47 replies to this topic

[Guest]

Let's be clear here, I don't think we die at every moment or every time we go to sleep, and I don't think it is only an abstract philosophical statement. Let's shape the problem in the simplest way possible.

Let's say I'm standing at point A and I want to move to point B. I have two means to do it.

Mean 1: I walk from point A to point B.

Mean 2: Scientists create a clone of myself in point B and kill me at point A.

In both instances, to an exterior observer, I have been effectively transfered from A to B. But for me, if you allow me to choose which mean I prefer, I prefer mean 1. I don't think it is just a philosophical matter.

Mean 1: I think I am me when I leave point A and I am still me when I arrive to point B.

Mean 2: I think when scientists create a clone of me (unconnected by anything, assuming telepathy is still impossible), then this is a whole new person, however identical, that is not me. And when they kill me, I cease to exist from my own perspective. The existence of any number of clones or virtual copies of my mind stored anywhere do not change anything to that.

This is what I feel sure of. Now, imagine a scale of human experiences ranging from 1 (being alive from my own perspective) to 2 (death from my own perspective). Here is how I would intuitively classify them (I don't have any proof of that obviously)

Day to day awake moments: 1
Day dreaming: 1
Going to sleep: 1
Being uploaded progressively (Moravec transfer (http://www.accelerat...t-is-uploading/)): 1

Going into coma: Unsure
Going into full anaesthesia: Unsure
Having my brain cool down for a neural surgery: Unsure

Dying: 2
Dying while having an identical twin: 2
Dying while having an identical clone: 2
Dying, but having an identical clone made of me in the future: 2
Dying, but having my body cryogenically preserved, then unfrozen and brought back to life: 2

Sadly, since this is highly subjective, I don't think science will ever be able to tackle with this issue. All we can use is thought experiments. And if I was myself a clone, I would have no mean to know it anyway.

Saying that you're dead, as in informational theoretical dead (opposed to the other sorts of dead which medicine brings people back from all the time), when you go into cryonics is BEGGING THE QUESTION then, as assuming they can revive you, it's no different than any other case where consciousness is temporarily halted and then resumed. Consciousness is not merely a function of the volatile, electrical activity in the brain because that's been stopped in multiple people and all that's missing is the couple of minutes around when it was stopped. I think that if there is any case of temporary halting in brain function that you accept as still the same person, then you have to accept cryonics. If there isn't such a case, you're not worth arguing with because there's a lot of people out there living after having experienced that, and believing that they're not the same person implies you believe in a duality of brain and mind, which I think is an empty position that isn't even worth trying to refute.

I doubt that there is any guy who lost his neuro-electrical activity and is still alive. Note: we are not just talking about plain brain waives used to declare the death of a guy or measure sleep phases. We are talking about the inter-neuronal acitivty - if you loose the electric potentials of the axons of your neurons and the ongoing electrochemical potential at your synapsis you are simply dead as your braincells no longer can interact. Whether consciousness goes beyond your neural acitivty can be surely argued about - but certainly it is a major part of it.

[KalaBeth]

Note: we are not just talking about plain brain waives used to declare the death of a guy or measure sleep phases. We are talking about the inter-neuronal acitivty - if you loose the electric potentials of the axons of your neurons and the ongoing electrochemical potential at your synapsis you are simply dead as your braincells no longer can interact. Whether consciousness goes beyond your neural acitivty can be surely argued about - but certainly it is a major part of it.

First - can you be more specific about "electrochemical potential at the synapse?" Also, has there not already been an animal brain put through the cryo process, returned, and still showing some electrical activity? Not full function of course, but some kind of activity? If so, how does this relate to the argument above?


It all does seem the crux of the argument as to whether "the I" is more akin to a "running software application" of electrical activity or to a "removable hard drive" of brain structure. Logically, the ability for the same pattern to be able to "boot back up" from a null or static state would seem to imply the latter - but simple human intuition has failed plenty. Questions of personality change with brain damage could go either way (for what it's worth, I've also seen the inverse of what TFC reports in a relative with dementia - the memories were gone, but the core personality remained essentially unaltered. More gentle and vulnerable, but still very much the same person.)

