Today, we are going to discuss the metaphysics of cryonics.
What is a person? Organic matter? A collection of genetic code?
Identity automaton?
A model of psychology?
Interesting. Shouldn’t it be easy to say what a person is?
Yes, not being able to define it is a bit disturbing as we say we are one.
Consciousness? Going with that, what is consciousness?
Consciousness would imply we need to expand the inclusion of personhood on all sentient animals? It would.
Random access generator?
Choice-maker? Let’s go with that. What drives choice making?
Access and freedom. What is freedom?
Needs, wants, desires. It makes you take one path over another. And we want food for mechanical reasons. We want company for reasons of our brains innate infrastructure. We want everything for reasons that pre-existed before our awareness of our own desire.
Freedom = the opportunity to choose wisely. Now you’re going to ask what ‘wisdom’ is. Indeed, I shall. What is wisdom?
That one is highly-subjective, I think. Some believe the opposite that any wisdom is strictly objective. That anything we could call wise all serves the mechanisms of the bodies survival and optimum function, physical and loosely psychological neg-entropy.
Knowing in an all-encompassing way.
Sometimes it is enjoyable to choose something not-so-wise, though, and maybe there is some wisdom in that, also.
Our science currently has discovered some very complicated things about the body and perhaps more specifically the brain. One of the things that concerns them is that the process of death is neither simple nor simultaneous.
I read a book once on ‘how you die.’ It’s complicated enough for a whole book. Perhaps more than a single book.
So when is someone dead?
When the soul leaves the body, last breath.
Brain shuts down.
According to science the last breath scenario and the brain shut down are both reversible. So are they really dead?
I think you are dead when you go past the reversible.
When lack of oxygen has caused sufficient degradation? Lack of oxygen just causes ischemic injury, and many conditions that are considered death don’t involve oxygen deprivation.
When the soul leaves the body completely? What is the soul?
Consciousness. We can get stuck there. Soul is consciousness, consciousness is soul. Yet there does seem to be discontinuity there.
There are multiple identifiable elements of consciousness, almost like having multiple people or creatures in what we think of as a single mind. In fact, the hemispheres of your brain seem to give every evidence of being potentially independent brains all on their own. So which is you? Experiment shows they have individual consciousness, even individual temperament and memory. So if part of your brain is dead, who is dead?
Someone who goes through a stroke can see the old them as dead.
Is that where the depictions of devils and angels come in? When we talk about our conscience? Likely.
Consciousness is a collection of these brains’ experiences? I offer that the soul is a locus of attenuation. That a process occurring in the field of consciousness reconfigures the field of consciousness itself, sort of like forming a cell out of psychic energy, and this locus is not confined to your brain, but in fact interacts with your entire body.
There are also psychologically “required” multiples as with children who have been abused, and therefore need to “be” someone else to cope. Yes, the brain is readily prepared to make as many constructs out of consciousness as it needs.
Like a signal is attenuated to get into another form? Yes.
But this is perhaps a different subject. We will see where cryonics leads.
Your thoughts are welcome. Be well friends.
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
~science,mysticism,spirituality~