Evidence that the head is mostly enough is the fact that people sometimes get upper spinal injuries that make them quadriplegic, and when that happens it sure sucks for them but we don’t think of it as “they died and got replaced by a different person”. Right? I might be misunderstanding spinal injuries.
it’s not just money- a severed head is considered medical waste, which has fewer regulations around handling than a whole body (source: talk I saw several years ago). So there are borderline situations where you can get a head frozen much faster than a whole body.
This comment finally prompted me to ask Alcor if I can do some sort of split decision, where I get body frozen if it’s very convenient but head if not.
How does cyronic neuropreservation consider the peripheral and enteric nervous systems? why do they assume CNS is enough?
As far as I know, you have both options, but freezing only the head is cheaper.
My guess would be that the head is not everything, but it is more than 90% of “everything”. I may be wrong; there is a lot of guessing here.
I suspect that more people would freeze their entire bodies if cryonics became much cheaper.
Evidence that the head is mostly enough is the fact that people sometimes get upper spinal injuries that make them quadriplegic, and when that happens it sure sucks for them but we don’t think of it as “they died and got replaced by a different person”. Right? I might be misunderstanding spinal injuries.
it’s not just money- a severed head is considered medical waste, which has fewer regulations around handling than a whole body (source: talk I saw several years ago). So there are borderline situations where you can get a head frozen much faster than a whole body.
This comment finally prompted me to ask Alcor if I can do some sort of split decision, where I get body frozen if it’s very convenient but head if not.