On Sun, 25 Nov 2001, G.P. wrote:
> I have been thinking a lot about cryonics but have not signed up yet.
> In my opinion the main difficulties with cryonics are:
> 1) The time between death and arrival of the cryonics team. Too long a
> delay may cause irreversible damage to the brain structure and the
> memories etc. encoded therein.
Actually, I'm becoming more convinced that the window is fairly wide.
We can assume that there is a fair amount of redundancy in the brain.
Why? Because we *know* that minor strokes do not generally eliminate
my self-consciousness. Of course there are arguments that there may
be fairly critical brain areas for specific functions that one would
not lot wholesale loss of -- but we may also be optimistic that we
will understand the functions of these areas to replace them with
nanorobot assists should that be necessary.
It turns out that the "synapses" are pretty hard-wired together.
There are "velcro" like proteins that actually hold the synapses
in place. I suspect it takes quite a long time for these to
break down (perhaps days -- we need to do research studies here).
Of course "freezing" will disrupt some of these -- but there will
be pretty big fingerprints that the nanorobots can use to reconnect
things. Of greater significance might be the activation of acidic
proteases normally confined to the lysosomes (due to a buildup of
lactic acid in a non-oxygenated brain). So it may be critical for a
medical team to either keep you on a respirator or intervene in such
a way to keep your blood pH on the alkaline side.
If in fact you have prepared properly and instructed your primary
caregivers properly, I don't think that significant damage need
result from the time-of-death until the time-of-suspension even
overseas. But you have to accept that the average medical person
is *not* going to know the procedures to follow to minimize structural
breakdown in the brain after death occurs. Interestingly enough after
you are "dead" there should not be any legal barriers to the medical
people or suspension team administering the 21st Century Medicine
"brain cocktail" (the one they use when they freeze dogs but they
don't expect to get FDA approval of because the FDA won't approve
"cocktails"). Ideally one would want to administer it *before*
death but better late than not at all.
To my way of thinking preparation is probably more important than
location in minimizing damage due to suspensions. What one needs
is a critical mass of people committed to cryonics that caregivers
can make a business of being "up-to-date" on the best suspension
methods.
Robert
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