Statistically Uncomfy

Terrible things inevitably happen.

I love being a stick in the mud, Dear Reader - certain topics that, once brought up, I just have to poke with a pre-packaged argument cooked up in my mind. One such trigger for my poking is one Bryan Johnson. He’s that Billionaire injecting himself with his son’s blood to de-age himself. I’m sure you’ve heard of him somewhere or other - and if not, count yourself blessed. He came up on a topic of immortality, and I simply could not resist the urge to poke. It can be summed up with a simple question: Do you want to live forever, Anon?

Now, this is a question I have noticed a rather disturbing shift in. When I was a young lad in the 90s, it seemed downright insane to ever answer anything other than a robust “yes!” Who wouldn’t want to live forever in those days? fears of war and terrorism were gone, entertainment was good, you could really visualize enjoying the best of that era, every day, forever. Today, however, people seem to want to die. They seem to have an ideation on the idea. If someone told them they could live forever, they seem angry, many times. Perhaps they simply want the power to decide when to die, hence the rise of things like MAID in Canada. This is a strange shift from the 90s, but perhaps not that strange considering the decline of the past 30 years.

I remember back in the 90s there was a curious trend of dying rich people having their brains frozen in liquid nitrogen, with the expectation being they’d probably thaw them out in a few years and grow them a new body with some wiz-bang science. The institute that was big on doing this back then, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, still exists and in fact has been freezing brains and bodies since the 1970s. They have about 200 bodies now, slowly collected every few years. The scary thing? These people are technically still “alive” - sorta. In most instances, they were frozen mere seconds to minutes after their pulse ceased. In other words, fully within the range of resuscitating if you were to resurrect them today. Of course, the pace of medical science hasn’t gone as fast as they were hoping, and if we did bring them back, they’d probably spend their last few hours with severe frostbite, organ failure, and a fate to quickly melt away into water. The process of properly resurrecting them today is mostly known, and could be done if someone wanted to spend the money to do it. You’d basically have to take a human bone marrow, Genetically insert cryogenic endurable genes from species like arctic whales etc, and then grow from that bone marrow a form of modified human blood with its own antifreeze-like proteins and peptides. Then you’d have to fill a large tank with the peptide isolated, and place the body into it, while also injecting the blood into the veins as they came into contact with the peptide and thawed out without damage. Of course, you’d still have a cancer-riddled walking corpse.

One of the older bodies they have is that of James H. Bedford, born 1893, flat-lined January 12, 1967, and frozen two hours later. It’s very unlikely his brain is entirely preserved given both the time delay and the primitive cryogenic protocols of the 1970s. However, there’s a decent chance that if you thawed him out in the above method and shocked his body with some juice, you’d probably get a pulse. He’d probably be brain dead, but you could probably fish out a few remaining memories on something like Neurolink. Imagine the strange history: Technology from 2024 records memory form 1899 from brain that died in 1967… Horrors beyond your imagination, etc etc.

In fact, this sort of thing could probably be done in other situations, such as with bog bodies, or ice age corpses that wash up when a glacier melts. It’s quite possible that within your lifetime, you could see a recording of a stone-age caveman’s memories fished out with something like neurolink, from some well-preserved corpse. As long as the wiring is still intact, you can give it a jump and get something.

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Returning to the discussions with my friends, I was quite the contrarian. I told them I don’t want to live forever, just a little bit longer. Let’s say, Three Hundred Years. That seems nice. I explained my reason was simple: Math.

Statistically, biological immorality doesn’t stop you from eventually dying. It just limits how you could theoretically die. Every way you could die can have a statistical probability attached to it. But getting rid of one way of dying does not alter the probability of death by other means. For instance, you might have a 1:2000 odds of dying in a plane crash, and a 1:50 odds of dying from cancer. Statistically, this person is more likely to die from cancer. A biologically immortal person now sees 0 odds at dying from cancer, but the 1:2000 odds of dying in a plane crash remains. With the longer life, this virtually guarantees the very scary death by plane crash, eventually.

Number games like this is why being immortal does not necessarily equate to a longer and happier life. It basically guarantees the terrifying unlikely death will eventually happen.

Chaos Theory, or Murphy’s Law, or any number of scientific terms of plain bad luck, gets empowered with biological immortality. The rare becomes inevitable because you will live long enough to experience it.

