Accelerating Future Transhumanism, AI, nanotech, the Singularity, and extinction risk.

Legal Victory for Cryonics

There's another media explosion over cryonics, this time having to do with a woman named Mary Robbins. She signed numerous documents indicating she wanted to be cryopreserved at Alcor, then, her family claimed that she changed her mind in her final days. A Colorado court recently ruled in favor of Alcor because no documentation to back up the family's argument was ever produced, as required by Colorado law. Here is the Associated Press coverage. This ruling sets a good precedent. It sometimes seems as if hostile family members are willing to throw away the law to ensure that their relative rots in the ground in lieu of being cryopreserved. Almost as if their soul would be trapped if they were suspended.

It's disappointing how many family members freak out when they find out that their mother/father/relatives are signed up for cryonics and going into cryosuspension. Even if I thought cryonics was complete bunkum, I would at least have the decency to respect the wishes of my relative.

Even if I thought revival from a preserved state were impossible, I would still be sympathetic to cryonics because it is based on the principle of preserving rather than destroying a very valuable object -- the human brain. This leaves open the possibility of future analysis, imaging, and inferences about the person whose brain it was. If my ancestor's brains were preserved, there would come a day where it could be possible to analyze them non-invasively and maybe learn something about their neurology. For instance, you might have heard about how blind people acquire a better sense of hearing and vision than everyone else. In the not-too-distant future, it could become possible to scan a brain and determine if someone was blind by the structure of their visual cortex. More and more details would follow as neuroscience progressed, until eventually everything would become determined. The brain, just like everything else in the world, is thoroughly non-mystical.

Preservation is our only window into the past. Imagine the knowledge destroyed when the Library of Alexandria was incinerated. Similar knowledge is destroyed whenever worms and bacteria dissolve a brain, we just don't have all the tools to look at it yet. Surprisingly, many people are still not clear on the acknowledged fact that all our memories, personality, feelings, and inclinations are encoded in the structure and chemistry of our brains. They believe in a separate metaphysical "mind" somehow independent of the brain. But the mind is simply the structure and function of the brain. Even if revival proved impossible in the long term, the preservation of individual brains today could provide a unique window into the past for future generations to analyze, providing a strong argument for its value.

The human brain is the most remarkable known object in the entire universe. Why throw it out like a bit of moldy hamburger? For a very modest cost, the seats of our consciousness can be preserved after our metabolic death. In fact, the technology already exists to destructively scan brains piece-by-piece -- ever heard of ATLUM? This serial sectioning method allows for such precise nanoscale scanning that individual synapses and vesicles are visible using a scanning electron microscope. You can read more about the technology at the brain emulation roadmap. Within a few decades or maybe even less, it will be possible to create a computer file that consists of a nanoscale scan of an entire human brain. It's only a matter of time before scientists learn how to interpret the patterns of such scans as frozen thoughts, memories, personality, and other complex mental features. It may take a while, but hey -- if you're frozen at liquid nitrogen temperature, your neural molecules ain't going anywhere fast.