Is there a good layman's level overview of the "software vs hardware" subject? Or is it even close to settled yet?


edit - also, if the former case turns out to be more important that presently accounted for in cryonics, would a cold-but-not-frozen suspension still be possible, say in a nutrient-rich liquid with artificial circulation and periodic electrical stimulation to keep the pathways open? I realize it's awful science-fictiony.. but then, so is a lot of the stuff we're already doing these days. I'm about to get on a multi-ton machine that will take me through the freakin' sky.

Edited by KalaBeth, 05 December 2009 - 07:50 PM.

[Guest]

Currently science still has huge gaps in the knowledge about how the brain works exactly, how our mind is created due to the interaction of the neurons and even the way how information is processed and stored in the various brain areals.

I don't know about the animal brain, so it would be interesting to know what kind of "electrical acitivity" was shown. But to give you impression how the brain is constructed and how the neurons interact I recommend to start eg with wikipedia. Bascially your brain consists of billions of cells, which are connected by trillions of synapses. Long axons spread from each brain cell to 1000s of other braincells where the contact point is the synapsis. There is a steady electric potential within the axons and at the synapses and depending on the input from the neuron a decisive action potential travels along the axon to the synapsis, releasing neuro transmitters to enable communication. These potentials are of course largley atributed to various ions, their movement and compensation of electric charges.

So if this complexe system is not maintained, the interneuronal electric connections get lost. If your braincells die due to a lack of oxygen a general decay process occurs whereby the axons and synapses degrade. The connection to other brain cells get physically lost as well as the ions get neutralised, displaced, released uncoordinated etc. . In short: the brain cells no longer interact and the system wide electrical connection of the brainscells is disrupted. Of course this also is a matter of time. I could imagine, that in theory if you act very fast and very invasive (i.e. getting the complete brain frozen within say 2 minutes after cut of oxygen flow) you could freeze a brain "in process". However, this is defintiley not currently done in Cryonics.

Edited by TFC, 05 December 2009 - 09:16 PM.

[j0lt_c0la]

Note: we are not just talking about plain brain waives used to declare the death of a guy or measure sleep phases. We are talking about the inter-neuronal acitivty - if you loose the electric potentials of the axons of your neurons and the ongoing electrochemical potential at your synapsis you are simply dead as your braincells no longer can interact. Whether consciousness goes beyond your neural acitivty can be surely argued about - but certainly it is a major part of it.

First - can you be more specific about "electrochemical potential at the synapse?" Also, has there not already been an animal brain put through the cryo process, returned, and still showing some electrical activity? Not full function of course, but some kind of activity? If so, how does this relate to the argument above?


It all does seem the crux of the argument as to whether "the I" is more akin to a "running software application" of electrical activity or to a "removable hard drive" of brain structure. Logically, the ability for the same pattern to be able to "boot back up" from a null or static state would seem to imply the latter - but simple human intuition has failed plenty. Questions of personality change with brain damage could go either way (for what it's worth, I've also seen the inverse of what TFC reports in a relative with dementia - the memories were gone, but the core personality remained essentially unaltered. More gentle and vulnerable, but still very much the same person.)

Is there a good layman's level overview of the "software vs hardware" subject? Or is it even close to settled yet?


edit - also, if the former case turns out to be more important that presently accounted for in cryonics, would a cold-but-not-frozen suspension still be possible, say in a nutrient-rich liquid with artificial circulation and periodic electrical stimulation to keep the pathways open? I realize it's awful science-fictiony.. but then, so is a lot of the stuff we're already doing these days. I'm about to get on a multi-ton machine that will take me through the freakin' sky.

