[extropy-chat] Altered genes let roundworms wiggle longer

[Brett Paatsch]

Robert J. Bradbury wrote:

> The best available technologies indicate that one can freeze
> oneself -- and that given future advances in technologies
> that frozen structures may be reanimated.

Maybe this isn't the best spot to bring this up, but I don't
think this is right.

There IS evidence that things like frogs can survive freezing
and that spores can be taken down towards absolute zero
and then resume life functioning simply by allowing them to
return to more normal temperatures, but there is no *evidence*,
technological or otherwise (that I am aware of) that shows that
an organ as complicated as a human brain can be frozen and
then returned to normal temperature and reanimated.

There is *hope* and *belief* that human brains can be reannimated
- cryonicists hope and  believe, as do 'resurrectionists' but there is
not yet technological evidence for either proposition (that I'm aware
of).

At this stage we can't even freeze organs like hearts and reanimate
them and these are organs in which no sense of self resides. So
there's currently technological limits.

Even IF we had mature nanotechnology and could rebuild a
new brain exactly as the old brain was, (ie. an atomic level copy)
there would still be real doubt in my opinion as to whether this
amounted in practice to reanimating the self from the standpoint
of the self.

Let me be clear, I come to consider this question without any belief
in souls or supernatural whatsoever.  I think I *am* my living changing
growing brain so I'm looking at this question from a very materialistic
standpoint.

So far as I can see there is absolutely no evidence anywhere that
*I* can survive the dismantling of my brain.

Seems to me the idea that the self as experienced in the first person
can be reduced to patterns and information that could then be replicated
as information and patterns can is pure speculation. Pure faith.

If there is any *evidence* to the contrary I'd like to see or hear it.

Seems to me that cryonics requires a sort of intensely reverse solipsicm
where one does not accept that one has a self - a conscious subjective
at all. One has lost the first person and sees oneself only as others can
see one - separately and from a distance. Ironically a person who thinks
they are no more than information and pattern would think that going
into a teleporter and think it coming out as the patterns would be the
same in both cases but what is lost is one self and what is replaced
is another self.

What constitutes one's self may not be fully explicable currently in
scientific terms but so what - from the standpoint of being one's self -
that there is a self of some form IS the bedrock experiential certainty,
even if the exact nature of what one is is unclear.

One reasons and practices the scientific method well or badly as a self.
One relates to others from the self. Perhaps the self is a high level
construct
of simpler phenomenon from the standpoint of outsiders looking in
(even scientifically) but not from the first person position of the self.

Regards,
Brett Paatsch