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Comment by dTal | Hacker News Reader

Definitionally, no. If you can come back, you're just ill.

It's like asking, "can erased data be recovered?" If it can, it's not erased.

Not exactly.

Our definition of what's death coincided with us not being technically able to recover anyone from it. That's the reason it included "non recovery" (e.g. permanence).

Death includes a person having no brain activity, no breathing, no metabolism, no heart rate, no consciousness, etc. The permanence of those things is an accidental attribute of death, not it's fundament (that why we can say: "When you're dead, you're dead forever" or can imagine and write about "Dead coming back to life").

If death is a state characterized by X, Y and Z attributes (today, and for millennia now), then the discovery of a way to revert those X, Y, Z attributes in the future doesn't mean everybody who had then in the past wasn't death.

I'd say that your argument is a nominalism inspired version of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.

It's like as if one everybody would call a certifiably "dead person" today (e.g. a buried cadaver) is revived in 10 years due to some technological feat, someone goes to say "yes, but that was not a true dead person", moving the goalposts.

If technology is able to revive JFK in 2200, would you say JFK is not dead today?

This is a great explanation of a nuance I didn’t appreciate before. Thanks!

Obviously the question actually being asked is "Are people traditionally classified dead actually dead dead?" to which the answer may only be "mostly" rather than "yes".

Everybody knows there's a big difference between "mostly dead", and "all dead".

If we ever invent time travel that will mean that, relatively speaking, we all live forever. That would also mean that the universe is continually recording every single instance of time.

If I were a sci-fi author I would write that the reason the universe is expanding and accelerating is to record all of the new data being created. Just like a needle writing on a record. To record more data it needs to move the needle farther away from the center. And the farther away from the center it moves the faster the needle, relative to the disc, moves.

Or rather, it's not that time is "recorded", but it just exists, all at once, just like that, and we're simply experiencing a lower-dimensional slice of the universe, so we feel like we are "moving" through time when we really aren't.

I'd actually like to read that sci-fi story. Its a fun premise.

You are - for limited values of "read".

>That would also mean that the universe is continually recording every single instance of time.

This isn't compatible with special relativity. Simultaneity is always relative to the frame of reference which can be picked arbitrarily.

There's a non-fiction book, The Physics of Immortality by Frank Tipler, with a similar premise. Because the universe (according to some models) will end in a Big Crunch, collapsing to a single point, and because information can't be destroyed, then an omniscient intelligence will arise near the end of time with the ability to restore everyone who ever lived.

That is a good metafor. Someone might say, it is not really erased, is it is just the pointer that is deleted. Someone else says, there are still traces of magnetic field left, just much weaker. But if the disk is put in a shredder we can be sure it will never be read again - it is truly dead.

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