From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2003 - 18:16:21 MDT
On Monday 07 July 2003 02:55, randy wrote:
> >> I am still signed up for cryonics, but it seems to be to be a very low
> >> probability chance of success, barely better than nothing. Many people
> >> don't even bother to sign up for this reason. I certainly hope that
> >> better methods can reduce this situation before my time comes.
>
> But how do they calculate the odds?
The calculation need not be particularly rigorous. If significant information
is stored structurally and if significant structural damage is a property of
current cryonic techniques then it is given that there will likely be too
much loss of significant information.
>
> Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
> >I've spoken with Peter Passaro about this, and apparently the main things
> >are (a) get frozen as soon as possible after death (b) use the new
> >oxygenated cryoprotectants (c) keep the brain from being starved of
> >oxygen. So people are working on it, and if you get frozen with the
> >latest techniques your chance of survival may still be pretty good.
> >
> >One problem I have, though, is that it still looks to me like it would be
> >better to just chop off the head and drop it into a bucket of liquid
> >nitrogen as fast as possible. *Large*-scale freezing damage is
> >irrelevant; you can still connect the dots easily enough.
>
No, I don't think you can. What are to use to "connect the dots" where which
dots were connected to what and even some of the dots themselves is precisely
what was lost to freezing damage?
> >What you want
> >to ensure is that the information, the Shannon information, is still
> >there. I would not be surprised to find even the earliest cryonics
> >patients are resurrectable in toto; it is not necessary that the cells be
> >reparable but that their physical state, when scanned down to the atomic
> >level, contain enough information to extrapolate back the original brain
> >and its relevant high-level information.
The power of the scan is irrelevant at the resuscitation end if what is
scanned is too critically damaged in some of its major information bearing
aspects.
- samantha
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