Yes, that first one is the experiment I thought was obvious (I was about to come back and edit my comment to detail this, but you responded first).
I think it would teach us whether freezing and reviving with learning preserved was actually possible or not. This strikes me as important and useful information. That C.elegans has some inbuilt ability to survive freezing would confound it slightly, but I still think it's a necessary thing to at least look at.
There is next to no funding for cryonics research.
That little? (I can believe it, though.)
Has this experiment, or something like it, even been postulated anywhere in the past 20 years, or is it not as obvious to everyone else as it is to you and me?
And massive regulations against doing animal-based experiments without government approval.
I really doubt the scientific exploitation of C.elegans is as hard as that would imply, compared to the numbers of mice and rats killed daily for science.
I think it would teach us whether freezing and reviving with learning preserved was actually possible or not. This strikes me as important and useful information. That C.elegans has some inbuilt ability to survive freezing would confound it slightly, but I still think it's a necessary thing to at least look at.
I agree it would be useful. My wording was less charitable than it should have been. Still, the second test seems more definitive.
...I really doubt the scientific exploitation of C.elegans is as hard as that would imply, compared to the numbers of
About a month ago kalla724 posted a number of comments on this post, many of which were highly upvoted.
Synopsis: I) I think that kalla724 is too pessimistic about the practice of cryopreservation to preserve personal identity, because we don't know what level of synapse/active zone/protein structure is preserved in human brains, and we also don't know what level is required for personal identity. II) I think kalla724 is wrong about the required detail necessary to simulate a C. elegans. This is testable in the relatively near-term, and the results of that test might yield insight into whose argument in point I is stronger.
I
kalla724's main argument: it is not possible (p = 10^-22) that cryonics will preserve personal identity, because replacing water with cryoprotectant will cause too much damage to proteins and lipids in the brain.
My view is that kalla724 is too pessimistic. To find a specific example to expand upon this intuition, I searched for "c elegans memory". I chose one of the first reviews in the results: http://learnmem.cshlp.org/content/17/4/191.full, published in 2010 by Ardiel and Rankin. Here's their first example:
The specific neurons mediating this are known:
Through more science, they found that:
There is some evidence for how the short-term component of the tap-withdrawal response plasticity. This is it:
This means that the complexes of proteins, working together, add phosphate groups to themselves as a post-translational modification. Each individual complex functions as a potassium ion channel, so changing its structure can alter the excitability of the cell.
Whether vitrification will preserve this specific post-translational modification is, as far as I know, an open question. The current cryoprotectant solution, M22, is pretty physiologic, which means that it functions similarly to water. But, we don't have this data.
It's likely that when the protein complex undergoes autophosphorylation, other changes occur in the cell as well. If this led to changes in the cell's epigenome, which is very common, and the structure of the epigenome is retained by the cryopreservation, then the cell's epigenome could allow reverse inference of the state of its ion channels. We also don't have this data.
The authors also discuss evidence for the long-term component of the tap-withdrawal response plasticity:
This means that the number and distribution of a well characterized protein at the synapses of cells is highly correlated with the strength of the memory. This is consistent with current paradigms of long-term memory.
Under ideal cryopreservation conditions, synaptic vesicles and receptor distributions are likely retained, even if some of the proteins may be a bit denatured. The data is far from perfect here, either.
It's also important to stress that this only occurs under ideal conditions. Given the current practice of cryonics, cryoprotectant will not reach many or most areas of the brain. In these cases, there is a large amount of ice damage and the information is much more likely to be irretrievable.
II
kalla724 says:
kalla724's requirement is that we look at live C. elegans to simulate them. But, the evidence above indicates a good correlation between AMPA receptor distribution and tap-withdrawal reflex. And there is good reason to believe that these features are retained by vitrification under ideal conditions.
So, it seems to me that if you were to emulate a particular C elegans, you could add more receptors (or just up the strength parameter) at those synapses, and thus mimic the plasticity of the tap-withdrawal reflex. Looking at live animals would not be required.
One more note:
Extrapolating results on personal identity from C. elegans to humans is not ideal. If the results are biased in one direction, we should expect more redundancy in mammalian neural systems than there are in nematode ones, because mammals have so many more brain cells.
Edit 6/15: fixed format of quotes.
Edit 6/16: added synopsis to clarify main points.