[extropy-chat] Cryonics should be preserving life, not just identity.

[Robert Bradbury]

On 1/27/06, Heartland <velvethum at hotmail.com> wrote:

>
> Cryonics makes no sense if it tries to preserve the identity of the
> original while forgetting to preserve the *life* of the original.


Actually that may be the case for you but may not be the case for everyone.
I think my father might not prefer to continue on an exteremely extended
life if many of the people he has cared about have died (my mother for
example).  I proposed something along these lines a few weeks ago but it did
not lead to an active thread.

Briefly they are:
1) Total reanimation of the "thread" (i.e. *you* get to run who *you*
consider yourself to be).

2) Total recovery of all of the memories of a life preserved within a
brain.  Though presumably if these were uploaded these would allow one to
"inhabit" the mind of that person.  (Do I really want to be Paris Hilton?)

3) Total recovery of all of the "good" memories of a life preserved within a
brain.  E.g. my father might prefer to pass along his memories of his
childhood, my paternal grandfather (whom I never knew), my great
grandfather, etc. but not pass on his memories of WWII.

I suspect this would require something like bequeathing ones brain to a
trust and allowing information withdrawal from the trust under carefully
controlled situations (similar to today's medical ethics evaluation
committees dealing with things like allowable organ donations, transplants,
etc.).  In cases not foreseen this might require partial "reactivation" of
the evaluation centers (which could be connected to the emotional centers)
of the mind in order to evaluate a withdrawal request which was
unanticipated with the trust was established.  It gets very dicey if it was
specified in the memory trust establishment that full "thread" activations
were not allowed.

Robert
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