We could imagine a spectrum of ways you could die. The left-hand can be the very boring ways to die such as in your sleep, old age, slipping on a banana peel, etc etc. The right can be the very painful ways to die: cancer, disease, entering a poorly maintained Chinese factory, etc etc. Now, you’ve knocked out a few of these out on both columns, but the risks still exists. Knocking out more would actually require behavior shifts. - avoiding the things which will, statistically, eventually, kill you. You shouldn’t fly anymore, for example. Because if you can live forever, you will eventually, statistically, get on the plane that crashes. You shouldn’t drive either for the same reason. You actually have to think of everything in terms of probability now, and if you’ve lived long enough to hit the unlucky chance of failure, you will die most horribly.

Some people think it is worth the risk. That’s why they pursue the goal. But they’ve got to wake up to the reality of probabilities. The longer one lives, the more likely one is to inevitably get unlucky.

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When I was younger, my mind would apply this thinking to religious topics. Specifically, angels. Angels have no savior. When they err, they are damned forever. It is therefore a predetermined fate that if angels have free will, and they live forever, then all angels will eventually suffer damnation. It’s just a matter of when. Jesus Christ was a great comfort to me in those thoughtful mind games of probabilities. Man will always have a savior, while angels do not. I thought a lot about what that might do to the angelic mind, knowing that statistics demands they will eventually all fall. The only solution, really, is to take away their free will and make them beings of pure obedience. Of course, then how did Satan and his legions come to fall in the first place? Were they designed to be disobedient from the start? It’s a fun, if frightening, mind game. Why would angels want to serve God at all, knowing they will eventually offend and get damned? The reality of probability demands they can’t have free will. However, why, then, create bad angels at all?

I’ve considered if perhaps an angel can be thought of as a kind of knotted or looped pattern of behavior. In computer terms, this is a finite state machine that loops through behaviors and, as long as they remain in their proper environment and face them one at a time, the mechanisms of their behavior remain obedient. A finite state machine can handle any problem because it has states defined to deal with any individual problem. If Angels are like this, they can act correctly for any situation: They can become warrior in times of threat, sing praise in times of the presence of God, and offer correct wisdom when asked. But finite state machines have one major flaw: They cannot handle hybrid states. They can only handle one state at a time, not multiple states.

Under these conditions, the angelic mind cannot be designed to fall, but it can experience a fall if they are forced to act in multiple states at once. For instance, if an angel has a state for testing mortal men, and a state for bowing to immortal God, they can do each individually, but if they were faced with a situation that was both at the same time, the finite state machine breaks because the state is now more than finite.

This stems from my broader curiosity on how, exactly evil came to be and death entered the world. We are told as Christians that Death entered the world through the sin of man, but Satan was already present and tempting mankind. How can Satan have been fallen at that time, if evil had not yet entered the world? But if Satan, as a finite state machine, is simply designed to poke and test things, then Satan would continue as designed until his programming came into contact with a paradoxical state, such as the God-Man Jesus Christ. After which, his designed nature to question and test would be applied to God, which is sinful. This is the broader theory that Satan did not know he was damned until after Jesus Christ told him he was for testing God. But these mind games are ultimately just exercises of logic for something beyond human understanding.

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In terms of human understanding, these mind games can be applied to nations too. The Finite State Machine is, essentially, how software and institutions achieves immortality. If you can perfectly define every state a program needs to exist in reality, it will not fail. If an institute has policies for every possible state of existence it experiences, then it will always be ready to respond in an efficient and effective manner without oversight or debate committees. Of course, this can only work if you can, actually, define every state - or at least a broad enough number that the unknowns can be applied in a predictable way. For instance, one state for disaster doesn’t have to know what the disaster is, just that there are broad behaviors that apply to any disaster.

In many ways, the United States is a finite state machine, and each state is very well defined and perfect for handling specific contexts with perfectly coded policy. If the state is something that might make people violent, it can enter a state that uses its media arm to distract and censor. If it faces an external threat, it can enter a military state with its powerful military. If it enters an economic state, its resilient economy can shift and face any problem too.

As a finite state machine, the United States is well buttressed from the usual points of contact we see states fail so often from. But this does not block off the statistically unlikely, nor can it handle multiple states at the same time. This ensures the unlikely becomes the inevitable. Like an angel, it can be forced into applying those perfectly defined states of behavior improperly and break itself. This is the United States’ great flaw: It can handle pretty much any situation that hits it, so long the hits form an orderly que to be responded to one at a time. The second multiple crises hit it at once, it cannot adapt to more than one state. It breaks.

That should make you very uncomfortable with statistics.