102 replies to this topic

[Danail Bulgaria]

I recommend in this discussion to be more scientific, i.e. to use the known scientific facts, and for the unknown details to use the version, that is most closely related with the scientific way of thinking and a possible way of scientifically researching it.

About the soul:
When considering reanimation You must not deal with the soul. No matter if it exist or not, the fact is, that today reanimation in the first minutes to hour is possible. So, even if actually the soul exists, it can be brought back in the body. My persoanl oppinion is that the soul do not exist.

The real issues, that must be considered are:

1) The possibility a vitrified person to be unvetrified and/or a frozen person to be refrozen.
To answer this question must be cited cases of frozen and refrozen back animals and people when using a specific methodic and the effect of that. If such data do not exist, then it must be experimented with animals. A group of alive animal must be frozen to cryogenic temperature and refrozen again, and to be seen the result as follows: The number of those, that survived, the number of those, that not survived and the number of the survived with serious imparement of the body must be statistically calculated. Then the result will be scientific and we may say yes or no the science today can not freeze and refreeze back an animal with this methodic. So, the question of this matter is: Does anyone knows of frozen and refrozen cases of animals and people?

2) The possibility the death person to be revived.
I watched a movie for Alcor for the vitrification of a preson, named Anita Riskin. From the movie, as far as I understood, the time needed to perform the procedure from the death to the vitrification was more than an hour. According to my medical knowledge, after this period irreversible (for now) damage of the cells appear. The possibility for reanimation of people, who left death for more than an hour, according to my medical knowledge will not be possible in the near future. This means, that people, who expect to be refrozen until 2050 will not be able to be refrozen. As for reversing the irreversible damage, at this moment the medicine things, that this reversing is impossible, so the chance the medicine to start working in this direction also are not encouraging for the near future.

3) The possibility to be cured the disease, that led to the death.
Here the possibilities this to hapen are bigger. Medicine imbunes alot of money, effort, work and whatever You can imagine for defeating the incurable diseases, leading to death. According to me it is possible at the year 2050 to be able to cure many of uncurable today diseases and stages.

4) The possibility the restored and recovered person to become immortal.
To become immortal is the dream, that everyone in this forum has. So far scientific proof, that this is impossible do not exist. Unfortunately, according to me this will not happen during our life and the life of our childern. I hope that our grandchildren will have the chance to be immortal.

5) The possibility the future society to allow that.
The world surely goes to overpopulation. The chances for the society to allow the previous four points is minimal.

6) The cost of the procedure.
I have serious doubts, that the cost of the procedure is artifitially increased. The devices, that I saw on the Alcor movie, and the consumatives, plus the technics and the number of the involved people will not reach 200 000 dollads (at least if the same was made in my country - Bulgaria). This leads me to the logical point, that fraud is quite possible.

[CryoBurger]

This thread has gotten off topic.

I created it because I would like to see examples that provide evidence that we are nothing more than machines.

Until that evidence can be provided, I retain my opinion that there is a huge assumption in Cryonics. That humans are just machines, and can just be "turned on" like a switch.

I realize this concept is utterly absurd if your worldview does not include any form of immaterial existence, despite the evidence pointing towards numerous other dimensions, but try to ignore your bias and humor the question anyways. People such as yourself laugh at anyone who believes there is a spirit, because we have no evidence to support such a thing, right? What evidence to you have to support your assumption that a human who has been pronounced dead, can be brought back to life simply by thawing them?

Or did we already establish in previous pages that there needs to be some sort of stimulus to start the heart pumping again, etc...

[nickthird]

Well the problem here is that it is not clear what a 'dead' human is.
To be more precise, it is not clear, what happens to the 'you' after you are pronounced brain dead.

If what makes a you is atoms, then, yes it would make sense life can be restarted, since a 'dead' you is the same atoms, albeit not incorporated in the process which is 'life'.

If what makes a you is the interaction of particles in itself, there you have trouble, since close to zero kelvin would stop that, killing you off. Then 'restarting' your life, would mean, creating a new interaction, which would not be the same you.

[Luminosity]

There's just no evidence that life can be restored to someone who has been dead for more than a few days. Furthermore, most people who have died are not restorable. Freezing someone just slows decomposition of their DEAD BODY. That is all. I can't think of a live person who was been accidentally frozen for days and successfully restored to life. The whole assumption behind cryogenics is flawed. I am afraid that it will put people's remains through an ordeal, as well as their loved ones. Not so nice things have happened to people's cryogenically frozen remains. Look what happens to neglected graves, which are not that hard to maintain compared to a frozen body. I think cryogenics is against nature and lacks any and all evidence to support it.