There are some papers about brain activity in animals after perfusion and cooling, but most of them are so old that I can't access them online even from my school's internet. One that I could find was a paper in Nature, Viability of Long Term Frozen Cat Brain In Vitro, where they perfused the brain of a cat, and then kept it at -20 degrees C for six months.

We especially emphasize the fact that in vivo perfusion of the brain for two hours or more, with the bloodless atificial solution used, was not lethal to nerve cells of the central nervous system. It was also effective in starting up the microcirculation of the brainand revival of its function after long storage and reperfusion. At this stage we wish to conclude that brain cells are not exceptionally vulnerable to lack of oxygen. It appears that even nerve cells of the brain can survive and be revived after long term storage under special circumstances.

I can't read ECGs so I can't tell you anything about what the results of those mean, but I think their conclusion is impressive enough, especially since they used glycerol as their perfusate for storage. Anyone who has access to the paper and can make sense of the more technical medical concepts would be appreciated, as to invert a famous saying, I'm a physicist, not a doctor. I do, though, think this provides a good argument.

[Guest]

Note: we are not just talking about plain brain waives used to declare the death of a guy or measure sleep phases. We are talking about the inter-neuronal acitivty - if you loose the electric potentials of the axons of your neurons and the ongoing electrochemical potential at your synapsis you are simply dead as your braincells no longer can interact. Whether consciousness goes beyond your neural acitivty can be surely argued about - but certainly it is a major part of it.

First - can you be more specific about "electrochemical potential at the synapse?" Also, has there not already been an animal brain put through the cryo process, returned, and still showing some electrical activity? Not full function of course, but some kind of activity? If so, how does this relate to the argument above?


It all does seem the crux of the argument as to whether "the I" is more akin to a "running software application" of electrical activity or to a "removable hard drive" of brain structure. Logically, the ability for the same pattern to be able to "boot back up" from a null or static state would seem to imply the latter - but simple human intuition has failed plenty. Questions of personality change with brain damage could go either way (for what it's worth, I've also seen the inverse of what TFC reports in a relative with dementia - the memories were gone, but the core personality remained essentially unaltered. More gentle and vulnerable, but still very much the same person.)

Is there a good layman's level overview of the "software vs hardware" subject? Or is it even close to settled yet?


edit - also, if the former case turns out to be more important that presently accounted for in cryonics, would a cold-but-not-frozen suspension still be possible, say in a nutrient-rich liquid with artificial circulation and periodic electrical stimulation to keep the pathways open? I realize it's awful science-fictiony.. but then, so is a lot of the stuff we're already doing these days. I'm about to get on a multi-ton machine that will take me through the freakin' sky.

There are some papers about brain activity in animals after perfusion and cooling, but most of them are so old that I can't access them online even from my school's internet. One that I could find was a paper in Nature, Viability of Long Term Frozen Cat Brain In Vitro, where they perfused the brain of a cat, and then kept it at -20 degrees C for six months.

We especially emphasize the fact that in vivo perfusion of the brain for two hours or more, with the bloodless atificial solution used, was not lethal to nerve cells of the central nervous system. It was also effective in starting up the microcirculation of the brainand revival of its function after long storage and reperfusion. At this stage we wish to conclude that brain cells are not exceptionally vulnerable to lack of oxygen. It appears that even nerve cells of the brain can survive and be revived after long term storage under special circumstances.

I can't read ECGs so I can't tell you anything about what the results of those mean, but I think their conclusion is impressive enough, especially since they used glycerol as their perfusate for storage. Anyone who has access to the paper and can make sense of the more technical medical concepts would be appreciated, as to invert a famous saying, I'm a physicist, not a doctor. I do, though, think this provides a good argument.

Yes, I heard from that neurons can under some circumstances/influence of hormones survive a lack of oxygen longer than the commonly alotted couple of minutes before starting to die. I can not access the paper so can not tell about preservation of neuronal connections, though I think it is more challenging to freeze a human brain "potential preserving" as it is simply very large.

