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Mitochondria and the Prevention of Death
H_Fisher writes "Research into mitochondria — small structures within a cell that have their own DNA — suggests that they may be a cause of cellular death, according to Newsweek. The article The Science of Death: Reviving the Dead reports on people who have recovered from sudden death due to cardiac arrest through the use of medically induced hypothermia. The cooling process may help stop the death of brain and heart cells initiated by the mitochondria once they are deprived of oxygen. The article goes on to probe delicately at the question of where a person's personality 'is' between death and later revival, and describes several ongoing scientific studies of near-death experiences."
I don't want to troll, but I prefer not to get my science from MSNBC and other mainstream media sources.
Most importanly, as this article alludes to, this new approach valdiates some of the science surrounding cryonics. As far as I can tell, cryonics is the only possible way for any of us to get our selves and our memories to the distant future where we can live superlong lives, or maybe even forever.
Homo Sapiens Americanus--A documentary in p
http://www.cell.com/content/article/fulltext?uid=P IIS0092867404000315
Haven't we known about caspase cascades and mitochondria for several years... I'm pretty sure I learned about them in AP Biology five years ago.
Programmed cell death (apoptosis) is normally considered a good thing. Cell death is the front line against Viruses, toxins, and other pathogens. When a cell is hopelessly invaded it will immediately try to kill itself or be told to kill itself by it's neighbors? Why? Well first single cells by themselves don't have much defense against stuff so when the jig is up there's no point in trying to live on. An inveded cell is a danger to it's neighbors since the virus will use it's machinery to replicate. Thus it's a mutually assured destruction strategy. And the first thing most bugs do on entering a host is attack the signals for apoptosis. Indeed Cancer is dangerous because it's immortal.
Thus it's interesting to find a way to override perhaps the most important response shared by cells in the body.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
> The article goes on to probe delicately at the question of where a person's personality
> 'is' between death and later revival...
Do they also discuss the color of zero or how wide is up?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Starting with the hypothesis that consciousness is purely a physical thing (i.e. the atoms and electric signals firing in your brain, and there is no soul or wonky business like that)--a hypothesis that I happen to agree with. It is a *profoundly* mysterious question if it would, in fact, be the same "you" inside if your brain were switched off for a while and then turned back on. Suppose in the time you were shut off, it were possible to make an exact copy of yourself, down to the atomic level, and then both copies were turned back on. Which one is "you"? Obviously both of you would think you were the original since you share the exact same memories.
:)
It's one of those questions that seem unanswerable. Personally I feel it has something to do with the continuity of brain activity. You interrupt that, and whatever that "spark" is ceases to be, and if the brain is turned back on, it would be a different "you". Which is why I'd never take a transporter ride and think actual working cryonics would be pointless since I would never experience waking back up, it would be a different consciousness, albeit one that thinks everything went just fine. If ever underwent either, I would assume the "me" that woke back up would have some lingering doubts.
One of the many philosophical papers on this: http://www.benbest.com/philo/doubles.html
It sounds like you weren't dead in any medical or scientific sense, just that your heart had stopped. There's been debate, probably since the dawn of humanity, as to when you can say someone is actually dead. There's always been problems of 'dead' people waking up, unless you actually practice cremation or draining the blood -- that's why we do it. There was a contest of sorts to make a medical definition of death back in the 1700s or 1800s -- the actual point where you could never come back. The guy who won proposed that putrefaction (when the body is actually rotting) was the only scientifically valid definition. I think the current medical definition is no heartbeat and no electrical activity in the brain.
Anyway, I'll hijack this thread to talk about my own information about where the 'personality' is during a clinical death experience. I don't think it 'is' anywhere. It's like asking where windows is when your computer is off. Going through a coma or medical death is like rebooting the part of your brain that generates your personality. If you read about Hindu and Buddhist meditation, and also the experience of serious hallucinogen users, they talk about an experience called 'ego death'. It's where you still perceive everything you normally would, except there is no "I". The subjective perspective completely evaporates. You see yourself as objectively as you would the person sitting next to you, not attached to your desires or fears. Even though you can still perceive your own thoughts and internal body states, you still don't have the sensation of an "I" or a soul who is experiencing it. Your sense of ownership, or things belonging to 'you', including your own body and thoughts, just is gone. It's called the 'unseen seer' in Hinduism, or the invisible eyeball by the transcendentalist Americans of the 1800s.