[Mind]

I shouldn't be amazed by this, but I am. Cryonicists are sooooo far ahead of the general public and medical community regarding the definition of death that it is emabarrassing.

Recent article in Newscientist expressing surprise that a cold body can come back to life.

Once again, rather embarrassing for the modern medical profession, someone else has now "discovered" what cryonicists have known for a long long time, that people can be clinically dead for long periods of time and be brought back to life: http://www.kurzweila...k-from-the-dead

As far as the evidence about organisms spontaneously coming "back to life", besides the human cases where all they needed was to be warmed up to the correct temperature, there have also be pig experiments (dogs too, I think), where they were cooled down to near freezing for at least 3 hours, showed zero signs of life, then returned to normal when warm blood was re-introduced. Simple as that. I can't find the references easily right now, but I think some of the cryo-sites have them. Bwowk could probably ring them up pretty quick.

[YOLF]

I'm not sure if it was brought up in this topic or not, but there is a video somewhere on youtube that shows a mouse being thawed alive. Then there are always the Soviet experiments... Do they teach the Soviet stuff or was it really just propaganda? Youtubed for like 30 min. but no mouse video.. it's therre though.

Soviet Reanimation Science:

[Danail Bulgaria]

If it had to be a propaganda, then these movies should be projected to the masses. At least in Bulgaria, such movies were NOT projected to the masses. So, it doesn't seem to be a propagand.

[Brain_Ischemia]

This post is Informally titled:
Why isn't the title of this thread directed towards the practice of allotransplantation of organs derived from someone pronounced dead?

I would normally decide to pass by the fountain without tossing in a coin, but it seems to me that the inanity underlying this thread should not go unchallenged on this forum.

To clarify a few things:

- The above excerpt is from the 1940 film "Experiments in the Revival of Organisms" http://en.wikipedia....al_of_Organisms
What is depicted in the ~four-minute clip posted above is straightforward: Isolated organs supported extracorporeally, use of rudimentary CPB.
In the 1950s, Vladimir Demikhov successfully grafted a second head onto healthy dogs; the second head demonstrated normal awareness & cognition as well as autonomous motor control.



- The survival of small mammals (hamsters and rats) following induced hypothermia as well as freezing and thawing was first demonstrated by Audrey Smith in the 1950s. See-
http://www.ncbi.nlm....pubmed/13165726
and
http://www.ncbi.nlm....les/PMC1365897/

- In the 1960s/70s, Robert J. White lead a series of experiments which included the first demonstration (AFAIK) of an extracorporeally sustained isolated mammalian brain
http://www.nature.co.../2021082a0.html
and the first head transplant
http://www.ncbi.nlm..../pubmed/4997130

Less well-known is that White also conducted experiments demonstrating recovery of metabolic function and electrical activity in neuronal tissue after low-temperature storage
White, R.J., Verdura, J., Albin, M.S. and Bowen, H., ‘Hypothermia Brain Storage With Electrical and Metabolic Recovery’, Physiologist, 7, p. 283 (1964)
White, R.J., Albin, M.S. and Verdura, J. and Locke, G.E., ‘Prolonged Whole-Brain Refrigeration With Electrical and Metabolic Recovery’, Nature, 209, pp. 1320-2 (1966)

Interesting interview with White shortly before his death:
http://on.aol.com/vi...plant-517140175


Isamu Suda went further, (famously) demonstrating recovery of EEG after freezing and long-term storage:
http://www.nature.co...s/212268a0.html
Some comments here:
http://www.evidenceb...uda-experiment/

Brian Wowk wasn't being pedantic when he explained why Suda's much-lauded experiments are of limited relevance to cryonics per se on this very forum:
http://www.longecity...ts/#entry136324

But it is relevant to the OP's point insofar as the title of this thread (and much of the content therein) betrays a lack of awareness of what life actually is.

Background:
- Firstly, the readers of this thread may wish to determine what fundamental attributes (structural and otherwise) separate individual cells belonging to each of the three domains of life.

- Some knowledge of the evolution of multicellularity would also be worthwhile (as in the colonial Volvocales shown below).

http://en.wikipedia....wiki/Volvocales

- As well as the first (extant) multicellular animals (among the Ediacaran biota), something like sponges descended from colonies of choanoflagellates

---

Now you can move on to the knowledge that at relatively small scales, living cells can not only sometimes tolerate freezing, complex arrangements of cells (organ systems and whole organisms) can as well.

