CellBioGuy comments on MIT Technology Review - Michael Hendricks opinion on Cryonics - Less Wrong
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Comments (20)
Straw man. Connectonomics is relevant to trying to explain the concept of uploading to the lay-man. Few cryonics proponents actually believe it's all you need to know to reconstruct the brain.
The fact that someone can be dead for several hours and then be resuscitated, or have their brain substantially heated or cooled without dying, puts a theoretical limit on how sensitive your long-term brain state can possibly be to these sorts of transient details of brain structure. It seem very likely that long-term identity-related brain state is stored almost entirely in relatively stable neurological structures. I don't think this is particularly controversial, neurobiologically.
This is not, to the best of my knowledge, true, and he offers no evidence for this claim. Cryonics does a very good job of preserving a lot of features of brain tissue. There is some damage done by the cryoprotectants and thermal shearing, but it's specific and well-characterized damage, not total structural disruption. Although I will say that ice crystal formation in the deep brain caused by the no-reflow problem is a serious concern. Whether that's a showstopper depends on how important you think the fine-grained structure of white matter is.
Bad philosophy on top of bad neuroscience!
Considering that damaging large amounts of white matter gives you things like lobotomy and alien hand syndrome, or sensorimotor impairment, and that subcortical structures are vitally important...
Sorry, I probably should have more more specific. What I should really say is 'how important the unique fine-grained structure of white matter is.'
If the structure is relatively generic between brains, and doesn't encode identity-crucial info in its microstructure, we may be able to fill it in using data from other brains in the future.