What part of the matter in our body is necessary to retain consciousness?
Brain. What part is necessary to spark consciousness?
Neurons? There are some who think that if you could just preserve the neural net, you would preserve that person’s consciousness, the rest of the brain being unnecessary. They have even managed to run a flight simulator on a chip that used cultured rat neurons for circuitry.
Energy pathways? Indeed, but where are those energy pathways found? What generates them?
Aren’t the neural networks echoed in the quantum froth surrounding us? Excellent. There are so far many complications that for the time being serve as barriers to cryonic resuscitation.
So really what this Cryonics is about is the ability of the brain to store life even if the body has shut down. Exactly. They even practice a modified version of it called neuro-preservation.
Cryogenics is the freezing part. Exactly. In neuro-preservation they keep the head and cremate the body.
With the technology now they are reaching beyond keeping the physical brain and looking at uploading into technology? So modern cryonics? Yes. It may be possible to revive the consciousness without repairing the original body.
Assuming they could code the brain’s “information” into something that could be “uploaded.” If you accept the information theory of death, then any transportation or transposition of that information would be revival of life, the substrate being viewed as irrelevant.
I’d be very sad for the person if they ever came up with a Robocop. No, no body, no modified or mutilated body, just a point for point reproduction of that persons consciousness.
So someone’s head could power a computer? Well, they have already proven that an eel brain could drive a robot, and in theory if they revived the neurons and integrated them into a computer mechanism… Well, in your brain, neurons are born and die all the time, and you don’t come to the conclusion you are dead. Even if they revived only a portion of your nervous system, with technological assistance and rehabilitation, it could in theory be possible to fully restore the mind and personality, sort of like learning to walk again but all in the mind.
Is it a myth also that once neurons die they can’t come back? Yes. The idea that the brain has only a limited number of neurons and doesn’t grow any more has been disproven, and well… What of cloned neurons? They would integrate with your previous ones “naturally” perhaps restoring portions of genetic memory.
We need more willing human test subjects. They haven’t lost a stream of interested people as far as cryonic practice goes.
Would you rather not be a created life form? Is being a randomly occurring life form all that cool?
Created through love, yes. That’s the ideal, yes.
We don’t know enough to responsibly create life forms. Yet from the point of information theory we may be on the verge of doing just that, with artificial intelligence, and with the discovery of XNA.
Mainly built, I think, for all the wrong reasons. Well, DNA was just one of the possible combinations that could lead to things like us. In theory, they could even transcribe our DNA into a more durable form. If the information is preserved, wouldn’t that be us?
Polymers? Yes, that would be the idea.
Like fungus that eats plastic and uses it in its own structure. Indeed. There is a form of bacteria that can metabolize arsenic which was thought impossible.
We’re doing it now piece by piece in a way. People with an artificial arm define it as ‘my’ arm.
If we could do that, we would become the new androids. Indeed, a sort of oblique approach to the same end that cryonics is seeking. One of the alternative approaches to cryonic resuscitation is molecular repair, rebuilding the person’s body on an atomic level. Would that cease being the person?
Haven’t we replaced every cell in our body every seven years? It is in fact true, though I’m not sure of the time frame. So is the replaced cell construct not you? What would be so strange about a technology being included in “you”?
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~