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

[Brett Paatsch]

Robert J. Bradbury wrote:

> Does it *really* matter?

Well yes of course it matters, unless the truth is irrelevant to
the construction of your models about how to build a better
world.  

If cryonics is prohibited by the laws of physics would you
want to know that and deal with it or would you want to 
continue with an illusion ?

In your position, I'd want to know the warts and all truth,
because I might choose to allocate my resources and 
energies differently if I found that one path was hopeless.

You once asked me a very good question. What does one
do if one realised that one's own generation is not going
to make it? Does one give a shit about the next generation
and try to help them.   I think the answer is yes. 

I think we don't bring unnecessary suffering into a world
that already has enough of it.  We clean inherited single
nucleotide polymorphism diseases right out of the gene 
pool.  No more kids born with cystic fibrosis, or 
huntingtons. We cut the suffering that clearly can be cut
off at the root. 

> 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.

What is your current level of understanding of the neuronal
structure of the brain and how memories are stored in that 
structure ? What is the most recent fact you learned in this
knowledge domain that made any sort of impression on
you ?

These sort of questions and your answers to them might 
enable us to think critically about such questions as how
much of the essential Robert information store is too much
to lose even for Robert. 
 
If your answer is that you don't care how much you lose
some is better than nothing then I'd reply well why don't
you just freeze some body cells and send a letter to the
future requesting they clone you. That would be a heck
of a lot cheaper and easier. 

> 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 a yawn. Some legal weavil makes some change in the
definition of death on paper. Nothing substantive changes at all. 
 
Or the legislators ignore the whole thing and individual doctors
continue to exercise their own judgement as to whether a 
particular death has occured or not. 

> 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.

Okay what is your figure for the amount of computing processing
power that is needed to rebuild the pattern in your brain?

What is you figure for the economic cost of running that
computerised process? Do you have a cost of your own or
are you relying on someone elses projections?

> 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.

Probably not indeed. 

Brett Paatsch