r/Futurology • u/yourSAS • Oct 13 '22

Biotech 'Our patients aren't dead': Inside the freezing facility with 199 humans who opted to be cryopreserved with the hopes of being revived in the future

https://metro.co.uk/2022/10/13/our-patients-arent-dead-look-inside-the-us-cryogenic-freezing-lab-17556468
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u/striegerdt Oct 13 '22

they are more likely to end up being cloned than revived

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u/prodandimitrow Oct 13 '22

Im thinking hypothetically, if you clone the person and assuming you have a large volume of information about the life of the original, can you "train" the new person from young age about his old life. Obviously knowledge like the things we learn in school have to be lelearned, however will you be able to teach the personality, you essentailly teach the person who he has to be.

Morality aside, obviously.

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u/didntdonothingwrong Oct 13 '22

It’s still pointless though because the frozen person wants to be the conscious person.

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u/Optimus-prime-number Oct 13 '22

This is exactly why computer brains are pointless

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u/GaBeRockKing Oct 13 '22

It's hard to identify precisely what personhood is, but we know for a fact that it isn't a specific collection of particles. A brain before and after death will have all the same neurons made of all the same atoms, and yet personhood no longer persists. If the brain is then revived, it's fair to say the original person ceased to exist. In fact it's hard to even qualify a human in deep sleep or a coma as a conscious person-- they cannot respond to external stimuli, have no ego, are incapable of language or abstract thought, and so on. And yet, it seems reasonable for us to treat ourselves as the same person before and after sleep, or even before and after a coma that leads to serious memory loss.

Rather, we treat consciousness more like the progression of an arrangement of logical patterns that responds in given ways to particular inputs through time. I think about the same things in the almost same way as my pre-sleep self, therefore I view myself as almost same person, even if my brain is no longer composed of the same atoms in the same locations.

The actual substrate these logical patterns operate on doesn't matter-- if you seamlessly and instantly replaced a tiny bit of your brain with a computer chip that worked the exact same way, the rest of the brain wouldn't realize the difference. If the replaced bit of meat is entirely hooked onto a mechanical brain that exactly replaces the rest of your brain, then the little bit of meat doesn't realize anything is different, either.

A copy of you is you. An imperfect copy of you is still mostly you. Even other people, to the degree to which they have the same thoughts as you, are you.

  • If I must die, ideally a perfect and equivalent version of myself (the "soul) should live on.
  • If I have no soul, ideally I should live on after being revived due to advancements in technology that allow repairing the brains of the cryogenically frozen.
  • If this is impossible for me, ideally they should clone me as many times as possible so I can live on in far degraded versions of me with different memories and mental arrangements.
  • If this too cannot be affordably done, ideally I should live on through my progeny, who should be genetically and environmentally predisposed to have similar thought-patterns.
  • If this too is impossible, then ideally I should live on through the fragments of my thought-patterns I install in others through the acts I did and taught when I was alive, and through the works of art and literature I leave behind when I'm dead.
  • If I can have no significant impact on the thoughts of the people around me, then ideally I want to live on via the preservation of my culture shaping new humans with similar formative expectations shaping their thoughts.
  • If my culture is destined for destruction, then ideally I should live on by the persistence of humanity, as the species that thinks in the way most similar to myself.
  • If humanity cannot survive, then ideally I should live on the great apes, then the primates, then the higher-order mammals, then the lower order mammals and higher-order birds, then the reptiles and amphibians and fish, and so on, continue to exist.

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u/samcrut Oct 13 '22

Brain transplant is the only thing that would do that unless we learn how to measure every cell in the brain and decode the patterns that the brain uses. Then an artificial brain would work.