I’m somewhat annoyed with the current state of cryonics, because even though there are references to the information-theoretic notion of death, the concept isn’t pushed far enough.
It seems pretty plausible to me that an Alzheimer-afflicted head of an autopsied corpse with a bullet in the brain that lied at room temperature for 2 days and then fractured while cooling down after being thrown in liquid nitrogen without any kind of vitrification will still contain redundant information about almost every aspect of the original person.
From this perspective, setting a cutoff for the proper condition in which patients are admissible for preservation is pretty much the same mistake as throwing away the patients that are only clinically dead for several minutes. You just don’t know how to restore a patient in that condition, what can possibly be done with this scrambled message.
I’m somewhat annoyed with the current state of cryonics, because even though there are references to the information-theoretic notion of death, the concept isn’t pushed far enough.
It seems pretty plausible to me that an Alzheimer-afflicted head of an autopsied corpse with a bullet in the brain that lied at room temperature for 2 days and then fractured while cooling down after being thrown in liquid nitrogen without any kind of vitrification will still contain redundant information about almost every aspect of the original person.
From this perspective, setting a cutoff for the proper condition in which patients are admissible for preservation is pretty much the same mistake as throwing away the patients that are only clinically dead for several minutes. You just don’t know how to restore a patient in that condition, what can possibly be done with this scrambled message.