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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
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.
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.
Which is often an indication of bad assumptions.
Which is "you" after the duplication? First we ought to ask, is there a "you" before the duplication?
Look closely. What is this "you"? "Your" body? That's not the same from moment to moment, atoms entering and leaving with every breath. "Your" thoughts? Just as changing and fluid. "Your" memories? But "you" are making new ones and forgetting old ones each day.
Go down to a stream and sit on the rocks. Perhaps you'll see a spot where whirlpools form for a bit, a knot of water that under the conditions takes on a perceptible form for a few seconds, then melts away as conditions change. Then, a little later, in the same spot, another whirlpool forms.
Is it the same whirlpool?
The question isn't meaningful. "Same" here is a construction of mind, a mere question of our agreements about language, not denotative of any truth about the world.
"You" are just a character in the story being told by your brain.
One story about Zen Master Bankei says that he was very scared of death as a child. When he had his great enlightenment, he realized that "he" could never die, because "he" had never been born. Now that's liberation!
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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.
"you" is just something your brain does. Asking where you go when your brain turns off is like asking where the spinning goes when the motor turns off.
Play Command HQ online
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?