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The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

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Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#41

Post by radu_floricica »

xgbi wrote: post #8

Serious question: what's to salvage from the brain of a terminal brain cancer child? This strikes me as a very silly way to preserve a human being. If they really wanted to give their child a "chance" to live a full life, they should have cryogenized her sooner, no? (It might be illegal, though.)

> what's to salvage from the brain of a terminal brain cancer child?

Her personality and memories, of course. Most of the brain is back-office, keeping the body alive and doing low level processing. The parts containing "her" could easily be untouched by cancer. Keeping just her brain frozen is a bit of a stretch, but all the hurdles are strictly technological in nature. Make a clone (or a partial clone, if you have ethical concerns), cut and paste the good parts into the clone and you've healed her completely.

It may seem a lot right now, to fuse brain parts together or to do head transplants, but they aren't really that far-fetched. Barely 100 years ago we were still arguing whether heavier-than-air flight is possible, and weren't even dreaming concepts like radiation or turing computability. Compared to that making nerves grow back together is just elbow grease.

Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#42

Post by [deleted] »

xgbi wrote: post #8

Serious question: what's to salvage from the brain of a terminal brain cancer child? This strikes me as a very silly way to preserve a human being. If they really wanted to give their child a "chance" to live a full life, they should have cryogenized her sooner, no? (It might be illegal, though.)

[deleted]

Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#43

Post by rl3 »

tim333 wrote: post #38
martin-adams wrote: post #37

I find cryogenics such a thought provoking field. If you're going to be frozen after death, you would probably want the restoration process to be fully mature before you are restored. But yet, someone has to go first (outside of shorter frozen trials). But then again, who is to say that the restoration process will take the form of thawing out the brain. An advanced digital scanning technique could imprint the brain…

>someone has to go first Probably there'll be animal experimentation first. Then when Fido's still able to fetch they'll give humans a bash.

That's assuming humans would be performing the resuscitation, which I doubt. If general intelligence has been solved, it will probably be an AI doing the work.

Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#44

Post by csn »

martin-adams wrote: post #37

I find cryogenics such a thought provoking field. If you're going to be frozen after death, you would probably want the restoration process to be fully mature before you are restored. But yet, someone has to go first (outside of shorter frozen trials). But then again, who is to say that the restoration process will take the form of thawing out the brain. An advanced digital scanning technique could imprint the brain…

Is there any name for this puzzle? I've been thinking about this for a while now.

Cloning the particles (and their states) that make you up would most likely produce a separate mind, as I think would teleporting where v1 is destroyed and v2 consisting of different particles, although in the same configuration. But what about separating said configuration, transporting them somewhere else and putting them back together? Cryogenics is in my opinion the only possible way to give a chance in preserving an original mind well beyond natural human lifespan without actually extending it.

Not only can't others tell a clone apart from the original: the hypothetic clone, as I understand it, couldn't do that either. Now what if this process, due to cellular regeneration in the brain, happens constantly? Your mind is not the same it was a minute ago: that mind is dead and gone. Would it even matter?

Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#45

Post by escaped_hn »

martin-adams wrote: post #37

I find cryogenics such a thought provoking field. If you're going to be frozen after death, you would probably want the restoration process to be fully mature before you are restored. But yet, someone has to go first (outside of shorter frozen trials). But then again, who is to say that the restoration process will take the form of thawing out the brain. An advanced digital scanning technique could imprint the brain…

You're assuming that everyone being frozen is "equal". Hate to say it but people like this girl will be unfrozen to see what happens long before they bring out the brains of Steve Jobs and the like.

Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#46

Post by eli_gottlieb »

reasonattlm wrote: post #23
geographomics wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Resuscitation seems unlikely, given that the freezing process itself damages the tissues, as well as the degradation that has already happened post-mortem.

They don't freeze, they vitrify. That's a very big difference. http://www.alcor.org/cryomyths.html#myth2 We can debate the degree to which cryoprotectant perfuses the brain outside a laboratory test of tissue, but vitrification appears to preserve the fine structure of tissue very well: http://www.brainpreservation.org/competitors/ There is evidence of synaptic preservation in preserved and restored nematodes: http:/…

Well, they resuscitated a nematode. That's... actually worth updating my view of how well they can preserve things. I should go ask people for help interpreting that paper.

Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#47

Post by martin-adams »

rl3 wrote: post #43
tim333 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>someone has to go first Probably there'll be animal experimentation first. Then when Fido's still able to fetch they'll give humans a bash.

That's assuming humans would be performing the resuscitation, which I doubt. If general intelligence has been solved, it will probably be an AI doing the work.

Well there's a scary thought. Sending your loved ones into the future full of machine whose motives may not exactly be the same as ours.

Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#48

Post by mastazi »

csn wrote: post #44
martin-adams wrote: post #37

I find cryogenics such a thought provoking field. If you're going to be frozen after death, you would probably want the restoration process to be fully mature before you are restored. But yet, someone has to go first (outside of shorter frozen trials). But then again, who is to say that the restoration process will take the form of thawing out the brain. An advanced digital scanning technique could imprint the brain…

Is there any name for this puzzle? I've been thinking about this for a while now. Cloning the particles (and their states) that make you up would most likely produce a separate mind, as I think would teleporting where v1 is destroyed and v2 consisting of different particles, although in the same configuration. But what about separating said configuration, transporting them somewhere else and putting them back togethe…

The thing is, unless you have certain metaphysical beliefs, the very concept of "identity" is a flawed one and doesn't really represent the reality of us being actually a complex aggregate structure of cells. The concept of "self" is in my opinion just a rough approximation or a framework that we use to quickly assess reality, much like time, as we commonly think of it, does not fully represent the complexities of relativistic time, however it is useful to manage our daily life[1]: the sentence "I'll be with you in 5 minutes" could open a whole lot of possibilities if we consider time in a relativistic scenario, whereas it is fairly unambiguous in our daily life. Similarly, the concept of "self" would be very ambiguous with regards to e.g. annelid worms (who can be split in 2 and survive as two separate individuals[2]) whereas it sums up fairly well the way we think of ourselves as individuals.

[1] See http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/2166333... [2] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragmentation_(reproduction)

Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#49

Post by martin-adams »

jeremyjh wrote: post #39
martin-adams wrote: post #37

I find cryogenics such a thought provoking field. If you're going to be frozen after death, you would probably want the restoration process to be fully mature before you are restored. But yet, someone has to go first (outside of shorter frozen trials). But then again, who is to say that the restoration process will take the form of thawing out the brain. An advanced digital scanning technique could imprint the brain…

Only if the observer were some metaphysical being, rather than simply the inside view of a particular computation. If you reproduce the computation faithfully, you have reproduced the observer.

Lets hope that part of science is discovered before the restoration part.

Where my thoughts end up more in the personal beliefs rather than scientifically backed is down to what the observer is defined as. Could this be the same as a soul?

One thought that I have is whether the physical state is bound with a non-physical state, like you (non-physical) controlling a remote controlled car (physical). By freezing the subject you could detach this binding, and by thawing you could reattach another observer, maybe based on proximity, with the memories and physical mind of the original.

Hollywood has pretty much covered all these concepts in one shape or another.

[1] The Prestige - Teleportation

[2] 21 Grams - Existence of a soul

[3] The Matrix - AI controlled future

Re: The youngest person to be cryogenically preserved

#50

Post by r721 »

csn wrote: post #44
martin-adams wrote: post #37

I find cryogenics such a thought provoking field. If you're going to be frozen after death, you would probably want the restoration process to be fully mature before you are restored. But yet, someone has to go first (outside of shorter frozen trials). But then again, who is to say that the restoration process will take the form of thawing out the brain. An advanced digital scanning technique could imprint the brain…

Is there any name for this puzzle? I've been thinking about this for a while now. Cloning the particles (and their states) that make you up would most likely produce a separate mind, as I think would teleporting where v1 is destroyed and v2 consisting of different particles, although in the same configuration. But what about separating said configuration, transporting them somewhere else and putting them back togethe…

It was called "Teletransporter (new matter): survival or death?" in a poll of philosophers:

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/12/what_do_philoso....

http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2009/12/15/who-are-...

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