🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <34b8dc3d.701477672@news.mindspring.com>,
cryon@mindspring.com (Randy Smith) wrote:

>This, then, is really the foundation upon which the *hope* (not faith,
>not just wishful thinking) of cryonicists rests: the inevitable
>advance  of science as applied to information theory:  as long as the
>*medium* of the message is not destroyed (as it would be when it rots
>in the coffin), with the advance of science, the day may very well
>come when any message previously thought lost will someday be
>decipherable.

In which case that's fine; I was getting the impression that some people
here believed that freezing (with the best care and the latest techniques)
would produce, to put it simply, a "revivable" brain.

However, I still have a great deal of trouble believing that any future
technology could decode and reapply the information required to recreate
the person- because the medium of the message is *still* being destroyed on
freezing, although more subtly than by rotting.

A radical improvement in freezing techniques might do the trick- or at
least part of it. But as I said, it has to satisfy two vital and mutually
contradictory requirements at once; no significant damage and a high degree
of stabilisation.

I do call it wishful thinking. But that's just semantics I guess.

And I still think that the lack of continuity of brain function is crucial
to the difference between dying and "going through an experience" (hard to
find a word for it- survival?) Having had four total anaesthetics and a
couple of incidents with loss of consciousness in my life- not too many but
enough- I have found that the continuity is always there, very strongly in
the case of short (seconds or minutes long) interruption, pretty strongly
in the case of an hour or so. However I'd have expected that, and we're
talking about decades. I really think that the one experience doesn't
translate well to the other.

By the way, my whole point is that there is nothing outside the physical
self; we really are just a bag of chemicals. If there were a soul, it would
all be so easy wouldn't it?

-- 
Peter