Eukaryotes such as plants and some insects and insect larvae can survive temperatures as low as –100°C
http://jeb.biologist.../213/3/502.long

For prokaryotes like bacteria, survival of sub-zero temperatures is often trivial.

Does it not occur to you that mundane realities like the survival (and regeneration) of ice-age plants or the concerns regarding interplanetary contamination by human technology upend your entire conceptual framework regarding cryonics?
http://www.pnas.org/...ent/110/24/9839
http://astro.berkele...tion Policy.pdf

...or long-term sub-zero storage of gametes, zygotes, and human tissue (first demonstrated by Audrey Smith and Chris Polge in 1949!)?
http://www.nature.co...s/164666a0.html

...or the reversible vitrification of a viable whole organ demonstrated by Greg Fahy and Brian Wowk?
http://www.ncbi.nlm....les/PMC2781097/

"But wait!" you emphatically exclaim, "single cells, even whole organs are one thing...but you're preserving dead people, and they're just cadavers!"

Does it not occur to you that any individual human's survival after cardiac arrest invalidates your premise?

Does it not occur to you that the fact that we (seriously) talk about people "coming back from the dead" in ERs is an indication that our definition of death is NOT actually a description of reality?...or do you think that paramedics and ER doctors are "restarting life" (your words) like voodoo priests, Shelley's Frankenstein, or Jesus of Nazareth?

Rather than wonder which is more plausible (that "death" is not REALLY death, or that doctors are like the worshippers of the Red God in "Game of Thrones"), why not consider a mundane aspect of reality like organ donation after cardiac death.

And so we come to the question:
Why isn't the title of this thread directed towards the practice of allotransplantation of organs derived from someone pronounce dead?
Please, help me understand why you don't seem to have the same cognitive dissonance when it comes to a heart or a kidney taken from a dead person as you (evidently) do for a brain?

More to the point, why aren't you asking paramedics what makes them have the "assumption that life can be restarted"?

Let me make this as clear as possible:
Cryonics works if and only if the people cryopreserved are not actually dead.
Barring the return of Jesus Christ, the actual resurrection (and not merely cloning) of dead (as in REALLY DEAD) organisms is not consistent with our understanding of physical law.

Now, to be serious-
The brain is not a heart or kidney, and the survival of any unique constellation of memories depends on more than *just* the survival of individual neurons.
Nevertheless, memories are not merely a function of transient biochemistry; electrocerebral silence (ie "brain death") does not obliterate personal identity (patients undergoing aortic arch surgery, in which "brain death" is induced, do not wake up with total amnesia).
Memories are essentially embedded in the actual neuronal ultrastructure itself.

It stands to reason that it should therefore be possible in principle to preserve the ultrastructure of the brain in sufficient fidelity such that the memories and personal identity of the individual survive (even if metabolic function has ceased, as in the case of cryopreservation).
To me, that is the premise of cryonics. Furthermore, it seems to me that whether you call this "cryonics" or not, so long as civilization does not destroy itself, sooner or later the technology allowing for the above will be perfected. The results of many years of research strongly suggest that extant technology (ie rapid intervention after "clinical death" to mitigate ischemia, and current cryopreservation protocol relying on vitrification agents) is already capable of the above.

According to our understanding of physics and biology, (most) cryonics patients may be (potentially) alive but in states of varying degrees of injury. This means that the ultimate prognosis of cryonics patients is likely to be highly variable and determined on a case-by-case basis.

FWIW, these are some slides (a small excerpt, the total presentation consisted of over a few hundred slides) I made last year for a presentation I gave on cryonics. I was fairly stupid and ignorant about the subject at the time (and I still am); the stuff about post-ischemic necrosis is overly simplistic and of limited relevance, but at the very least it contradicts the idea that there's some bright red line at which individual brain cells instantly become "cadaverous" (or something) when someone is pronounced dead.
Also, Anna Bågenholm may not be the record holder (survival stories of this kind more typically involve young children). BTW: There is no such word as "pulminocardiac" (misspelling of "pulmocardiac").
See this:
http://www.goteborgd...ere-hypothermia
For a less gratifying reminder of the challenges potentially facing cryonics patients, this should be sobering:
http://www.cnn.com/2...a-baby-survivor

Edited by caliban, 17 April 2018 - 07:30 AM.
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[Brain_Ischemia]

BTW, FWIW quick google came up with this good read on Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest:
http://ceaccp.oxford.../5/138.full.pdf
"The majority of patients will tolerate 30 min of circulatory arrest at 18C without significant neurological impairment."

