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.
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