[Medical Time Travel]

Yes, I heard from that neurons can under some circumstances/influence of hormones survive a lack of oxygen longer than the commonly alotted couple of minutes before starting to die. I can not access the paper so can not tell about preservation of neuronal connections, though I think it is more challenging to freeze a human brain "potential preserving" as it is simply very large.

You are correct that it is more challenging to vitrify "potential preserving" the human brain as it is simply very large. Recently I found a interesting website opened by a person who tries to set up a Brain Preservation Technology Prize: http://www.brainpreservation.org/

Edited by Medical Time Travel, 05 December 2009 - 11:04 PM.

[KalaBeth]

Thank you!

Wow... 1966? Why so little work in the last forty years? Was it abandoned as a dead end? Or some other reason?

There are some papers about brain activity in animals after perfusion and cooling, but most of them are so old that I can't access them online even from my school's internet. One that I could find was a paper in Nature, Viability of Long Term Frozen Cat Brain In Vitro, where they perfused the brain of a cat, and then kept it at -20 degrees C for six months.

[Shannon Vyff]

One reason KalaBeth is that it became difficult for cryonicists to use animals in experiments. That study was one of the ones I read as a teen that made me actually get the paperwork to sign up, its just common sense after you look at the evidence of how it is possible scientifically. If our society survives, or the cryonics organizations survive--that is what in my mind makes the possibility of cryonics working very small.

[bgwowk]

I doubt that there is any guy who lost his neuro-electrical activity and is still alive. Note: we are not just talking about plain brain waives used to declare the death of a guy or measure sleep phases. We are talking about the inter-neuronal acitivty - if you loose the electric potentials of the axons of your neurons and the ongoing electrochemical potential at your synapsis you are simply dead as your braincells no longer can interact. Whether consciousness goes beyond your neural acitivty can be surely argued about - but certainly it is a major part of it.

This is incorrect. Anyone whose heart was stopped for more than half minute and later resuscitated recovered from a state of zero brain electrical activity. That's thousands of people. Other reversible conditions that can shut down the brain include hypothermia, hypoxia, and high dose anesthesia. People in barbiturate comas can recover from days with no brain electrical activity. See

http://www.alcor.org...ltimetravel.htm

and

http://en.wikipedia..../Clinical_death

for references.

Brain electrical activity is like RAM. Long term memory is like your hard drive. People can and are routinely "rebooted" after power off. The key is keeping and/or restoring tissue health. Electrical activity is not required. In fact electrically activity is deliberately shut off with hypothermia and drugs during circ arrest surgeries because allowing it to persist when blood circulation is stopped is *worsens* prognosis for recovery.

The idea that cryonics creates any philosophy of mind problems that are new to medicine is incorrect.

http://www.depressed...something-else/

[Guest]

I doubt that there is any guy who lost his neuro-electrical activity and is still alive. Note: we are not just talking about plain brain waives used to declare the death of a guy or measure sleep phases. We are talking about the inter-neuronal acitivty - if you loose the electric potentials of the axons of your neurons and the ongoing electrochemical potential at your synapsis you are simply dead as your braincells no longer can interact. Whether consciousness goes beyond your neural acitivty can be surely argued about - but certainly it is a major part of it.

This is incorrect. Anyone whose heart was stopped for more than half minute and later resuscitated recovered from a state of zero brain electrical activity. That's thousands of people. Other reversible conditions that can shut down the brain include hypothermia, hypoxia, and high dose anesthesia. People in barbiturate comas can recover from days with no brain electrical activity. See

http://www.alcor.org...ltimetravel.htm

and

http://en.wikipedia..../Clinical_death

for references.

Brain electrical activity is like RAM. Long term memory is like your hard drive. People can and are routinely "rebooted" after power off. The key is keeping and/or restoring tissue health. Electrical activity is not required. In fact electrically activity is deliberately shut off with hypothermia and drugs during circ arrest surgeries because allowing it to persist when blood circulation is stopped is *worsens* prognosis for recovery.

