X-Message-Number: 16004
From: 
Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2001 11:16:25 EDT
Subject: Re: CryoNet #15993 to J. Goldberg

John de Rivaz has put on Cryonet a message from J. Goldberg:

> When a brain is damaged through lack of oxygen it is not merely that
> brain cells die, but they become deformed.  The tips of the axons
> change their positions, as to the filaments of the dendrites.
> 
> Now if the original positions are crucial for the functioning of the
> brain and the positions change, then the damage is absolutely
> irreversible unless there is some way to determine the original
> position.  It's like putting a bunch of grains of sand in a box,
> shaking the box and hoping that future technology will allow some
> people in the future to put each grain of sand back where it initially
> was.  For simple connections that just echo a signal along a chain of
> neurons this isn't such an issue.  It also may not be a show stopper
> for invertebrates (sp?) which don't have dendrites.  But for big
> vertebrate brains, it involves damage which is not only permanent by
> contemporary technology, but fundamentally irreversible because
> necessary information is lost.
>
The first reponse would be along something as that:
 In living being, there are 3 information systems: Genetic, Immunologic and 
Brain content. In 1950 none was understood, now, the first at least start to 
be known: It is bassed on DNA. We are here at the level where clonning  a 
mammal is an ethical problem, not a technological one (at least in principle, 
in the broad range). Cryonics is a bet on comming science and technologies. 
You are asked to have the faith in them and assume there will be  a discovery 
about brain informations, similar to DNA discovery in genetics.

Put quite bluntly, this seems to be the position of biological researchers 
working in the cryonics domain ( they are few to say the least!).

My favorite position is somewhat different: I think you can't bet your 
survival on faith, even if it is faith in technology or science. So I assume 
there will be no discovery similar to the genetic role of DNA in the 
neurological domain. Most true progress comes from instrumentation and so, 
from physics, not biology.

To start at the bottom, all biological systems are simply chemical gradients 
in watery solutions. These are produced by selective permeability throughout 
membranes. So we are convolved surfaces in water. Computer are very good at 
building complex surfaces on a screen with many textures. They could as well 
compute the internal surface of cells and  define textures as chemical 
properties.

This is the starting point for a "biological virtual world on computer".

Assume you build a brain or a full body this way. It would be far more 
realistic than present day neural networks. The main interest of such a 
living simulation is yet elsewhere : Here, you could run time backward. If 
you load in the system a copy of a death, frozen body, you would be able to 
programme a back running time sequence so that the working biological entity 
would be recovered.

You could then use a clonned body and link the new biological brain to the 
one in the computed space. This is not living again, this is living two 
simultaneous life: one on Earth and one in the computed space with a single 
couciousness. 

If someday "classical" cryonics with body repair fulfill its promise, the 
original body must be here. So the copying process in the computed space must 
not be destructuve. It must be done with quantum nondemolition X-rays 
scanning or a magnetic resonance immaging variant.

The necessary computing power for that undertaking would be afordable in 2030 
- 2050.The scanning system must be build in the same time frame.

This is the basic technological path. Other, more exotic solutions are open 
to studies.

One is what we could call technological black magic:  It rests heavily on 
quantum mechanics and quantum computing: Magic is about the display of a 
mundane situation then hiding it to do some trick and displaying the result. 
Black magic here is about making the "trick" behind a physical event horizon, 
the most known example being a black hole in gravitation theory. In "quantum 
black magic", the process unfolds this way

1/ Thakes a quantum system (a single particle, a full body or more).
2/ Build in an analog quantum computer a quantum domain as large as the one 
seen in 1.
3/ Use quantum teleportation to copy 1 into 2.
4/ Use the copied quantum system to make a digital version.
5/ load the digital copy into a digital quantum computer.
6/ Run the computer with some programme to do the "trick" .
7 Copy back the result in analog form in the analog computer. 
8 Copy back (by quantum teleportation) the content of the analog computer in 
the original system.

That one will so be constrained to evolve into what has been computed in the 
digital computer. This may cheat nearly any physical law encountered in a 
continuous evolution in the "normal world.

I know black magic is a bad name for this process, when physicists have done 
alchemy, they have called it nuclear physics. may be transhorizon technology 
(THT) would be better...

THT is not for tomorow, may be in one century or two.

Yvan Bozzonetti.

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