X-Message-Number: 2270
Date: 19 May 93 23:41:32 EDT
From: "BROOK H. NORTON" <>
Subject: CRYONICS; Reanimation; reply to T.Donaldson

> = text from T. Donaldson

>The newly created version of the patient should NOT be created in the frozen
> state. Thawing itself will cause fatal damage, even assuming that we can
> project from the patient's state to what that patient's state would be if
> frozen in a perfect condition. This point has been made before.

What is the basic problem with thawing from an undamaged frozen state?

>It will take more than AI alone to recover the patient from a map of the
> location of his/her molecules. We still need to understand a good deal more
> about just what the state of a live person is, chemically. We don't yet
> understand how memory works, nor IN DETAIL where it is stored. Therefore
> no amount of AI can tell us how to put it back there.

The nice thing about reanimation is that we don't have to know how memory
works in detail to fully restore the memories.  All we have to do is infer
what freeze damage has been done and then return the structure to
its original form (assuming the memories are in tact prior to freezing).

To summarize one variation on this alternate reanimation: You disassemble
the frozen patient, molecule by molecule, recording their damaged positions
on a computer.  You apply AI algorithms to the software pattern
of the patient to construct a healthy pattern for the patient.  You
assemble from scratch (perhaps in a different room from where the damaged
patient is stored) the healthy patient.

This procedure doesn't require any more information than the procedure
described in "CRYONICS - Reaching for Tomorrow".  It just seems to me a
simpler way to handle the logistics.  In both reanimation scenarios the
damaged patient must be examined at the molecular level, the freeze
damage must be assessed, and the damage reversed.  Both scenarios have
the same flow of information.  Only the logistics are different.

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