But the cells remain dead, as does the organ they comprise.
In the case of vitrification under ideal conditions this is not true of most of the cells. There is a spectrum of cryonics cases, and many of them do have a high rate of cell death, but the goal of cryonics is to prevent cell death to the greatest degree possible.
Death is a process, not an all or nothing proposition. You don’t really need to assign a category “dead” or “not dead” to understand what’s going on. The brain is broken beyond simple repair and ceases to be animate. Maybe a more useful term would be one that connotes brokenness rather than irreparability.
Most cells survive for several hours after clinical death. Ten minutes or so without oxygen (blood flow) initiates an ischemic cascade that current technology cannot halt, but this cascade takes a lot of time before most of the cells actually die.
ETA: It is a good point that cell death isn’t the same problem as information loss. A really powerful AI with high grade molecular nanotech could probably recover more information by analyzing non-viable cells than a more minimalistic rejuvenation technology that simply rescues the remaining viable cells and replaces missing ones.
My problem with “broken” in this context is that it fails to distinguish between a brain that fails to function as intended in some important capacity—for example, one that is incapable of identifying its person’s wife—and one that fails to function as intended in any capacity at all.
I guess I can go with “inanimate,” if you want (since you say “ceases to be animate”). It seems weird to fail to distinguish between a corpse and a statue, but not unbearably weird.
Perhaps a different prefix would make it more clear that it is a formerly animate object, or between stages of being animate. E.g. postanimate or transanimate.
In the case of vitrification under ideal conditions this is not true of most of the cells. There is a spectrum of cryonics cases, and many of them do have a high rate of cell death, but the goal of cryonics is to prevent cell death to the greatest degree possible.
Death is a process, not an all or nothing proposition. You don’t really need to assign a category “dead” or “not dead” to understand what’s going on. The brain is broken beyond simple repair and ceases to be animate. Maybe a more useful term would be one that connotes brokenness rather than irreparability.
Most cells survive for several hours after clinical death. Ten minutes or so without oxygen (blood flow) initiates an ischemic cascade that current technology cannot halt, but this cascade takes a lot of time before most of the cells actually die.
ETA: It is a good point that cell death isn’t the same problem as information loss. A really powerful AI with high grade molecular nanotech could probably recover more information by analyzing non-viable cells than a more minimalistic rejuvenation technology that simply rescues the remaining viable cells and replaces missing ones.
My problem with “broken” in this context is that it fails to distinguish between a brain that fails to function as intended in some important capacity—for example, one that is incapable of identifying its person’s wife—and one that fails to function as intended in any capacity at all.
I guess I can go with “inanimate,” if you want (since you say “ceases to be animate”). It seems weird to fail to distinguish between a corpse and a statue, but not unbearably weird.
Perhaps a different prefix would make it more clear that it is a formerly animate object, or between stages of being animate. E.g. postanimate or transanimate.
More optimistically, pre-reanimated.