eli_sennesh comments on Survey: What's the most negative*plausible cryonics-works story that you know? - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Academian 23 December 2015 07:32AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 30 December 2015 04:22:24AM 1 point [-]

Revivees are zombies. That is, they are animated, but not conscious. Depending on their background, they may conceptualise this in different ways, such as being still dead, being damned, having no soul, etc.

How can that even work? Literally, how can it work? Consciousness is one of the things the brain does. How do they conceptualize, including forming self-concepts, and act "animated", without normal consciousness?

Comment author: Good_Burning_Plastic 30 December 2015 06:05:11PM *  0 points [-]

I think he means something like the Cotard delusion (see also).

Comment author: RichardKennaway 31 December 2015 09:09:55AM 0 points [-]

Exactly. Except that rather than being a remarkable but rare thing with no apparent causes and no known mechanism, it happens (in this imaginary scenario) every time to revivees.

"Consciousness", after all, is a word we use to name a part of our conceptualisation of mental phenomena, and deductions about the real world made from its definition need not be accurate. It need not even match up to any word in some other human language, let alone the physical result of such a radical operation on the brain as cryonic time-travel.