On a separate note, I'd be curious to hear what people think of Cyronics.
Difficult to discuss without getting religious. Too much surrounding the subject that we just don't know and that needs to be filled in with personal assumption.
Personally, I
suspect that it's probably easier to get that kind of thing to work if the body is put into stasis before death rather than doing what we're doing now: freezing dead bodies. If you're already dead...there's probably a reason you're dead. Freezing a corpse then thawing it out after years and animating it, then trying to "fix" whatever was the original cause of death...yeah, I think that's probably better described as trying to animate a corpse rather than "restoring from hibernation."
More religiously though there's the issue of consciousness. I'm not convinced that I am merely my physical body. If we're of a spiritual bent, I don't see any fundamental reason why a "soul" couldn't come back to inhabit a previously used, recently reanimated body, but it seems unlikely to me that the mechanics for doing so would simply be thawing it out and fixing whatever problem cause dthe body to die in the first place. Or for that matter, that the process would be very practical do it at all from a purely physical point of view of doing anything at all to the physical body itself. If you imagine a soul as a "thing" that can exist independently of the body, the what can you possibly expect to to do the body to cause a soul that's no longer present to "come back?"
If you want to take it one step further...personally...I suspect that consciousness is not an exclusively either/or a "physical body" or "soul" phenomenon. I'm pretty sure that a biological, physical human body could be made to function even without a "soul." I suspect that consciousness might be a phenomenon that relates to networked systems and observer processes. A human body is probably a sufficiently advanced system that is is able to ...spawn? ...posses? consciousness independent of non-physical "higher consciousness." To put it another way, do you believe that artificial intelligence is possible? Could a sufficiently complex computer become self aware? If so, well...human bodies and brains are fairly complex things. If a computer could become self aware, then why not a brain? But, I don't think that me, myself...my consciousness, what I am...is merely the consciousness of a brain. If my body were to die then be frozen for 20 years and reanimated...it may be possible that the system is sufficiently complex to manifest consciousness, and enough memory may exist in the brain for that consciousness to resemble me, but I don't think that consciousness would be "me." It might resemble me. It might be pieces of me. But it wouldn't be
all of what I was unless the non-physical-body portions of my consciousness were to also "network" with the reanimated body portions.
It's fuzzy ground. I don't think that I'm merely my brain.
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Topic: Transhumanism Discussion Thread (Read 54292 times)