The idea that cryonics creates any philosophy of mind problems that are new to medicine is incorrect.

http://www.depressed...something-else/

Oh, I do not doubt, that you can be "clinical dead", so especially having flat brain waves. Such states are routinely created in certain surgeries and the people recover. However, I doubt that they lost the neuroelectric potentials in their axons and synapses - so if you want the voltage connecting each and every brain cell. And I highly doubt that those are sufficently preserved in current Cryonics.

Imagine synapses as a tricky sequence of capacitors with breakdown voltages and the axons as the wires connecting them with a small transistor, the neuron. With the difference that it works with the physical movements of ions. Under certain circumstances they can be halted and even frozen in motion. But if you loose them the voltage is lost and transistor is just an isolated electric component without a higher purpose. The processor is destroyed.

Edited by TFC, 07 December 2009 - 11:03 PM.

[advancedatheist]

I think I'm the copy. The Mark who wakes up from cryostasis in Future World will be the real me.

[CryoBurger]

to our best knowledge, all atoms are the same and we constantly replace them throughout our life, even in our brain.

Here is where your argument fails. There is no ongoing swapping of any physical material while in suspension. Therefore you would be the exact same set of atoms you originally were, as there is no way to generate and renew while in suspension.

Furthermore, even though our entire body replaces every single one of our cells numerous times over, we still remember who we are. We still are the same person.

Based on your logic, you are not you, you just think you're you. You're claiming to be you. But the you of age 15 is not the same person. So you are an imposter.

There is obviously "cell memory" involved, so you remain "you" despite complete replacement of all cells.

So your own argument cancels itself out, unless you acknowledge that you are just a clone of your former self, and therefore an invalid version of the original you...

-CB-

[CryoBurger]

And if there is 100% chance that cryonics will not work, just as there is 100% chance that God doesn't exist, then no, putting effort in it is not a good bet. Better invest in life extension for your children.

With all due respect to those in the Life Extension camp here, if you actually believe that anything is going to happen in the short time you have remaining on this earth, that will make you immortal, than your ability for logical thought is downright lacking. If you believe this and also consider cryonics to be a useless waste of time, then I stand by my first assessment even more strongly. If you believe this, think cryonics is a waste of time, and are actually willing to bet all your luck on the assumption that you're going to be immortal in the next 40 years, then my friend - you be one crazy mofo.

[halneufmille]

Here is where your argument fails. There is no ongoing swapping of any physical material while in suspension. Therefore you would be the exact same set of atoms you originally were, as there is no way to generate and renew while in suspension.

Furthermore, even though our entire body replaces every single one of our cells numerous times over, we still remember who we are. We still are the same person.

This is exactly my point.

I will try to formulate my argument as a reductio ad absurdum. I assume a statement which leads to an illogical conclusion, proving that the assumption was wrong.

1. Assumption: If I die, then have my body kept frozen, then unfrozen and reanimated, it will feel for me like waking up from a long coma. I.E. Cryonics works.

2. But, since as you accept yourself, molecules and cells are replaceable, it means that instead of using my own frozen body, scientists could in principle, if such advanced technology existed, rebuild me from scratch (anyway, cryonics assume that they will repair the damages from vitrification, which is using matter to repair me partly). If they rebuild me from scratch, then I should still wake up in this new body just as in my own body.

3. But if they can rebuild my body once, there is nothing that prevents them from doing it any number of times and create "clones" of me. Let's say that instead of one, they create 10 copies of me and all wake them up. Then, it should feel for me like awaking from a coma in 10 different bodies at the same time. This is the illogical conclusion. Assuming away telepathy, I cannot be simultaneously be in 10 different bodies at the same time.

So what do I conclude?

1: If I am presently alive and you wake up a clone of me, this clone is independent of me. He is imbued with a consciousness of his own.
2: Does the nature of this clone depends on me being presently alive or not? No. So if you wake up a clone of me while I'm dead, he is still independent of me and I don't "wake up" in this clone.
3: Specific molecules do not form "who we are". Thus, since waking up a clone do not "wake me up", then waking up my own dead body do not "wake me up" either. A new conscience enters in this body and I remain dead.

