What Oregon Brain Preservation is doing isn’t exactly cryonics in the traditional sense. Most of what they offer is aldehyde-based brain preservation, which stores your brain at refrigerator temperatures. They do have a cryonics option, but it’s not free—$15,000 for whole-head cryopreservation, or if you’re feeling more minimalist, $5,000 for just the brain.
fair enough! maybe i should edit my post with “brain preservation some through cryonics for indefinite storage with the purpose of future reanimation is sufficiently subsidized to be free or marginally free in some regions of the world” 😅
I don’t feel strongly about this one way or another, but I think it’s reasonable to expend the term cryonics to mean any brain preservation method done with the hope for future revival as that seems like the core concept people are referring to when using the term. When the term was first coined, room temperature options weren’t a thing. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PG4D4CSBHhijYDvSz/refactoring-cryonics-as-structural-brain-preservation
Do you happen to know whether we have reason to suspect that the aldehyde and refrigerator approach will be measurably less effective for future use of the stored brains, vs conventional cryopreservation?
Both aldehyde fixation and liquid-nitrogen cryopreservation are techniques easy to perform, and routinely employed in ~every biology lab for cell cultures. Reversing the latter is trivial and also routine; reversing the former is not possible with current tech.
How relevant you consider this is up to you. My guess is that people intuit that with improved technology, the relative difficulty of reversing these on the macro scale would be the same.
The enthusiasm for aldehyde-based chemical fixation preservation seems extremely misplaced to me. Biological viability is lost, and the original proteins can no longer return to a normal state. Traditional cryopreservation is much safer if you’re looking for real prospects of revival—at least, that’s how I see it.
probability of reverting biological viability of fixated brain seems plausibly higher to me than reverting structural integrity (connectome mapping) of traditional cryonics 🤷♂️ I’m still signed up with Alcor atm, but I’d rather vitrifixation
I am revisiting what I wrote earlier. In fact, I am now in favor of chemopreservation. It so happens that some time ago I was concerned about the “paradox of duplicates”:
“I would be happy to know Your Lordship’s opinion, namely, whether, when my brain has lost its original structure, and when, a few hundred years later, the same materials are recreated in such a curious way that they become an intelligent being, I should say that this being will be me; or whether two or three of these beings would be formed from my brain; whether they will all be me, and therefore a single identical intelligent being.”
— Letter from Thomas Reid to Lord Kames, 1775
Since then, I have revised my position to consider the copy paradox as unjustified. Initially, I was worried about this issue because once a patient is fixed, the proteins can no longer return to their original states, and the brain is biologically dead. A chemically fixed brain cannot simply be repaired with medical nanorobots and reheated; it must be scanned and emulated in the form of a whole brain emulation or reconstructed. In short, revival after fixation normally relies solely on the information while discarding the matter, which was problematic for me.
Then I read Michael A. Cerullo’s theory of branched psychological identity. According to him, consciousness will continue to exist as long as there is continuity in a person’s psychological structure, memories, personality, dreams, and the causal relationships between different pieces of information. In short, if at least fifty percent of this structure can be reinstated, then identity has survived and consciousness continues. The theory asserts that if two copies are made, you will continue to exist independently in both; if three, four, or even a hundred copies are made, it is the same. Your consciousness is restarted at the point where it left off.
This is scientifically coherent if we consider that the human mind is defined by its substrate, the brain. The brain is a physical object governed by the laws of physics and composed of a finite physical quantity. It can therefore be described with information, such as bits. If you can recover a version sufficiently close to this model and reinstate it, you recover a person’s mind, and the problem of copying in the context of cryonics or duplication becomes completely unjustified.
If the aldehyde preservation method is as good as traditional cryopreservation, then this looks like a pretty glaring market inefficiency—someone should be able to swoop in and undercut the established cryo companies.
I just don’t know enough about the object level arguments to say much with confidence, but I’m a bit skeptical such a gap in the market exists.
I see absolutely no point in requesting whole-head preservation when preserving only the brain (which is essentially the same thing) costs significantly less than having your entire head preserved at Oregon Brain Preservation.
The only argument I’ve found in favor of whole-head preservation is that handling a slippery and fragile structure like the brain might cause problems—meaning it could be damaged in the process.
