Personally, I would be very impressed if anyone could demonstrate memory loss in a cryopreserved and then revived organism, like a bunch of C. elegans losing their maze-running memories. They’re very simple, robust organisms, it’s a large crude memory, the vitrification process ought to work far better on them than a human brain, and if their memories can’t survive, that’d be huge evidence against anything sensible coming out of vitrified human brains no matter how much nanotech scanning is done (and needless to say, such scanning or emulation methods can and will be tested on a tiny worm with a small fixed set of neurons long before they can be used on anything approaching a human brain). It says a lot about how poorly funded cryonics research is that no one has done this or something similar as far as I know.
Hmm, I wonder how much has been done on figuring out the memory storage in this organism. Like, if you knock out a few neurons or maybe synapses, how much does it forget?
Since it’s C. elegans, I assume the answer is ‘a ton of work has been done’, but I’m too tired right now to go look or read more medical/biological papers.
I’m not totally sure I’d call this sufficient evidence since functional damage != many-to-one mapping but it would shave some points off the probability for existing tech and be a pointer to look for the exact mode of functional memory loss.
Personally, I would be very impressed if anyone could demonstrate memory loss in a cryopreserved and then revived organism, like a bunch of C. elegans losing their maze-running memories. They’re very simple, robust organisms, it’s a large crude memory, the vitrification process ought to work far better on them than a human brain, and if their memories can’t survive, that’d be huge evidence against anything sensible coming out of vitrified human brains no matter how much nanotech scanning is done (and needless to say, such scanning or emulation methods can and will be tested on a tiny worm with a small fixed set of neurons long before they can be used on anything approaching a human brain). It says a lot about how poorly funded cryonics research is that no one has done this or something similar as far as I know.
Hmm, I wonder how much has been done on figuring out the memory storage in this organism. Like, if you knock out a few neurons or maybe synapses, how much does it forget?
Since it’s C. elegans, I assume the answer is ‘a ton of work has been done’, but I’m too tired right now to go look or read more medical/biological papers.
I’m not totally sure I’d call this sufficient evidence since functional damage != many-to-one mapping but it would shave some points off the probability for existing tech and be a pointer to look for the exact mode of functional memory loss.