Conclusion: Cryonics do not work. Even if it can bring your body back to life, it can not bring YOU back to life.

Now, I'm not saying I religiously believes this. I could be wrong somewhere. But If somebody wants to challenge this reasoning, they should point out the step or steps where I'm incorrect.

[ben951]

3: Specific molecules do not form "who we are". Thus, since waking up a clone do not "wake me up", then waking up my own dead body do not "wake me up" either. A new conscience enters in this body and I remain dead.

I understand your sets of thoughts but not the conclusion you draw from it.

To me the deduction of that statement is:"Specific molecules do not form "who we are"." so an exact copies of me is me no matter what the substrate is.

At least it's not less me than the me before and the me now, since we replace the atoms of our substrate all the time

I don't think clone is the proper word since it means genetically identical but does not include memories, experience etc..

If me make multiple copies of you, each one will become independent from the other the moment they come to existence like a branch that divide itself through time.

Time is very important here if for instance you travel back through time and meet yourself, we know it's possible in theory (time is just another dimension) are they 2 different person talking to each other ?

Yes and no, not more or less than the you know and the you before or your copies after you wake up from cryonics, by the way i don't think they will make multiple copies of you without your consent.

Identity will become a big issue in the future, at some point we will build AGI and obviously be able to duplicate their identity there's no reason to think we won't be able to do it for ourselves too.

Edited by ben951, 08 December 2009 - 11:02 AM.

[halneufmille]

I don't think clone is the proper word since it means genetically identical but does not include memories, experience etc..

Granted, I will only use the expression "exact copy".

3: Specific molecules do not form "who we are". Thus, since waking up a clone do not "wake me up", then waking up my own dead body do not "wake me up" either. A new conscience enters in this body and I remain dead.

I understand your sets of thoughts but not the conclusion you draw from it.
To me the deduction of that statement is:"Specific molecules do not form "who we are"." so an exact copies of me is me no matter what the substrate is.

The conclusion is the opposite. I say that since I cannot awake in an exact copy of myself (conclusion 2), and since my own dead body is equivalent to any exact copy of my dead body (because exact molecules do not matter), then the conclusion (3) must be that I cannot awake in my own dead body either.

At least it's not less me than the me before and the me now, since we replace the atoms of our substrate all the time

Of course, then the natural question is: Am I not died and reborn at each moment? I think the reason that we stay ourselves from moment to moment is that our brain is constantly activated by electricity. But this is speculative. See post #26 and the great posts by xlifex.

Identity will become a big issue in the future, at some point we will build AGI and obviously be able to duplicate their identity there's no reason to think we won't be able to do it for ourselves too.

Yes, I think we might be able to upload ourselves, but in a progressive, Moravec transfer sense (http://www.accelerat...t-is-uploading/). Otherwise, an upload would just be a virtual copy of your mind without really being yourself.

Edited by halneufmille, 08 December 2009 - 02:47 PM.

[enoonsti]

I think I'm the copy. The Mark who wakes up from cryostasis in Future World will be the real me.

...and Mark wins this topic. Thanks everyone for participating.

[CryoBurger]

To the original poster - I really don't think your concerns are going to be an issue honestly. There are much bigger fish to fry in the world of potential problems / challenges.

Assimilation will be a big issue.

Jobs. Employment.

Education. Social standing.

Quality of life.

Emotional / Psychological Stability and health.

Dont we have examples of people dying? You're still you. Whether or not you're you is entirely based upon whether your memories were damaged.

I dont think any of the other issues you raise are going to be an issue.

The fact that we replace 100% of our cells every "X" number of years is proof that you can probably rest at ease.

And if you're using this as your justification for avoiding Cryonics altogether, then I don't think its justified.

-CB-