What is interesting about this is that some people can’t even imagine this being an issue whereas others can’t imagine it not being an issue. To me it seems like a simple extrapolation from stem cell research and organ printing to regenerating the whole body.
I’ve mentioned recently reading Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Body before. He’s a very intelligent man, but he lives for doing body stuff—“Decades of full-contact abuse
and overconfidence in all sports ending in ‘-boarding’ …” The book makes it clear how much of his self-image is his entire body, every bit of it, and really brought it home to me how much sporty people will feel this way.
Even given cryonics as only “the second-worst thing that can happen to you”—addressing the body issue strikes me as a non-futile idea, e.g. preserving the enteric nervous system, which may not be the 100 billion cells of the brain in the head, but at 100 million is still pretty sizable as neural networks go.
That said, the cryogenic preservation of organs in general is going great guns, because there’s buckets of cash in transplant research. This suggests we’ll find out soon enough what happens when someone gets someone else’s gut. Or even just a clone of their own gut.
I haven’t seen it raised as a “standard” objection, but it has occurred to me quite a few times as a problem with the head-only approach.
What is interesting about this is that some people can’t even imagine this being an issue whereas others can’t imagine it not being an issue. To me it seems like a simple extrapolation from stem cell research and organ printing to regenerating the whole body.
I’ve mentioned recently reading Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Body before. He’s a very intelligent man, but he lives for doing body stuff—“Decades of full-contact abuse and overconfidence in all sports ending in ‘-boarding’ …” The book makes it clear how much of his self-image is his entire body, every bit of it, and really brought it home to me how much sporty people will feel this way.
Even given cryonics as only “the second-worst thing that can happen to you”—addressing the body issue strikes me as a non-futile idea, e.g. preserving the enteric nervous system, which may not be the 100 billion cells of the brain in the head, but at 100 million is still pretty sizable as neural networks go.
That said, the cryogenic preservation of organs in general is going great guns, because there’s buckets of cash in transplant research. This suggests we’ll find out soon enough what happens when someone gets someone else’s gut. Or even just a clone of their own gut.