It’s my understanding that cryogenic freezing does a tremendous amount of currently irreversible damage to the brain. If so, then the future technology that can reverse the damage, or else read the contents of the brain despite the damage, might be able to do the same for a gunshot to the head.
I’m not as enthusiastic about cryo as some here, and neither am I an expert in it. That said, my understanding of the procedure is that in successfully vitrified tissue it kills neurons via cryoprotectant toxicity but preserves neural structure and enough chemistry to make a pretty good guess about their internal state. You’ll find neither in a brain scrambled by gunshot: at least in the damaged portions, and barring truly Clarkeian technology, that information is permanently lost to entropy.
Depends on how scrambled. If you take a porcelain vase and drop in on a hard floor, it will shatter. But you can put the pieces together. The bits of brain may be indistinguishable to the human eye, but unless they are literally creamed, the individual cells separated from each other on an individual level (a possibility—I don’t know the specifics), it might be possible to re-assemble the bits.
Cells are not so resilient that a bullet will simply separate them and leave them otherwise intact. It may or may not be possible in principle to tell “which cell goes where” if you were to separate them, but a bullet to the head doesn’t even give you something that convenient to work with.
You’re talking about a “creamed” brain—one in which the individual cells are separated from each other on an individual level. I was explicitly specifying a brain that is not creamed, but rather, we might say, shredded. I did admit that I didn’t know the specifics, so I’m not 100% sure that a bullet merely shreds the brain. I’m no ballistics expert.
Remember paper shredding? We used to do this to hide secrets. Many people still do it. But it doesn’t work any more. The shreds can be reconstructed. Now with scanners and computers the process can be automated. Quoting Wpedia:
After the capture of the United States embassy in Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis, shredded documents were turned over for painstaking manual reconstruction, which revealed to Iran some U.S. operations including spies. Today, scanners and computers can reconstruct shredded documents very quickly.
So, shredding a document was previously considered to effectively lose the information to entropy. No longer are we under any such delusion—with today’s technology, shredding is no longer sufficient. Now we need to burn our secrets—hence, the burn bag.
Now apply this point to the brain. If the brain was shredded, that doesn’t mean that the chunks of it can’t be reconstructed. Not today, obviously, but I wasn’t talking about today. One of the methods of revival speculated about is scanning the brain and using the data to create an upload personality. But it’s precisely scanning that makes it so easy today to reconstruct shredded documents. So even if scrambled brains seem like a mess to us—seem like a shredded document—that doesn’t mean they will provide a serious challenge to the sort of computing power involved in uploading personalities.
Also, a person can often survive massive chunks of his brain being removed. A person can survive with half his brain removed. All I see in that famous photo of Bin Laden is a little hole over one of his eyes. Maybe the whole brain was turned into cream. Or maybe only one half of his brain was creamed. If the latter, then the possibility remained that he could have been revived at a future date, had he been frozen.
It’s my understanding that cryogenic freezing does a tremendous amount of currently irreversible damage to the brain. If so, then the future technology that can reverse the damage, or else read the contents of the brain despite the damage, might be able to do the same for a gunshot to the head.
I’m not as enthusiastic about cryo as some here, and neither am I an expert in it. That said, my understanding of the procedure is that in successfully vitrified tissue it kills neurons via cryoprotectant toxicity but preserves neural structure and enough chemistry to make a pretty good guess about their internal state. You’ll find neither in a brain scrambled by gunshot: at least in the damaged portions, and barring truly Clarkeian technology, that information is permanently lost to entropy.
Depends on how scrambled. If you take a porcelain vase and drop in on a hard floor, it will shatter. But you can put the pieces together. The bits of brain may be indistinguishable to the human eye, but unless they are literally creamed, the individual cells separated from each other on an individual level (a possibility—I don’t know the specifics), it might be possible to re-assemble the bits.
Cells are not so resilient that a bullet will simply separate them and leave them otherwise intact. It may or may not be possible in principle to tell “which cell goes where” if you were to separate them, but a bullet to the head doesn’t even give you something that convenient to work with.
You’re talking about a “creamed” brain—one in which the individual cells are separated from each other on an individual level. I was explicitly specifying a brain that is not creamed, but rather, we might say, shredded. I did admit that I didn’t know the specifics, so I’m not 100% sure that a bullet merely shreds the brain. I’m no ballistics expert.
Remember paper shredding? We used to do this to hide secrets. Many people still do it. But it doesn’t work any more. The shreds can be reconstructed. Now with scanners and computers the process can be automated. Quoting Wpedia:
So, shredding a document was previously considered to effectively lose the information to entropy. No longer are we under any such delusion—with today’s technology, shredding is no longer sufficient. Now we need to burn our secrets—hence, the burn bag.
Now apply this point to the brain. If the brain was shredded, that doesn’t mean that the chunks of it can’t be reconstructed. Not today, obviously, but I wasn’t talking about today. One of the methods of revival speculated about is scanning the brain and using the data to create an upload personality. But it’s precisely scanning that makes it so easy today to reconstruct shredded documents. So even if scrambled brains seem like a mess to us—seem like a shredded document—that doesn’t mean they will provide a serious challenge to the sort of computing power involved in uploading personalities.
Also, a person can often survive massive chunks of his brain being removed. A person can survive with half his brain removed. All I see in that famous photo of Bin Laden is a little hole over one of his eyes. Maybe the whole brain was turned into cream. Or maybe only one half of his brain was creamed. If the latter, then the possibility remained that he could have been revived at a future date, had he been frozen.