Yes, unquestionably some of the “information” that constitutes your person hood is in your gut, your glands, your immune system and your peripheral nervous system. However, your position would seem to imply that these things, and things much more central to your identity, such as your brain structure, are like unchanging books or artifacts on a museum shelf. They aren’t. In fact, by the time you are 80, you will have lost roughly a third of your brain mass and your brain will be a tattered “remnant” of what it once was. You’re now losing roughly 80K neurons a day. The practical consequences of this will be a massive transformation of your personality and of your functional capabilities. If that change were to be imposed on you all at once, you would not only be horrified, you likely wouldn’t even recognize the resulting individual as the same person. More likely, you’d consider that individual to be a cruel and sadistic parody of yourself.
The point is that your “identity” is a dynamic thing which is badly degraded over time by aging. This is important information to keep in mind, because it provides context for what I’m going to say now. I have known a good number of people who have no stomach or intestines. They could not eat food of any kind. They stayed alive by virtue of total parenteral nutrition (TPN) which provides for all their fluid and nutritional needs intravenously. These people did not undergo any perceptible change in memory, personality or person-hood. At least three such people I’ve known have also had kidney transplants. That’s even more interesting, because we now know that many patients with successful, long term grafts become chimeric with the donor! Donor immune and stem cells colonize the patient! Similarly, any mother is chimeric for each of her fetuses. In fact, in animals, if you injure the mother’s heart or brain during pregnancy, the fetal stem cells are the ones which repair the damage—massively remodeling the damaged organs. This chimerism seems to be an evolutionary adaptation to protect the mother against injury during pregnancy.
To my knowledge, no one is upset at the idea that a significant fraction of the stem cell population in such people is ALIEN. And those stem cells are genetically and functionally different from the native ones. Maybe more than the gut, the immune system is an extension of the brain—they interact dynamically and the immune system can and does profoundly effect mood and behavior.
So what is identity? Well, that’s complicated, but one thing is clear, it is NOT static and a lot of the changes in the structures which determine it happen all the time as part of life, and you have little or no control over them. Where this intersects whole body vs. neuro is that you have the need (arguably the necessity) to decide just what parts of you are truly essential to your person-hood AND at what cost in risk to survival they can be taken along during cryopreservation.
If you are smart, cool, and rational, you’ll try to determine just what parts of you are really you—are really essential to your person-hood. This would be an impossible black box of a task were it not for contemporary transplant and artificial organ medicine. There are tens of thousands of people on dialysis or who get kidney transplants. There are people with no hearts, or new hearts, and people with gut, liver, pancreas and renal transplants. There are countless people with bone marrow transplants and countless others whose spinal cord and peripheral nervous system have been functionally disconnected from their brains. Do these people constitute an acceptable degree of survival for you as persons? If so, I would suggest you delve into the logistics, economics and hard practical realities of cryopreservation that must endure over a period of many decades, or far more likely, a century or two. It is NOT easy to handle, move or care for whole body patients. They are a ball and chain and cannot be moved or evacuated quickly. They are subject to a large burden of state regulation which neuros are not, and they suffer additional injury to the brain as a result of compromises necessary to achieve cryoprotection and cooling.
If you think that those components of you identity present in your body are worth those added risks, then you should go whole body. However, my question is, where is the empirical evidence to support that belief? I’ve known many, many transplant patients well, and neither they nor I saw any noticeable transformation in their identity. Indeed, the transformation, such as it was, was the return to fully functioning person-hood which resulted from becoming chimeric with another human being or a machine.
Thanks for the very thoughtful reply. I hadn’t properly considered the “ball and chain” risks of whole body you mentioned. Is there much of a chance that technology will develop in a way so that I will be revived sooner if I go with whole body rather than neuro?
Yes, unquestionably some of the “information” that constitutes your person hood is in your gut, your glands, your immune system and your peripheral nervous system. However, your position would seem to imply that these things, and things much more central to your identity, such as your brain structure, are like unchanging books or artifacts on a museum shelf. They aren’t. In fact, by the time you are 80, you will have lost roughly a third of your brain mass and your brain will be a tattered “remnant” of what it once was. You’re now losing roughly 80K neurons a day. The practical consequences of this will be a massive transformation of your personality and of your functional capabilities. If that change were to be imposed on you all at once, you would not only be horrified, you likely wouldn’t even recognize the resulting individual as the same person. More likely, you’d consider that individual to be a cruel and sadistic parody of yourself.
The point is that your “identity” is a dynamic thing which is badly degraded over time by aging. This is important information to keep in mind, because it provides context for what I’m going to say now. I have known a good number of people who have no stomach or intestines. They could not eat food of any kind. They stayed alive by virtue of total parenteral nutrition (TPN) which provides for all their fluid and nutritional needs intravenously. These people did not undergo any perceptible change in memory, personality or person-hood. At least three such people I’ve known have also had kidney transplants. That’s even more interesting, because we now know that many patients with successful, long term grafts become chimeric with the donor! Donor immune and stem cells colonize the patient! Similarly, any mother is chimeric for each of her fetuses. In fact, in animals, if you injure the mother’s heart or brain during pregnancy, the fetal stem cells are the ones which repair the damage—massively remodeling the damaged organs. This chimerism seems to be an evolutionary adaptation to protect the mother against injury during pregnancy.
To my knowledge, no one is upset at the idea that a significant fraction of the stem cell population in such people is ALIEN. And those stem cells are genetically and functionally different from the native ones. Maybe more than the gut, the immune system is an extension of the brain—they interact dynamically and the immune system can and does profoundly effect mood and behavior.
So what is identity? Well, that’s complicated, but one thing is clear, it is NOT static and a lot of the changes in the structures which determine it happen all the time as part of life, and you have little or no control over them. Where this intersects whole body vs. neuro is that you have the need (arguably the necessity) to decide just what parts of you are truly essential to your person-hood AND at what cost in risk to survival they can be taken along during cryopreservation.
If you are smart, cool, and rational, you’ll try to determine just what parts of you are really you—are really essential to your person-hood. This would be an impossible black box of a task were it not for contemporary transplant and artificial organ medicine. There are tens of thousands of people on dialysis or who get kidney transplants. There are people with no hearts, or new hearts, and people with gut, liver, pancreas and renal transplants. There are countless people with bone marrow transplants and countless others whose spinal cord and peripheral nervous system have been functionally disconnected from their brains. Do these people constitute an acceptable degree of survival for you as persons? If so, I would suggest you delve into the logistics, economics and hard practical realities of cryopreservation that must endure over a period of many decades, or far more likely, a century or two. It is NOT easy to handle, move or care for whole body patients. They are a ball and chain and cannot be moved or evacuated quickly. They are subject to a large burden of state regulation which neuros are not, and they suffer additional injury to the brain as a result of compromises necessary to achieve cryoprotection and cooling.
If you think that those components of you identity present in your body are worth those added risks, then you should go whole body. However, my question is, where is the empirical evidence to support that belief? I’ve known many, many transplant patients well, and neither they nor I saw any noticeable transformation in their identity. Indeed, the transformation, such as it was, was the return to fully functioning person-hood which resulted from becoming chimeric with another human being or a machine.
Thanks for the very thoughtful reply. I hadn’t properly considered the “ball and chain” risks of whole body you mentioned. Is there much of a chance that technology will develop in a way so that I will be revived sooner if I go with whole body rather than neuro?