X-Message-Number: 24389 From: "John de Rivaz" <> Subject: cryopreserving demented patients Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2004 11:09:31 +0100 From time to time comments are raised about the wisdom of cryopreserving patients who have "lost their minds". No one can be certain of the future, and to make a judgement that A or B is incapable of restoration is making a judgement of the future. Certainly one can speculate about probabilities, but they are just that -- speculations. The probability that an already demented mind will ever work again after it has been burned or rotted is a great deal smaller than if it has been cryopreserved. Even if you think revival from present-day cryopreservation is already small, two small numbers can still differ in magnitude. The popular press is full of stories about people who have stored illegal data on their hard drives, deleted it, only to have their PCs confiscated and the data found. In the UK a high court judge has just been punished for having illegal material on his PC. Rumours abound about using electron microscopes and similar devices to recover data that had been over written many times. How much of this is real and how much is authority inspired scare tactics I am not sure, but there must be some germ of truth in it. In the early days of PCs it was certainly believed that once data on a hard disk had been over-written that was an end to the matter. Criminals (and writers of TV cop shows) now believe that the only way to effectively destroy the data in a hard disk is to ***cremate*** the disk after removing the metal outer casing. I know that human brains are not hard disks, but changing predictions and realities as to what is possible over the past couple of decades with hard disks may well have striking similarities with regards to changing predictions and realities as to what can be recovered from damaged brains in the future. It is unlikely that anyone will know "for certain" that all the information has been lost in a brain that is demented, at least within the next few decades or even centuries. -- Sincerely, John de Rivaz: http://John.deRivaz.com for websites including Cryonics Europe, Longevity Report, The Venturists, Porthtowan, Alec Harley Reeves - inventor, Arthur Bowker - potter, de Rivaz genealogy, Nomad .. and more Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=24389