[ExI] Nice Article on Brain Preservation

[Anders Sandberg]

On 17/09/2012 16:07, John Clark wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 17, 2012  Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se 
> <mailto:anders at aleph.se>> wrote:
>
>     > Since cell membranes are well preserved by standard histological
>     methods, why even investigate frozen tissue as an option?
>
>
> I too have asked myself that question and don't have a good answer, 
> but I'm no expert on this matter.

If you are a histologist you only care about structure, not function. 
Most medical people care a lot about maintaining function, but once it 
is out of their hands it is just left for the histologists to do a 
(literal) postmortem.

Cryonics people have the unusual view that that mildly non-functioning 
systems can have their relevant structure preserved and then restored. 
But this requires finding fixation methods (whether freezing or 
plastics) that retains properties of relevance to function that would 
not matter to a histologist: it falls between the chairs, and there are 
few people investigating it. I think the closest thing is researchers 
interested in systematic changes in viability in their cell and tissue 
freezers.


> > Max's point about revival options is important: we do not just want 
> to minimize damage during preservation, we also want to make the 
> resulting product amenable to as many possible future revival 
> technologies as possible.
>
> I don't understand the distinction. Whichever method produces the 
> least amount of damage preserves the most information, and the more 
> information transmitted safely into the future the more options there 
> would be for anyone who thinks we're worth the trouble of reviving.

Silly example: dumping the brain into the event horizon of a black hole. 
Ignoring stretching, all information is preserved. Except that it is 
non-retrievable by any technology.

Not all forms of information are easy to manipulate (consider searching 
the internet or a PDF to searching in paper documents), and some forms 
of distortion take much more effort to fix than other ones (if noise 
flips every other pixel in an image of a text it is much better than 
flipping every other bit of the text ASCII information).

Still, I think your rule of thumb "more information = more options" is 
largely true.



-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University

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