Slashdot Mirror
Finding Hope In Cryonics, Despite Glacial Progress
biobricks writes: The NY Times covers cryonics and destructive mind uploading, with some news on progress in brain preservation research. Quoting: "Dr. Fahy, a cryobiologist whose research focuses on organ banking, had provided the most encouraging signs that cryonics did preserve brain structure. In a 2009 experiment, his team showed that neurons in slices of rabbit brains immersed in the solution, chilled to cryogenic temperatures and then rewarmed, had responded to electrical stimulation. His method, he contended, preserved the connectome in those slices. But a complication prevented him from entering the prize competition: Brain tissue perfused with the cryoprotectant invariably becomes dehydrated, making it nearly impossible to see the details of the shrunken neurons and their connections under an electron microscope. ... He could fix the brain’s structure in place with chemicals first, just as Dr. Mikula was doing, buying time to perfuse the cryoprotectant more slowly to avoid dehydration. But he lacked the funds, he said, for a project that would have no practical business application for organ banking."
Please
boom!
But I was all set to sign up as a brain donor!
They've had his head on ice under epcot for ages.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I can live to troll another thousand years!
Table-ized A.I.
All that these con artists have done is to make empty promises to desperate people.
Their only accomplishment is to create a frozen cemetery.
When the money runs out so will the liquid nitrogen and then the dead will be buried or cremated.
No.
and the two-headed monster they were. One head black. The other white. Oh, what a movie!
And the Spock's brain one.
Allow me to be the first to break it to you. Ain't. Godda. Happen.
...is getting really impatient.
I'm sure all those companies that froze all those people would be more than happy to donate money to solve this prob-... HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
When a person needs funds, he will always find a way for hope.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Similarly, we should be working on hibernation, not cryonics. Once we can send a person to sleep for 40 years, while they only age 20 years, then we should be able to move to full cryonics. Until then, we are just kids firing off model rockets that go 1,000 ft straight up while we talk about hitting the moon.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Assuming they can revive frozen brains in the future, would this be really me or a good copy, and could anyone tell the difference.
we already know memory is not just stored in neural connection patterns. this is just another religion promising an afterlife it can't deliver
I could use a good Dixie Flatline construct
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
I'm STILL waiting for a rational explanation for how destructive scanning isn't death. Another person being created at the same time isn't it. Ship of Theseus isn't it. The brain isn't just software, its hardware is inherently part of the program.Destroy the hardware, destroy the program. Even if you made a backup that program is gone. I can buy another computer just like mine and install the same software, but it would be silly to say the other computer IS this one, whether or not I destroy this one. People who think destructive scanning is the same as life extension and people who think cryonics is a scam are both emotionally invested in accepting death or denying its existence.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
with respect to reviving the dead, population is exploding, and someone is going to waste their time reviving a brain. noone is so special that they cannot be replaced.
with respect to persons' leisure/recreation goals, anything is possible.
Moo?
Tell the billionaires, they will give you all the money instead of giving the to moronic presidential candidates.
Dr. Fahi, albeit this sounds cool, it also smells a bit like sour grapes to me.
I guess you would also have invented really cold fusion with the necessary funds.
Cryonics is nothing more or less than a fig leaf of hope for a "hereafter" for the secular mind; there's no proof it will work and not even a rational argument for it but it provides a psychological cushion against the stark certainty of death - as long as you don't think it through.
There is no proof that any of the techniques would work, no reasonable argument for why generations of people will expend resources to keep somebody on ice for generations and then thaw them out and revive and repair them. There is no reason to believe that such a person, even assuming perfect preservation and revival will have any of the required skills and abilities to survive and provide for him/her self in that distant future. The popsicle-person is likely to be a cultural outcast viewed as a social barbarian, the target of scorn and disgust. This person might even have to be isolated as a carrier of ancient diseases against which future-man has no immunity. In fact, there is every possibility that the frozen person would be treated as a TV dinner by wealthy cannibals, an organ donor for some distant descendant looking for organs from before some pandemic which occurred while he was frozen, researchers looking for examples of "primitive man" to dissect and study, etc.
Ultimately there is no promise that, once revived and presumably healed of whatever lead to one's demise, one would do anything other than live for a few more years and then DIE. This is very unlikely to be a way to actually avoid the permanence of death; at best it MIGHT be a way to delay death while losing all ones friends and relatives and the culture to which one is accustomed. After all, if future man is able to permanently cheat death, then the population will be unlimited and there'll be little need for monkey-men from the past and no reason to spend any resources on them.
Before spending any of your limited resources on getting your head frozen when you die, you need to ask yourself why you fear death so much that you are willing to shift those resources from yourself and your family to this scheme, and also ask what the true value returned (even if it all works as planned) would be. Are you preserving yourself and your family or just yourself? If you are revived but cannot be made immortal, how will you face your second death? (another freezing?)
Cryonics - the opiate of the wealthy secular masses. "Pie in the sky, by and by, when you die"
Ah. yes.
This one: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1581431552/tt0069372?ref_=tt_pv_md_1
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
The brain isn't just software, its hardware is inherently part of the program.Destroy the hardware, destroy the program. Even if you made a backup that program is gone. I can buy another computer just like mine and install the same software, but it would be silly to say the other computer IS this one, whether or not I destroy this one.
First, this is no argument against piecemeal incremental substitution (see the previous replies to your post). Piecemeal substitution is already happening, all the time, as your body undergoes its normal metabolic processes. In fact, to the extent that consciousness emerges from patterns of activity rather than physical structure -- that "you" comprise the oscillations racing around your brain, rather than just the wiring diagrams of your nervous system -- one could argue that "you" already are being replaced/regenerated several times each second.
More to the point, though, if I buy another computer just like mine and install the same software, I don't care whether the new computer "is" the old one. It does the same things, responds in the same ways, has the same state (memories). If it could "think", it would "think" it was still the same individual, albeit with its old infirmities healed, er, hardware flaws repaired. My old registered copy of Photoshop still remembers my preferences and behaves the same way, even though it now runs in emulation on an alien architecture; the only difference is that it's much faster, and it didn't stop running when its original hardware platform went extinct.
I don't see this as a return to a narrow and stubborn behaviorist approach. Behaviorism focused on externally observable stimulus and response, and denied the significance of any internal or non-observable state. If you want to define "internal state" as whatever is left after you've mapped every neural connection, modeled every neuron's behavior, faithfully recorded and emulated every activation pattern -- well, okay, but "consciousness of the gaps" doesn't impress me. Maybe that makes me a neo-behaviorist, but I think it just means that I'm not a Cartesian dualist. If there's an immaterial soul with its metaphysical hands on the controls of my corporeal self, well, the possible hiding places for that cockpit seem to be getting mighty small and thinly spread.
I've made my peace with personal mortality, but if I were offered a convincing chance to have my state vector preserved and potentially restored, I'd give it some serious consideration. One life should be enough, but I'm enjoying this one enough to see the value in continuing it or following it up.
What is wrong with being an Ice Princess?
The implications of this concept are giving me brain freeze!