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EHeller comments on Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics - Less Wrong Discussion
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False analogy; there is a change in medium going from the oiled up dermis to air.
Take a glass of water with a large number of tagged proteins. That is the model of e.g. presynaptic vesicles filled with neurotransmitters, swimming in the cytoplasmic matrix (which is mostly water). A significant amount of them is not attached to anything. I didn't say the folding structure would be scrambled, I said that the concentration gradients would be influenced, and that the orientation of non-attached proteins would change.
Shake the glass of water. What happens?
Shake the cytoplasmic matrix. What happens? What does such a rearrangement probably entail? That's right, some change in concentration gradients, and a host of non-attached proteins tumbling around in a merry free-for-all.
We can arrange to bet on our beliefs about this, say a 4 figure sum going to a charity of the other's choice, with mutually agreed upon authorities in the field being the arbiters? If so send me a PM, and we can make the result public once we're done.
To be clear, you want to bet that shaking your head side-to-side vigorously causes the same qualitative type of changes to protein concentrations along cell membranes as introducing a large concentration of toxic cryoprotectants?
I want to emphasize along cell membranes, as I believe those are the concentrations kalla was referring to, its where the information will be lost, and is why I referred to osmotic pressure and chemical interactions being very dominant, and such forces are not present in your glass of water analogy (other than shaking the glass will NOT cause the proteins to precipitate out), so I want to make sure we are talking about the same thing.
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No, I am not saying that shaking your head will rupture many of your phospholipid bilayers and in effect kill you.
Glad we could clear that up.
(What I am saying is "after the damage (e.g. cell membranes) has been repaired, certain information was not recoverable" not being a death knell for cryonics, since we accept a considerable margin of error concerning e.g. specific neurotransmitter vesicle locations in daily life without considering ourselves a different person just because we've effected a host of changes in distributions and arrangements. An example other than shaking your head, which also strongly affects cross-membrane distributions: SSRIs)
I agree that bioactive drugs will have effects on distributions, as thats what they exist for, they also cause (sometimes mild, sometimes extreme) personality changes. What I'm interested in is how wrong can we get things and still have a "working" brain.