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Cryonics and information theory


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#1 Bruce Klein

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Posted 07 July 2003 - 03:55 PM


source: Transhumanity

Cryonics and information theory
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, July 7, 2003

I’ve spoken with Peter Passaro about this [the feasibility of cryonics], and apparently the main things are (a) get frozen as soon as possible after death (b) use the new oxygenated cryoprotectants © keep the brain from being starved of oxygen. So people are working on it, and if you get frozen with the latest techniques your chance of survival may still be pretty good.

One problem I have, though, is that it still looks to me like it would be better to just chop off the head and drop it into a bucket of liquid nitrogen as fast as possible. *Large*-scale freezing damage is irrelevant; you can still connect the dots easily enough. What you want to ensure is that the information, the Shannon information, is still there. I would not be surprised to find even the earliest cryonics patients are resurrectable in toto; it is not necessary that the cells be reparable but that their physical state, when scanned down to the atomic level, contain enough information to extrapolate back the original brain and its relevant high-level information. The critical parameters here are a matter of information theory, not just medicine, and not at all obvious (i.e., how many initial states map to the same post-freezing state, whether critical information is in global patterns or local patterns, whether information makes a distinction in the final molecular state even if the apparent functional characteristics of the neuron have been destroyed).

more: http://www.transhuma...?id=696_0_4_0_M




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