You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

gwern comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 21, chapters 91 & 92 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: NancyLebovitz 04 July 2013 11:49AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (366)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: William_Quixote 04 July 2013 02:41:03PM 7 points [-]

Figuring out how to resurrect the dead will be hard enough. Figuring out the way the brain connects to the body and reconnecting all the individual nerve connections makes the challenge much harder. I'm not sure we know all the connections even now with much better technology and decades of additional scholarship. Saving just the brain makes the problem much harder. Keep in mind that the reasons actual cryo sites offer brain only options has a lot to to with cost, storage, transport, etc and not due to thinking its a fundamentally better option.

Comment author: gwern 04 July 2013 03:17:26PM 11 points [-]

a fundamentally better option.

But it is fundamentally better: the smaller the volume you are trying to vitrify, the better the process works because the greater surface area is compared to volume, and so you get faster and more even cooling (and in humans, you get problems with circulation getting blocked off after a certain point). Go read through http://chronopause.com/ . This is why you can drop small things into LN2 and they recover fine, or why Fahy could do a kidney and bring it back, but why we can't do larger things.

Comment author: Decius 06 July 2013 03:38:13AM 1 point [-]

Those are instrumentally better reasons, not fundamentally better.