Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015

Gondolinian

If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

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If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

Notes for future OT posters:

1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.

2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)

3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.

4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.

PZ Myers:

I also wonder what a future civilization would do if they inherited tanks of liquid nitrogen containing extracted blobs of diseased brains and decapitated heads. Does anyone really believe that they’d feel any obligation to resurrect them, even if they could?

Here's a fun topic of conversation - if I happen across PZ Myers, and he's having a heart attack, should I feel any obligation to perform CPR?

I get that Myers' article pisses a lot of people here off (myself included), but let's try to refrain from mean-spirited-ness, neh? Mind-killing happens readily enough by itself without people helping the process along.

11advancedatheist11y

Yes, if they have cryonics or its successor technologies for themselves and they can reason about consequences carefully. If you have an injury or pathology in the 24th Century that the health care providers don't know how to treat, you could go into brain preservation to see if the health care providers in, say, the 26th Century would know how to help you. Some of those health care professionals active in the 26th Century might have been born in the 20th or 21st Centuries and have gone through a round or two of brain preservation themselves, and they entered the practice of medicine in the 26th Century as one of their new careers. "Hey, I know this guy. He helped to resuscitate me in 2327. I owe him so I'll return the favor."

0Jiro11y

If you can perform CPR with little cost to you, you should. If performing CPR has a large cost to you, or if there are so many people that need CPR that performing CPR on all of them is, in total, a large cost to you, you are not obliged to do anything. How easy would it be for the future civilization to resurrect the brains?