Funny enough, this is from Wikipedia:
"The body can not live for more than 7 minutes without blood circulating."...which is contradicted by the rest of the article. The qualifier is temperature; details matter.
http://en.wikipedia....culatory_arrest

Is it clear yet that people generally don't know what the F they're talking about when it comes to life, death, ischemia, and resuscitation?

Edited by caliban, 17 April 2018 - 07:30 AM.
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[YOLF]

Very clear, but I would add that all cryonics patients are alive and the variable is time or time linked to technology/medicine,

[Brain_Ischemia]

Very clear, but I would add that all cryonics patients are alive and the variable is time or time linked to technology/medicine,

Overly optimistic.
See:
http://www.azcentral...-iowa-case.html

Brian Wowk made one of the first lucid arguments regarding the irreconcilability of the contemporary medicolegal/sociocultural concept of "death" and our understanding of biology and physics. This should be required reading:
http://www.alcor.org...athofdeath.html

Importantly, this doesn't mean that the *only* variable is time and technology; the point (mine, at least) is not necessarily that "death" should be defined by arbitrary conjecture about the capabilities of future technology.
See this for an example of that kind of thinking gone wrong (nobody can ever be dead then, right?):
http://en.wikipedia....iki/Omega_Point

Wowk introduced the terminology of "ametabolic coma" (or "biostatic coma" for individuals in biostasis); if healthy metabolic function can plausibly be restarted, it is difficult to justify a determination of "death" (and cessation of care).

However, we're left with the important and delicate issue of individuals in permanent vegetative states, at least *some* of whom have very clearly suffered brain damage sufficient to have essentially destroyed the memories constituting personal identity. Metabolic function may not be at issue in this case...and the fact that much of the lay public is incapable of not recognizing "death" after it had happened to Terri Schiavo while at the same time dismissing all cryonics patients as nothing more than frozen corpses is a particularly salient indication of just how clueless society generally is when it comes to life and death.
http://en.wikipedia....ri_Schiavo_case

Ultimately, the only definition of death that is actually meaningful in the real universe (ie physical, non-supernatural reality) to information beings like you and I is this one:
http://en.wikipedia....theoretic_death

Also see a recent article by Mike Darwin on the subject (and why I think it is extremely premature, to say the least, to claim that *all* cryonics patients are "alive"; at best their prognoses are uncertain; some may be beyond hope, and reproductive cloning does not constitute the continued life of the individual)
http://chronopause.c...ics-propaganda/

Unfortunately, between the extremes of a person transforming into a lifeless cadaver upon loss of EEG and the Omega Point fantasy, information-theoretic death still leaves us shackled to the limitations of our technology; we can't yet solidly define the point at which information-theoretic death occurs in humans.

Wowk offers a powerful insight on this point, basically positing that human life and death are at opposite ends of a gradient, and that future advances in technology will result in an ever-narrowing range of uncertainty but there will still be uncertainty; and even after reversible suspended animation of humans is demonstrated, that uncertainty will justify the preservation of individuals who've suffered injuries still beyond the scope of the day's existing technology.

This means that in a society that has beliefs about death that are concordant with biological and physical law, in which at least many severely injured people cannot ethically be abandoned (unless they explicitly wished to be), the finality and closure associated with death today will not be possible. It will be a very, very different world than the one you and I know.

Edited by caliban, 17 April 2018 - 07:31 AM.
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[YOLF]

I've read about Orville Richardson, but he's not a conventional case, and I think there is still hope for him, even if it results in limited success. As with Terri Shiavo, even if she was dead in terms of memory, her body was still alive and could have continued living until it was possible to recover function. Even if she didn't know who she or her family is, she still could have lived and become a whole nother identity. So two identities having lived in one biological entity. It's not only the brain that has the right to survive if a brain can survive in it given a medical advance. If I was dead in respects to information theoretic death (and not recoverable even with the most optomistic advances in science and medicine) and the rest of my body or even my brain could be returned to a working state and be immortal, I would still want that. My identity would be dead, but my biological entity could support another life from my genetics.

I like ametabolic coma, it has a ring to it, biostassis isn't bad either.

Anyways, from the perspective that they were your patients and you had virtually forever to engineer and mathematically model/reconstruct their identity with the help of AI and things we don't even know of today, I just don't think you have to assume that they are dead. Just as we might assume someone is a total loss and some doctor brings him back to everyone's surprise, we could be the ones who are suprised and there might be some required reading cryonics case studies to review when we get thawed. I believe, Wowk is right and we will soon see a change in people's thinking. At some point prior to the end of the world, we will be able to recover all of the cryonicists who like us, weren't covered by health insurance or universal healthcare. Or maybe we'll have a few brain splattered (IIRC one of use was shot in the head) or some in a situation similar to Orville's that may be pieced together with limited success, but we'll have as much information possible from the remains and restoration will likely be ongoing. If you make it to the Dewar, Cryostat, or Cryotube, you'll have at least a 99% chance of making it at some point with today's technology.

