Cryonics is not a discussion that’s primarily about biology.
Well, the biological aspect is “where exactly in the body is ‘me’ located”?
For example, many people on LW seem to assume that the whole ‘me’ is in the head; so you can just freeze the head, and feed the rest to the worms. Maybe that’s a wrong idea; maybe the ‘me’ is much more distributed in the body, and the head is merely a coordinating organ, plus a center of a few things that need to work really fast. Maybe if the future science will revive the head and connect it to some cloned/artificial average human body, we will see the original personality replaced by more or less an average personality; perhaps keeping the memories of the original, but unable to empathise with the hobbies or values of the original.
For example, many people on LW seem to assume that the whole ‘me’ is in the head; so you can just freeze the head, and feed the rest to the worms.
Whether you need to freeze the whole body or whether the head is enough is a meaningful debate, but it has little to do with why a lot of people oppose cryonics.
At this stage, I can see an argument for freezing the gut, or at least samples of the gut, so as to get the microbiome. Anyone know about reviving frozen microbes?
Well, the biological aspect is “where exactly in the body is ‘me’ located”?
For example, many people on LW seem to assume that the whole ‘me’ is in the head; so you can just freeze the head, and feed the rest to the worms. Maybe that’s a wrong idea; maybe the ‘me’ is much more distributed in the body, and the head is merely a coordinating organ, plus a center of a few things that need to work really fast. Maybe if the future science will revive the head and connect it to some cloned/artificial average human body, we will see the original personality replaced by more or less an average personality; perhaps keeping the memories of the original, but unable to empathise with the hobbies or values of the original.
Whether you need to freeze the whole body or whether the head is enough is a meaningful debate, but it has little to do with why a lot of people oppose cryonics.
At this stage, I can see an argument for freezing the gut, or at least samples of the gut, so as to get the microbiome. Anyone know about reviving frozen microbes?
It’s not hard. IIRC people brought to life microbes which were frozen in permafrost tens of thousands of years ago.