[ExI] Nice Article on Brain Preservation

[John Clark]

On Mon, Sep 17, 2012  Anders Sandberg <anders at aleph.se> wrote:

> 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
>

Restoring function is of course the name of the game because the brain has
ceased to function even before it was frozen or infused with plastic, but
its important to understand what sort of repair shop you're going to be
taking the broken object to. If the repairman has a limited supply of spare
parts then knowing how all the parts fit together (information) is not
enough and its important to preserve as much function as possible. But I
don't believe anybody is going to be revived (if they ever are) until full
fledged Nanotechnology has arrived and in that case the parts in question
are just atoms and the repairman has a unlimited supply of them, so all he
needs is information.

> 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).
>

True, all the information on how to make an egg is there in the scrambled
eggs but that does no good because I don't think even Nanotechnology can
get that information out and figure out how to unscramble an egg. The egg
has undergone turbulence and that means tiny changes in initial conditions
have led to huge changes in outcome, we don't want that happening to
brains. So the big question is, does the brain preservation method cause
turbulence? I could very well be wrong because I'm no expert but my
intuition says that plastic infusion is less likely to produce turbulence
than freezing.

  John K Clark
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