X-Message-Number: 33150
References: <>
From: Gerald Monroe <>
Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2010 06:04:06 -0600
Subject: Re: CryoNet #33145 - #33149

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Mike Darwin : I'm still stuck on the following.  If we cool the patient down
while preventing hypoxia, and then do not leave them 'liquid' and in a
hypoxic state longer than proven guidelines for possible recovery, freezing
the brain solid and then chilling it to the point that molecular motion
almost ceases, what could go wrong?  What physical structure COULD neurons
store information in that would not be retained in this manner?  The
functional systems of the brain may contain many mysteries, but it's still
an object made of ordinary matter.

Storage at near 0 C during transport might be a big mistake.  You could
easily be correct.

But it we were hypothetically presenting the science of cryonics to an
unbiased review board and we say : step ONE patient's brain is revivable,
therefore it contains the long term memory data.  Step TWO : a short time
after step ONE, we have frozen the brain and the larger molecules are
completely unable to go anywhere.  They have not budged from where they were
located in Step ONE.  Step THREE is of course the brain after a century in
liquid nitrogen...hopefully almost the same as steps 1 and 2.

It seems like it ought to be possible to write equations describing the
information state of the brain in step one followed by step two, and
mathematically PROVE that a negligible amount of information has been lost
in the transition.  We would need to know nothing at all about memory
storage, except that it is performed by large durable molecules above a
certain number of daltons.

This is under ideal circumstances : patient has good standby care by a
competent medical team, and chooses to be suspended a short drive from the
cryonics lab.  One way to ensure this would be to have the patient on an
active life support machine that the patient could order switched off,
causing the patient to legally die when the team is ready.  That would be a
frightening moment, and one that I hope all of us here have a chance to
experience (assuming a method for keeping the brain alive in it's current
form is not developed in the next 50-80 years).

Your clinical examples aren't very illustrative because you're talking about
edema for a period of days killing billions of neurons, and now the patient
cannot retrieve their memories.  Are the memories gone?  Did neurons
involved in the process of searching and retrieving declarative memory data
get destroyed?  Who knows, but the patient has been allowed to fester in a
hospital bed for weeks while the damaged neurons are eaten by macrophages,
and none of the damage has been repaired or the missing cells replaced.  If
I go attack your desktop computer with a soldering iron and short a few
hundred randomly chosen circuits, you would not necessarily conclude that
the data on your computer was destroyed past any method of recovery.
 Especially if your computer stored it's data in hundreds of distributed
storage chips scattered all across the mainboard.

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