The basic metaphysical concept behind cryonics is the information theory of death. According to the information theory of death, you aren’t dead until the structures responsible for generating or expressing your consciousness are damaged beyond hope of recovery. It is scientifically true that a great many parts of the neuron survive intact well after what we think of as brain death.

Would those be physical structures? I mean actual brain tissue? Well, some would say it’s the DNA and RNA. Some might say it’s the tubulin cytoskeleton.

So, the substrate of “information” is physical? According to cryonic theory, yes, and as long as it hasn’t degenerated beyond recovery or repair, you are not dead as long as specifically the memory and personality could be recovered. They point at the fact that people recover after long periods of severe brain dysfunction and retain both recognizable personality traits as well as their memory. The Egyptians thought along these lines even before science and technology made resuscitation possible. Even to the point of postulating multiple souls each existing with a different relationship to the body, the world and the afterlife,

It is true that our scientific understanding of this boundary is always being moved. I’m also reminded of Christian ideas of interring the full body to await the second coming and resurrection. Yes, that is a more contemporary belief. Much of this is generally regarded as nonsense of course, but why? Why is it so strange to think that there is still a soul in that body?

And that would ban cremation and organ donation. From one point of view organ donation is just another form of reincarnation, rather literal in that case.

So that is not a myth of organ transplant patients? That they can take on the personality of the donor? Well, looked at from a strictly mechanical point of view, little quirks of heart behaviour have been tied to facets of mood and changes in mental function. If someone else receives that heart and it has the same impact on that brain, then what is that other than personality transfer?

Memories transfer. Some believe that the basis of memory is genetic, and the transplanted organ has the originals genetic code, retains it, but let’s go even further. What about the degree of genetic transcription that takes place when a virus transfers from one host to another? Every time a virus infects you, copies of it undergo mutation, mutation brought about by their previous environment. When the newly mutated virus infects a new host and writes itself into new cells, even if that host doesn’t become infectious, especially if they don’t become infectious and the host just serves as a peaceful carrier. Well, if memory is genetic, then it would seem you can be infected by memory. And, if as some scientists say, your actual consciousness is the process of your working memory, your ability to hold things in your active attention, then someone could in theory be infected with someone’s point of view. So in that case cryonic stasis and subsequent repair could be seen as a form of extreme exorcism.

Repairing back to the original state before infection? Ideally that would be the goal, assuming they really knew what that state was in the first place.

Cryonics is preservation by freezing? That is it in the nutshell. There are more steps to it than freezing.

So it’s kind of like doing a virus scan and repair? Holy McAfee!

“Exorcising” the spook we know as “death”? Yes. Ancient shamans acted as psychopomps, guides for the dead, for two reasons. First out of respect for the departed, and secondly, if the dead were not guided away it was thought that they might in a sense “reinfect” the village. Their frustration and envy would lead them to try to take a life and living form that isn’t theirs. In theory, something like cryonics would prevent this, so did mummification perhaps.

Does that turn them into demons? That would make them seem like demons, would perhaps be mistaken for demons, and could wind up functioning like “Daemons” in the software sense. Subroutines in the still living persons consciousness. This being the less invasive scenario, eventually they started using what amounts to a golem, figures of the wives and slaves given the spark of life through prayer.

Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.

Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~