[Brain_Ischemia]

I've read about Orville Richardson, but he's not a conventional case, and I think there is still hope for him, even if it results in limited success.

I should be clear that when I refer to cryopatients in long-term care (either at Alcor or CI or anywhere else), the inextricable corollary is that no individual patient should ever be voluntarily abandoned, no matter what we think we know about his or her prognosis; the lack of ability to resuscitate a given patient means that that patient remains in stasis even if it is contemporaneous with the resuscitation of other patients. As is explicitly stated in Alcor's member contract, clonal reproduction is *not* a sufficient condition for "resuscitation" or cessation of stasis.

I should also add the qualifier that I am not currently a representative of any extant cryonics organization, and the opinions expressed are my own.
 

If Terri Schiavo is "dead in terms of memory," then whatever living tissue remains is as much "Terri Schiavo" as if it were a donated kidney or heart.
 

I admit this is a complex and delicate issue because it may portend the ultimate outcome of at least some of the individuals we call "patients" in cryonics today.
Nevertheless, I assert:
Assuming that Terri Schiavo's personal identity was destroyed according to information-theoretic death, then "she" could NOT have "lived"; even if we had the technology to completely heal the remaining body and brain, the resulting individual would be no more Terri Schiavo than an identical twin sister. ...or a son or daughter, for that matter. It's not just that it wouldn't be "fair" to call that individual by the same name, it's that it wouldn't be accurate.

I am of the firm conviction that unequivocal demonstration of memory retention (whatever the degree) must be the bedrock underlying any effort at resuscitation of an individual cryopatient; if we cannot demonstrate this, then I believe that resuscitation is absolutely contraindicated.

If anything I say ever matters in cryonics, then I will push very hard to ensure that the above is inviolable SOP.

As pertains to the late Mrs. Schiavo:
Bear in mind I'm only assuming
a) Terri Schiavo did in fact succumb to information-theoretic death
b) This means that it is not possible even in principle to "infer" identity (information-theoretic death is absolute)

Considering the amount of brain damage Mrs. Schiavo would have had to endure in order to meet the information-theoretic death criterion, the work that would need to be done to establish a completely healthy brain would presumably be such that this would no longer even be considered the same "biological entity".
 

When it comes to "rights," we can only talk about conscious beings, and for now, those only exist in brains. As Sebastian Seung says, "You are your connectome."
You are not your liver or kidney; in the strictest sense, those organs are like biological property, the ownership of which (may be) essential for your survival, but which you have the (property) right to give to others (just like any property).

For example, people should have the (property) right to donate organs while they are alive.
 

Again, this is organ donation.
 

If your "identity is dead," then YOU are dead; anything else that happens afterward is organ donation or cloning.

Anyways, from the perspective that they were your patients and you had virtually forever to engineer and mathematically model/reconstruct their identity with the help of AI and things we don't even know of today, I just don't think you have to assume that they are dead.

If natural law allows for the reconstruction of identity, then that individual did not meet the criterion for information-theoretic death in the first place; that's the point. Since we don't have the capability to determine this in humans (and it's difficult to foresee when we ever will), all patients must be considered potentially alive.
....but that doesn't mean that cryonics organizations should not discriminate who/what they accept as a patient.

Let us bear in mind that cryopreserved organisms (whether humans or otherwise) require active care and monitoring; Vitrification of embryos is not ritual entombment, and cryopatients are not messages in a bottle being sent to the future.
If when someone refers to "cryonics," they refer to ritual, then my opinion is that it should be considered to be in the same category as circumcision and the eucharist.

When I refer to cryonics, I refer to the experimental cryopreservation of the brain and/or whole organisms following (potentially) severe tissue and cellular damage in the hope that foreseeable technologies can repair and restore healthy function.

With the caveat that a cryonics organization should fulfill its contractual obligations to its members, disinterred corpses should be precluded as patients.

If the technological capability to restore the health of a particular patient cannot be plausibly described or foreseen, then I am not personally interested. For me, the bottom line is that we be able to give not merely a description of resuscitation that is in agreement with physical law, but a description that is plausible (and thus, actionable at least to some degree).

I personally consider anything less than demonstration of reversible suspended animation of humans in my lifetime to be an abject failure.
That is what motivates me.

Edited by caliban, 17 April 2018 - 07:31 AM.
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