Keep in mind that to freeze and unfreeze C. elegans you need much lower concentrations of the cryoprotectants as the freezing rate is much faster. Can’t generalize this onto freezing your whole head slowly (due to it’s size) with much larger concentrations of the cryoprotectants.
Yes, my takeaway from this is that it might be better to chop up my brain (provided it could be done with minimal damage) and freeze the pieces. The person recovered isn’t going to be exactly me. Will he be as close to me as myself waking the next day? Could we conceive of an empirical measure of such distance, even if we can’t implement one yet?
I think the chopped up brain would be as much you as you after a concussion assuming no bulk damage within slices. The neurons along the cut lines are destroyed, but it is still small percentile of all the neurons, and it’s not localized to one critical region. The neurons express distinct versions of a protein for self avoidance http://biologie.univ-mrs.fr/upload/p243/Dscam.pdf , so it is plausible that you can make sense of which wire goes where after scanning. Whereas the brain where all the strengths were screwed up by cryoprotectants, may likely be completely insane or entirely lack anything that you’d care to preserve.
This is assuming there’s no gotcha like the memory storage being dependent on a dynamic process.
I’ve argued elsewhere that this is the proper way to think about preserving identity. Being me is a property that various things possess to varying degrees, and to the extent to which I value continuing to exist I should value the extent to which things in the future are me.
Keep in mind that to freeze and unfreeze C. elegans you need much lower concentrations of the cryoprotectants as the freezing rate is much faster. Can’t generalize this onto freezing your whole head slowly (due to it’s size) with much larger concentrations of the cryoprotectants.
Yes, my takeaway from this is that it might be better to chop up my brain (provided it could be done with minimal damage) and freeze the pieces. The person recovered isn’t going to be exactly me. Will he be as close to me as myself waking the next day? Could we conceive of an empirical measure of such distance, even if we can’t implement one yet?
I think the chopped up brain would be as much you as you after a concussion assuming no bulk damage within slices. The neurons along the cut lines are destroyed, but it is still small percentile of all the neurons, and it’s not localized to one critical region. The neurons express distinct versions of a protein for self avoidance http://biologie.univ-mrs.fr/upload/p243/Dscam.pdf , so it is plausible that you can make sense of which wire goes where after scanning. Whereas the brain where all the strengths were screwed up by cryoprotectants, may likely be completely insane or entirely lack anything that you’d care to preserve.
This is assuming there’s no gotcha like the memory storage being dependent on a dynamic process.
I’ve argued elsewhere that this is the proper way to think about preserving identity. Being me is a property that various things possess to varying degrees, and to the extent to which I value continuing to exist I should value the extent to which things in the future are me.