Plastination - an alternative to cryonics
Previously
I'll assume that everyone who reads my blog has heard of cryonics.
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Chemopreservation has been known for some time, but has recently
received some attention as a credible alternative to cryonics. These
pages (PLASTINATION VERSUS CRYONICS, Biostasis through chemopreservation) make the case well. They also explain some nuances
that I won't go into. But basically, chemopreservation stores you
more robustly by turning your brain into plastic. There's no liquid
nitrogen required, no danger of defrosting. With chemopreservation,
they can't just fix what killed you and "wake you up", you'd have to
be scanned and uploaded.
Are thawing accidents likely? Yes.
Cryonics organizations such as Alcor just wouldn't let you thaw, because they take their mission very
seriously?
Without casting any aspersions on cryonics organizations' competence and integrity, consider that recently, 150 autistic brains being stored for research at McLean Hospital were accidentally allowed to thaw (here, here, here). McLean and Harvard presumably take their mission just as seriously as Alcor and have certain organizational advantages.
Without casting any aspersions on cryonics organizations' competence and integrity, consider that recently, 150 autistic brains being stored for research at McLean Hospital were accidentally allowed to thaw (here, here, here). McLean and Harvard presumably take their mission just as seriously as Alcor and have certain organizational advantages.
My two cents: Store EEG data too
In the cryonics model, storing your EEG's didn't make much sense.
When (if) resuscitation "restarted your motor", your brainwaves would
come back on their own. Why keep a reference for them?
But plastination assumes from the start that revival consists of scanning your brain in and emulating it. Reconstructing you would surely be done computationally, so any source of information could be fed into the reconstruction logic.
Ideally the plastinated brain would preserve all the information that is you, and preserve it undistorted. But what if it preserved enough information but garbled it? Like, the information that got thru was ambiguous. There would be no way to tell the difference between the one answer that reconstructs your mind correctly and many other answers that construct something or someone else.
Having a reference point in a different modality could help a lot. I won't presume to guess how it would best be used in the future, but from an info-theory stance, there's a real chance that it might provide crucial information to reconstruct your mind correctly.
And having an EEG reference could provide something less crucial but very nice: verification.
But plastination assumes from the start that revival consists of scanning your brain in and emulating it. Reconstructing you would surely be done computationally, so any source of information could be fed into the reconstruction logic.
Ideally the plastinated brain would preserve all the information that is you, and preserve it undistorted. But what if it preserved enough information but garbled it? Like, the information that got thru was ambiguous. There would be no way to tell the difference between the one answer that reconstructs your mind correctly and many other answers that construct something or someone else.
Having a reference point in a different modality could help a lot. I won't presume to guess how it would best be used in the future, but from an info-theory stance, there's a real chance that it might provide crucial information to reconstruct your mind correctly.
And having an EEG reference could provide something less crucial but very nice: verification.
"In the cryonics model, storing your EEG's didn't make much sense. When (if) resuscitation "restarted your motor", your brainwaves would come back on their own. Why keep a reference for them?"
ReplyDeleteThat's a naive view of the cryonics model when you think about it -- there's no reason cryopreservation could not result in the same kind of scanning/emulation style reanimation scenario as you describe for plastination. The difference is that with cryonics there is an *additional* chance that some kind of biological repair can be accomplished. The chance of direct physical repair of the plastinated brain is lower (though not entirely nonexistant).
> That's a naive view of the cryonics model when you think about it -- there's no reason cryopreservation could not result in the same kind of scanning/emulation style reanimation scenario as you describe for plastination.
DeleteThat's true, and one of the supporting links I gave explores that counterargument. The counter-counter answer is that if we're planning cryonics-to-emulation, we end up wanting what plastination promises, especially in robustness.
"Not so fast", you might say, "What about keeping our options open? Cryonics-to-whatever-works."
Yes, keep our options open, but there are tradeoffs. The more likely cryonics-to-emulation is, the more tempting plastination is.
The big threat is that plastination is hit-or-miss. What it preserves, it preserves well, but in current SOA, whole sections of the brain might be unpreserved. The researchers who developed it didn't care about bringing their lab rats back from the dead, so that was considered good enough.
From a layman's POV, it doesn't look harder than cryonics infusing the whole brain with cryoprotectant, but there could be all sorts of technical details that make me wrong.