without a body the brain won’t ‘work’, the brain is very much linked to the rest of the body, the fiction that we only need the head to ‘reanimate’ a person back to normal is just that, fiction.
wei Dai:”rebuilding/simulating the body to the level of detail needed to support cognition”
yes,but how complex is the nervous system? which wire connects to which, or is that not important? seems to me that you’re oversimplifying..
A significant data point here is that organ transplants—including those of entire limbs—have been made to work already. This indicates that the wiring in general cannot be so specific as to be impossible to replicate or regrow without originals.
Yes, but we don’t have any good data on whether the animals had the same personality so that doesn’t provide the same sort of data that organ and limb transplants do. But the overarching point seems correct.
the fiction that we only need the head to ‘reanimate’ a person back to normal is just that, fiction.
Well, it might be a fiction in the sense that we never actually do it. (Personally, I doubt there will ever be star-trek style teleportation for macroscopic objects, even though it seems ‘possible in principle’.)
But I think the OP is asking about the possibility in principle of restoring a dead person such that their memories, personality and intellect remain intact. If a frozen body has ‘enough information’ then so does a frozen head, right? Seems pretty uncontroversial, but as the OP points out, there are people who disagree.
without a body the brain won’t ‘work’, the brain is very much linked to the rest of the body, the fiction that we only need the head to ‘reanimate’ a person back to normal is just that, fiction.
wei Dai:”rebuilding/simulating the body to the level of detail needed to support cognition” yes,but how complex is the nervous system? which wire connects to which, or is that not important? seems to me that you’re oversimplifying..
A significant data point here is that organ transplants—including those of entire limbs—have been made to work already. This indicates that the wiring in general cannot be so specific as to be impossible to replicate or regrow without originals.
Also, we’ve transplanted animal heads.
Yes, but we don’t have any good data on whether the animals had the same personality so that doesn’t provide the same sort of data that organ and limb transplants do. But the overarching point seems correct.
Well, it might be a fiction in the sense that we never actually do it. (Personally, I doubt there will ever be star-trek style teleportation for macroscopic objects, even though it seems ‘possible in principle’.)
But I think the OP is asking about the possibility in principle of restoring a dead person such that their memories, personality and intellect remain intact. If a frozen body has ‘enough information’ then so does a frozen head, right? Seems pretty uncontroversial, but as the OP points out, there are people who disagree.