[extropy-chat] Alternative to Cryo was The Amazing Cellular Repair device

[Robert J. Bradbury]

Does it *really* matter?

A human brain is an information container.

Freezing it and thawing it doesn't scramble it all that
much.  If I do it with a steak I still get back most of the
steak.

You have to make arguments that information, particularly
*critical* information, would be destroyed in the freezing
and thawing process.  I have yet to see anyone involved in
cryonics make that argument in a way that satisfies me from
a biological and computer science standpoint.

So my conclusion is *any* freezing and unfreezing process
is reasonable.  Of course work being done by those such as
Greg Fahy is a little different because they are trying to
get things to the point where you can "unfreeze" (or technically
unvitrify) them now.  If they could do this on a whole body
basis it would mean that the entire concept, legal definition,
etc. of "death" would need to be reworked.

What I like to tell people is to freeze my head -- that is the
essential information content of "Robert".  Then if someday
that head gets dropped on the floor of some cryonics facility
and broken into a zillion little pieces -- it doesn't friggen
matter.  We are going to have the computer processing capacity
to put it all back together.  Some of me may get lost.  But
some of me is lost over time every year anyway.

So any reasonable approximation of cryonics will work.

What will not work is putting one into an oven and
disassembling ones molecules at several thousand degrees.
Putting that back together is something that even nanotechnology
can probably not do.


Robert