There is a part of our brain that generates this sense of self, the "I", and it can get shut down just like any other part of the brain, through bodily trauma, meditation, or drugs.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Fuck off you redneck piece of shit. Murdering animals for sport is reprehensible. I don't want to see your bullshit on slashdot anymore.
Ah. Do you trot out the same eloquent sensibilities for people who buy a new pair of leather shoes at some point before their last pair wears out? Oh, that's fashion - that's different, I guess. And what sport is it, exactly, that you think I'm practicing? Personally, I eat the birds and other animals that I personally go out looking for and bring home to the kitchen. And for each one I cook, that's one chemical-filled, agro-biz-raised taste-free farm animal I'm NOT eating. Do you eat the worms that are sliced in half while the soy plants for your tofurkey are being cultivated? Do you stand underneath the spinning blades of a nice, Green-friendly power generating windmill and eat the birds and bats that are beaten to death and fall to the ground so that some electrons can make your Wii glow and amuse you? What? I'm being presumptuous about your habits? Huh. It's almost like I don't know you, or something. Sort of like you're spouting a bunch of condescending crap that serves only to illustrate your own ignorance, bigotry, and malice. Which is fine, and you won't see me scolding you about where you can do it. Not to be confused with your take on things. I'm so glad that you're here to serve as thought police and to be the mind-reading arbitor of activities about which you - clearly - know nothing, but about which you none the less have formed a complex, nuanced, fully contemplated opinion. I mean, how else could you arrive at such a compelling, informed, and audience-changing bit of rhetoric? It's freakin' GENIUS, man. Wow. You've worn me out, and now I need to eat some protein. What do you recommend? Chicken? No thanks. Wild pheasant is far, far healthier.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
For all this stuff about creatures being hurt for non-meat purposes to be a good way of criticising vegetarians, you'd have to argue several other points first:
If you want to talk about electricity production, you'll have to prove that vegetarians use significantly more electricity than omnivores. You are unlikely to be able to do this.
If you want to talk about grain production, you'll have to prove that the extra grain which is directly consumed by a vegetarian significantly outweighs the large amounts of grain fed to livestock, and all other damage done to tiny animals by the livestock industry. This will be very tricky.
If you manage to prove the last point, you'll also have to make a good argument for (a) the accidental harm done to worms and suchlike outweighing (b) a lifetime of captivity followed by bloody slaughter inflicted on higher creatures. Since it is likely that both you and the other person both agree that priority ought to be given to higher creatures (humans before chimps, chimps before hamsters, hamsters before bacteria...), it would probably be pointless to try to make the argument.
Of course, you are unlikely to be interested in any of this. Stuff like "being presumptuous about your habits" leads me to believe that you are making these arguments about worms and bats totally disingenuously. You are not looking for the least harmful way of living, but simply throwing a tantrum because someone has said something that challenges your way of living.
You are not looking for the least harmful way of living, but simply throwing a tantrum because someone has said something that challenges your way of living.
Um, no. You're trying WAY too hard. I'm using a touch of rhetorical satire to point out that most people who elect to insert feigned outrage into a conversation are usually gigantic, annoying hypocrits.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
That's like saying that building an identical computer out of identical parts will never be running the same programs as the one that you cloned. Well, sure it won't, unless you stick in a clone of the old one's hard disk and RAM contents, at which point it WILL. The philosophical problems come in with the fact that a perfect-to-the-neuron-level clone of you WILL be yourself again. And so, if you're still around, will you! Just ask Dudley Bose.
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
You seem to have made some error there, because I am arguing (and not assuming) that being a little wrong (doing a small amount of unavoidable harm) does not make it OK to be a lot wrong (do a large amount of avoidable harm on top of that). My opponents are arguing the opposite.
