I've mentioned recently reading Tim Ferriss' Four Hour Body before. He's a very intelligent man, but he lives for doing body stuff - "Decades of full-contact abuse and overconfidence in all sports ending in '-boarding' ..." The book makes it clear how much of his self-image is his entire body, every bit of it, and really brought it home to me how much sporty people will feel this way.
Even given cryonics as only "the second-worst thing that can happen to you" - addressing the body issue strikes me as a non-futile idea, e.g. preserving the enteric nervous system, which may not be the 100 billion cells of the brain in the head, but at 100 million is still pretty sizable as neural networks go.
That said, the cryogenic preservation of organs in general is going great guns, because there's buckets of cash in transplant research. This suggests we'll find out soon enough what happens when someone gets someone else's gut. Or even just a clone of their own gut.
Many approaches to cryonics assume that a detailed map of the neural patterns in a brain (via brain scanning technology) may be sufficient, using future technology, to bring that person "back to life." But cognition is greatly shaped by more than just the neural pattern: it is shaped by biology - by the body. (See Noe 2009; Pfeifer et al. 2006; Lakoff & Johnson 1999.)
I admit I'm pretty unfamiliar with the cryonics literature. I assume this is a standard objection, and has standard responses. Where can I find those responses?
Thanks!