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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 17/09/2012 16:07, John Clark wrote:<br>
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On Mon, Sep 17, 2012 Anders Sandberg <span dir="ltr"><<a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="mailto:anders@aleph.se"
target="_blank">anders@aleph.se</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<div class="gmail_quote"><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote">
<div class="im">> Since cell membranes are well preserved
by standard histological methods, why even investigate
frozen tissue as an option?<br>
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I too have asked myself that question and don't have a good
answer, but I'm no expert on this matter.<br>
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<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
<br>
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<div class="gmail_quote">> 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.<span class="HOEnZb"><br>
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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. <br>
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<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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). <br>
<br>
Still, I think your rule of thumb "more information = more options"
is largely true.<br>
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<br>
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Faculty of Philosophy
Oxford University </pre>
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