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Would you freeze yourself?
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I'd rather not asymptotically approach death for eternity
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Frankly, I can't see how the neurological activity and electrical pattern in the brain could be preserved (or replicated) and then stored - who we "can be" at any one time is based on a unique pattern of neurons in the entire brain, and what we when do from there consists of a comically complicated patter of electrical activity.
The basis of 'humanhood' is a unique maze that would take a massive amount of data to describe, and then the activity inside of this maze would also have to be simulated, and the resulting effect of this activity on the maze would have to be accounted for as well. So it's possible to 'run' existence as a program, but I can't even picture how much storage and processing capacity this would require.
Much easier to use the fields of medicine and science to just hinder natural aging.
As for effective freezing - as in a crapshoot that doesn't doom me into becoming an inert popsicle, but might not ever lead to me being resuscitated in a desirable way, I would consider it unless my relatives at the time would be pained from me not really dying in a definite way. Hope is painful, and not knowing whether a parent will ever return or stay dead can't be fun.
hat seems a more useful version than cryogenics as it'd keep working when you had been restored as well whilst also a lot easier to store.
The other thing I've wondered about is whether or not the Cyrogenics facilities also do any insurance type deals, though they're closer to loans or savings. You set up an account to pay them for storing your head/pattern and to also invest the money, and after a set number of years (or when the technology comes out to re-sleeve you) you come out and claim the interest. Once you've got the tech, it's then literally Life Insurance but then you've not got the extreme culture shock and lack of useful abilities that the first guys have to come to terms with.
Lets not go down this path, it would still be as much 'you' as you would be on leaving the clinic. There's really no definition or concept of 'you' that makes any sense at all, let alone one that compares a potentially brain damaged, dethawed head against an electronic copy put into a new body.
A copy is a copy and a clone is a clone, but it'll never be 'you' that occupies a new body. Science really need finds a way to transplant our brains and stop them from aging.
I don't understand the concern about the rich freezing themselves and not contributing to the present; it is currently illegal to do so anyway -- you have to wait until you're "dead". Unless there is some country that has cryonics with laxer laws than I am aware of.
It's not a copy any more than the one who walked in there is a copy, "you" don't exist as a static or constant thing anyway - you're constantly being copied and updated as it is. If you did it simultaneously, neither of you would know which of you it was who walked in - how is this different from just allowing 10 years to pass and then being a completely person made of entirely new atoms anyway? You are defining "you" almost in the same way as we trying to point to when the DNA of one species has evolved into another one. The new "you" has branched off from the old one, not been added alongside, as there is no definable difference between the two of you.
I don't think there's anything that science can do without embracing this fact to stop brains aging, it's more than just mechanical failure (although if it was, would you be happy with a chip simulating neurons in your head, acting as more brain space, being implanted into a new brain - how much continuity is needed?).
Course the solution to both would be to be a kind of Hive mind, resleeve and clone yourself before you die and include some shared space (or perhaps even just open the shared connection whilst you sleep). Then you can repeat this constantly, with it being impossible to tell where one person starts and the other ends, even after the original has died long ago. But now we're just in science fiction, but still one I'd like to read about and perhaps live in. I could live with being Tastyfish Prime.
That's the one
But I probably wont freeze myself when it comes down to it.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
For instance, any kind of stasis would certainly open up long distance space travel and that could be an environment that would allow you to work off your debt and also to acclimatise to a future world. Uploaded humans wouldn't be the best people to send to start with, but would certainly make it easier to boost populations on a world that's been slightly colonised. If you can make it past the first few years and send a message back, then we can send the people who weren't ready for carving a new life out of the bare rock but are needed in a larger society without generations passing.
How people would respond to waking up a new world I don't know. Favourable to start with once you've got over the shock, I'd guess, especially if you've been exposed to the full culture shock of a future city.
Spoilered because, at least initially, the system being unknown is a plot point in the book's opening chapters;
Eventually what the powers in charge do is create genetically and technologically advanced bodies that aren't quite clones, but that use the person's base DNA as a template, and grow that person a new body (I think the process is eventually sped up to take around 18 months).
They then only take people at the age of 75, who sign up at 65 and are never told what will happen, just that they're going to be soldiers for at least 5 years, and if they survive they'll be permitted to join a colony, but can never return to Earth.
The procedure then uses a machine to transfer to intellect, consciousness and, well, the person's being, as it were, into this new body, and the old one is discarded.
It's purely sci-fi, but that idea seemed to resonate with this issue presented above; rather than moving our brain into a new body or a machine, what if we could actually grow a new brain and move the consciousness itself into it.
Anyway, it removes some of the "is a clone me or just a copy of me" by sort of 'updating the hardware and moving over the software' take on things.
Also, I really enjoyed those books.
But knowing my luck, I'd wake up to find something akin to 'Idiocracy'.