Epistemic status: vague conjecture and talking aloud.
So this article by Peter Watts has been making the rounds, talking about how half the people with cranial cavities filled 95% with cerebrospinal fluids still have IQs over 100. One of the side discussions on Hacker News was about how most of the internal tissue in the brain was used for routing while most ‘logic’ happened in the outer millimeters.
So far, I haven’t seen anyone make the connection to cryonics and plasatination. If it’s true that most of the important data is stored near the outside of the brain, does that make identity preservation through cryonics more or less likely? I vaguely remember reading that getting the core of the brain to LN temperatures took time. But if most data is near outside of the brain, which will reach LN temperatures first, shouldn’t that raise our estimates of whether personal identity is preserved?
There’s a difference between a brain that developed and grew under a set of unusual physical constraints and a brain that developed normally that’s been cored. The first is not normal but has not had chunks destroyed all at once after it was laid down.
I am reminded of the difference between patients born without a corpus callosum between the cerebral hemispheres and those that have them cut in adulthood. The latter develop classic split brain apparent semidual consciousness, the former are basically normally unitary (and diffusion tractography reveals an unusual density of sideways connectivity within the normally not very connected subcortical midbrain stuff, presumably built up in compensation as they built themselves, decidedly not normal nor as extensive as the corpus callosum but apparently functional).
Epistemic status: vague conjecture and talking aloud.
So this article by Peter Watts has been making the rounds, talking about how half the people with cranial cavities filled 95% with cerebrospinal fluids still have IQs over 100. One of the side discussions on Hacker News was about how most of the internal tissue in the brain was used for routing while most ‘logic’ happened in the outer millimeters.
So far, I haven’t seen anyone make the connection to cryonics and plasatination. If it’s true that most of the important data is stored near the outside of the brain, does that make identity preservation through cryonics more or less likely? I vaguely remember reading that getting the core of the brain to LN temperatures took time. But if most data is near outside of the brain, which will reach LN temperatures first, shouldn’t that raise our estimates of whether personal identity is preserved?
There’s a difference between a brain that developed and grew under a set of unusual physical constraints and a brain that developed normally that’s been cored. The first is not normal but has not had chunks destroyed all at once after it was laid down.
I am reminded of the difference between patients born without a corpus callosum between the cerebral hemispheres and those that have them cut in adulthood. The latter develop classic split brain apparent semidual consciousness, the former are basically normally unitary (and diffusion tractography reveals an unusual density of sideways connectivity within the normally not very connected subcortical midbrain stuff, presumably built up in compensation as they built themselves, decidedly not normal nor as extensive as the corpus callosum but apparently functional).