What Oregon Brain Preservation is doing isn’t exactly cryonics in the traditional sense. Most of what they offer is aldehyde-based brain preservation, which stores your brain at refrigerator temperatures. They do have a cryonics option, but it’s not free—$15,000 for whole-head cryopreservation, or if you’re feeling more minimalist, $5,000 for just the brain.
fair enough! maybe i should edit my post with “brain preservation some through cryonics for indefinite storage with the purpose of future reanimation is sufficiently subsidized to be free or marginally free in some regions of the world” 😅
I’m in favour of saying true things. I feel the (current) title is slightly misleading.
I don’t feel strongly about this one way or another, but I think it’s reasonable to expend the term cryonics to mean any brain preservation method done with the hope for future revival as that seems like the core concept people are referring to when using the term. When the term was first coined, room temperature options weren’t a thing. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PG4D4CSBHhijYDvSz/refactoring-cryonics-as-structural-brain-preservation
Definitely. Let’s not imitate the deceptive headlines in mainstream media
Do you happen to know whether we have reason to suspect that the aldehyde and refrigerator approach will be measurably less effective for future use of the stored brains, vs conventional cryopreservation?
Both aldehyde fixation and liquid-nitrogen cryopreservation are techniques easy to perform, and routinely employed in ~every biology lab for cell cultures. Reversing the latter is trivial and also routine; reversing the former is not possible with current tech.
How relevant you consider this is up to you. My guess is that people intuit that with improved technology, the relative difficulty of reversing these on the macro scale would be the same.
The enthusiasm for aldehyde-based chemical fixation preservation seems extremely misplaced to me. Biological viability is lost, and the original proteins can no longer return to a normal state. Traditional cryopreservation is much safer if you’re looking for real prospects of revival—at least, that’s how I see it.
probability of reverting biological viability of fixated brain seems plausibly higher to me than reverting structural integrity (connectome mapping) of traditional cryonics 🤷♂️ I’m still signed up with Alcor atm, but I’d rather vitrifixation
I am revisiting what I wrote earlier. In fact, I am now in favor of chemopreservation. It so happens that some time ago I was concerned about the “paradox of duplicates”:
https://www.benbest.com/philo/doubles.html
“I would be happy to know Your Lordship’s opinion, namely, whether, when my brain has lost its original structure, and when, a few hundred years later, the same materials are recreated in such a curious way that they become an intelligent being, I should say that this being will be me; or whether two or three of these beings would be formed from my brain; whether they will all be me, and therefore a single identical intelligent being.”
— Letter from Thomas Reid to Lord Kames, 1775
Since then, I have revised my position to consider the copy paradox as unjustified. Initially, I was worried about this issue because once a patient is fixed, the proteins can no longer return to their original states, and the brain is biologically dead. A chemically fixed brain cannot simply be repaired with medical nanorobots and reheated; it must be scanned and emulated in the form of a whole brain emulation or reconstructed. In short, revival after fixation normally relies solely on the information while discarding the matter, which was problematic for me.
Then I read Michael A. Cerullo’s theory of branched psychological identity. According to him, consciousness will continue to exist as long as there is continuity in a person’s psychological structure, memories, personality, dreams, and the causal relationships between different pieces of information. In short, if at least fifty percent of this structure can be reinstated, then identity has survived and consciousness continues. The theory asserts that if two copies are made, you will continue to exist independently in both; if three, four, or even a hundred copies are made, it is the same. Your consciousness is restarted at the point where it left off.
This is scientifically coherent if we consider that the human mind is defined by its substrate, the brain. The brain is a physical object governed by the laws of physics and composed of a finite physical quantity. It can therefore be described with information, such as bits. If you can recover a version sufficiently close to this model and reinstate it, you recover a person’s mind, and the problem of copying in the context of cryonics or duplication becomes completely unjustified.
Here is a link to Cerullo’s theory:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11023-014-9352-8
Now that I am a brancher, I logically have no objections to chemical fixation, and it is a form of preservation that interests me as much as cryonics.
Syd Lonreiro
I don’t know. The brain preservation prize to preserve the connective of a large mammal was won with aldehyde-stabilization though
I don’t know.
If the aldehyde preservation method is as good as traditional cryopreservation, then this looks like a pretty glaring market inefficiency—someone should be able to swoop in and undercut the established cryo companies.
I just don’t know enough about the object level arguments to say much with confidence, but I’m a bit skeptical such a gap in the market exists.
I see absolutely no point in requesting whole-head preservation when preserving only the brain (which is essentially the same thing) costs significantly less than having your entire head preserved at Oregon Brain Preservation.
The only argument I’ve found in favor of whole-head preservation is that handling a slippery and fragile structure like the brain might cause problems—meaning it could be damaged in the process.