I'm not justifying my eating habits, I don't need to.This is part of the problem. You make an assumption that because we're talking about something as dear to you as the very food you eat, then you get to do as much harm as you like without needing to justify it. But you do need to justify it, as much as any action that has an impact on others.
I'm simply pointing out the vegetarians are full of shit regarding "meat is murder".Not pointing out, but asserting without proof.
"Meat is murder" is a rather concise slogan, and it is disingenuous to treat it as a full argument. If someone said "Nike is slavery", you would presumably understand that the sloganeer wants to raise your awareness of child exploitation in specific factories, and is not saying that by boycotting one company you can have zero involvement with all exploitation.
Wrong is wrong. Don't bitch about someone that kills 1,000 people if you kill even 1 person yourself.Nope, you're totally wrong there. There are shades of wrong. This is elementary. People die all the time, and it is generally at least partially caused by someone else. The fumes from the cars you have driven in your lifetime may have done cumulative medical harm equal to the death of one person, but that doesn't mean that you cannot say that genocide is wrong.
You are trying to set up an analogy in which person A does harm which is totally unacceptable, and person B does the same thing a thousandfold, whilst you sit back obviously not murdering anyone, able to take the moral high ground. But that is a wildly inappropriate set-up. To be appropriate, you need to specifically place yourself correctly. You are in the same group as person B, with his thousand human kills under his belt. And you are attempting to gain moral high ground over person A. It's just absurd.
...owning up to your guilt just like the rest of usThat's comical in either its cluelessness or its dishonesty. Owning up to guilt is characteristic of meat-eaters, is it? No, never having seriously reflected on the harm done to animals is characteristic of meat-eaters, in a society where it is the norm to eat meat. Reflecting deeply on these issues and concluding that a behavioural change is necessary to minimise suffering is characteristic of vegetarians and vegans, in a society where a conscious decision is required in order not to eat meat.
This is quite obvious, but it is more convenient for you to latch on to a single slogan (and how about "guilt-free grill" to add grist to your mill?) and justify your thousand kills on the basis of it.
Why exactly should YOU be allowed to post on Slashdot in your freetime while others are sweating and toiling night and day just to have some bread on their tables?
Why exactly am I allowed to own a car while others can't even afford a pair of shoes?
I think the best solution is to take away all personal property and rights, so everyone has the same level. After all, it worked so incredibly well in Cuba, the USSR and the rest of the eastern bloc. I mean, everyone was so happy to be there!
To cite a personal song favorite of mine:
"to grind the mountains to the level of the valleys
to cut the trees to the level of the grass
to asphalt the land in the name of equality"
Never talk about why should anyone be allowed to do X, because that's none of our business. Talk about - and reason - why anyone should NOT be allowed to do X - and "equality" or "morals" have no grounds in that discussion, the only thing you can ever use as an argument is
"Does person A's activity X harm the freedom of others more, than it would harm to forbid A and everyone else this activity?"
Laws in free countries should be a black-list of forbidden activities, not a whitelist, a closed enumeration of what's acceptable and what's not.
Tell you what, get back to me when we figure out how to create an AI capable of passing a Turing Test.
Seriously, this isn't an out of hand dismissal. To say that the brain, or consciousness is somehow like a computer is, to me, more of a stretch than espousing an afterlife, or a soul.
Now I know that slashdot isn't likely to agree with me, and normally I'm loath to invoke a god-of-the-gaps, but if and when the time comes that we can fabricate intelligence in a box, we're going to have some serious rethinking of philosophy to do. Until then, I really do think that the burden to produce evidence lies with the mind-is-a-computer crowd, i.e. to me the mind looks a lot more unlike a computer than like it.
My major concern, how do we know that consciousness as we know it doesn't depend on some yet unknown quantum effects or isn't somehow governed by Godel's incompleteness theorem? In other words, is the brain deterministic? If the brain is deterministic then don't concepts of right and wrong go out the window?
Since there is no "trying" going on here, this can only be interpreted as a schoolboyish way of implying that he is cool and relaxed, whereas I am dorkily getting overexciting and having to use my full brainpower to respond to his points.
Which is exactly what's happening. He wrote a snarky paragraph to own a troll, and you're treating it like a thesis.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!