment on possibility of technological resurrection

We don't know what happens to the mind after death. I believe in mathematical realism, and Ibelieve simulations do not necessary depend on specific implementation to exist. I believe they exist independently as abstract potential patterns( in some real number, maybe a transcendental like pi exist numerical sequences representing all the temporal states of a simulation, and these have existed outside of time eternally).

If you burn all the books of isaac asimov and all the copies of them, the actual patterns haven't been destroyed even if no local physical implementation of them exist. As has been often said even random monkeys typing with enough time will produce these works again along with all possible books past present and future.

Now I believe the brain is hardware that is simulating sensory perception and an accompanying observer. I believe this simulation or sequence of patterns is eternal and has always existed outside of time, it exists independent of the brain's existence. If the multiverse is true it is likely that infinite copies exist and are taking the exact same sequence of actions at the same time.

Now I do not believe this means that one is intrinsically immortal. There are sequence of things that have defined beginning middle and end even if they are timeless, eternal in nature.

What I do think is that death remains an open question, we just don't know what happens to the continuity of consciousness, does it just end there or does it continue somehow? For example take a particular simulation of an ai with perfect checkers play against another ai with perfect checkers play, the game iirc will end in a draw. Now if you destroy the computers on which this simulation is being run, you don't actually destroy that particular perfect play game it exists outside of time along with all imperfect plays in a combinatorial space.(the related data for perfect play is about 200GB iirc).

If I take a book of hamlet and burn it midway through, the ideas the play is not actually destroyed only my access to it. If I was a character in the play i would be none the wiser, the ideas , thoughts, words are immune to corruption. In the brain the conscious observer is the main protagonist of the simulation, a simulation that is independent of substrate, as patterns while implemented in matter are independent of the matter in which they've been implemented. In theory it is perfectly plausible that the mind keeps on going somehow(for example, maybe the multiuniverse is true and the exact mind simulation is being run in parallel an infinite number of times, when the hardware is destroyed in one of these worlds, the individual simply continues in the rest of the copies as the actual interaction is exact it is conceivable the individual exists simultaneously at the same time across all copies.).

But again I restate we don't know what happens, we're only consciously aware of what our memory allows us to be aware of. Yet we know from experiments, drugs, accidents, etc that in some cases one can have no recollection of times when one was conscious. Do we solely exist in one body at a time? Even if so given that our brain has zero memory access to anything that could occur outside the brain's sensory input and its internal processes, we just can't know if our memory can be considered to provide the limits of what we're actually conscious of. If time travel is possible, we could be in two bodies at a time, past and future or more if repeated travelling occurs, and yet despite our conscious existence being in multiple places at the same time we wouldn't be aware of it, while hypothetical this hints that it is conceivable. We could conceive of a ship of theseus thought experiment, were a man and his wife's brain and body are slowly replaced with each others. Eventually the man becomes the wife and the wife becomes the man, did the man stop being the man at any point? how about the wife? or was the man both man and wife always but not consciously aware of this because of memory separation?I'm reminded of this story