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A comment on Hal Finney being cryopreserved now. Parent comment

Re:Hal Finney being cryopreserved now by thenmar on Thursday August 28, 2014 @04:20PM (#8239484)
Would you mind sharing some of that evidence? I certainly understand the desire to be cryopreserved, but given the lack of proof of concept (I'd love to be contradicted here!) and how little we know about the brain, it seems like a desperate Hail Mary marketed to wealthy tech folks as sound science.
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Re:Hal Finney being cryopreserved now by eudox on Thursday August 28, 2014 @04:28PM (#8239518)
Electron micrography of cryopreserved tissue shows pretty good preservation[0][1], and since every aspect of the mind is dependent on physical properties of the brain, the possibility of revival exists as long as structure and context are preserved in the brain.

>marketed to wealthy tech folks

Cryonics has historically been a middle class thing.

[0] http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/micrographs.html

[1] http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/braincryopreservation1.htm...

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Re:Hal Finney being cryopreserved now by jacquesm on Thursday August 28, 2014 @06:14PM (#8240026)
Electron microscopy of a ram chip shows no difference at all between one that contains a bunch of data and one that is empty.
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Re:Hal Finney being cryopreserved now by TeMPOraL on Thursday August 28, 2014 @07:23PM (#8240287)
Fortunately, brains don't work like RAM chips and there is apparently evidence that important data is saved in molecular structure, not in electric charges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryonics#Neuropreservation

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Re:Hal Finney being cryopreserved now by jacquesm on Thursday August 28, 2014 @07:45PM (#8240377)
Unfortunately though, data is not all there is, and a good part of what our brains do is electrical in nature.

In other words, you could save all the data in the brain but without knowing what the CPU was doing when it shut down (which is electrical state) that may not do you any good.

http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2013/07/16/i...

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Re:Hal Finney being cryopreserved now by eudox on Thursday August 28, 2014 @07:53PM (#8240417)
Thankfully the fact that people have come back just fine from minutes of total EEG silence (Often involving hypothermia) shows that the immediate state of the brain does not matter nearly as much as its structure.
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Re:Hal Finney being cryopreserved now by jacquesm on Thursday August 28, 2014 @07:55PM (#8240430)
That's not quite the same as freezing your brain for an indeterminate amount of time (decades? centuries? millennia? forever?) and expecting a spontaneous reboot after transferring and read-out + a whole bunch of other unknowns.

That's a brain that was still almost the same brain as the one in which the electrical activity as we currently detect it was lost.

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Re:Hal Finney being cryopreserved now by eudox on Thursday August 28, 2014 @08:03PM (#8240470)
>(decades? centuries? millennia? forever?)

All equivalent.

>expecting a spontaneous reboot

Nobody actually expects this. You can't just thaw someone and reperfuse them. Extensive repair work has to be done at the nanoscale.

In any case, the evidence shows electrical activity doesn't really matter when you're only concerned about long-term identity. Electrochemical impulses don't encode memory or personality. If they did, it would be pretty clear in people who recover from extreme hypothermia, as they would have retrograde amnesia.

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