[listic]

Personally, I'm with you on this. Cryonically suspending a person that died from brain damage or debilitating disease has even more fleeting chance for success. Unless there's a chance that at the moment of death the conscience is still there (due to great redundancy in the brain), it might be futile, after all. This is one issue that I believe all cryonics companies and advocates prefer to wholly overlook.

I imagine it should be terrifically hard to let go of your child and 'kill' them preemptively, for them to have a hope of later life. Even if the parents did even consider that option.

As far as I see it, cryopreserving a person that is not legally dead ('cryothanasia'?) might be possible, but no cryonics company has procedures in place to arrange for it and I am not aware of anyone that has been preserved this way. At least, it is necessary to move to a country where voluntary euthanasia is legal and the associated autopsy is not mandatory, and you are on your own with this. [1] This is another issue that cryonics companies and advocates prefer to overlook.

Cryonics is still very niche as it is. People are still very reluctant to arrange for cryopreservation beforehand, as it is. Cryonics companies have their hands full with just continuing to operate and convincing people to use their services. For there to exist people that are fully rational about their own or their loved ones' death, and think about it more deeply than the cryonics companies and advocates, is a whole next step entirely: I am unaware of such people yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_euthanasia

[moyix]

> Unless there's a chance that at the moment of death the conscience is still there (due to great redundancy in the brain), it might be futile, after all. This is one issue that I believe all cryonics companies and advocates prefer to wholly overlook.

You seem to be arguing that death is a binary state, but I don't think this is particularly well established. There are all sorts of arguments over what constitutes definite proof of death [1]. It seems more likely to me that the process of dying is a transition, and that the exact point along that transition where someone is irreversibly gone depends on our current level of medical technology – which is exactly what cryonics is betting on.

As an analogy, when RAM loses power, the data on it doesn't vanish instantly, but rather degrades over some period of time [2]. Depending on how the information is stored, what you're willing to do without, and what you can piece together, you can declare the data in RAM "gone" at different points throughout that process.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_definition_of_death

[2] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/h...

[listic]

I didn't mean to disagree argue that; just didn't have enough time to think this question over before typing.

Yes, death is not a binary state physically, but it is legally. This is what cryonics counts for.

Also, conscience is not binary; there is plenty of evidence that it is uneven and noncontinuous. People lose conscience and then regain it and live on all the time. Many people live in reduced states of consciousness most or all of the time. Our mind tries to maintain illusion of continuity of consciousness for our convenience. Sometimes people survive ridiculous amount of brain damage (men living with a hole in their head). All this is evidence that whatever forms our conscience is very redundant and just might survive the damage of what today is considered death and future restoration. Especially with the help of whatever medical technology will be available in the future (nanotech, hi-res brain scanning, etc.); especially if it would be needed anyway to counter the damage sustained during cryopreservation.

[wutbrodo]

> People lose conscience and then regain it and live on all the time.

Do you mean "consciousness" here? I assumed you actually meant conscience at first but this sentence doesn't seem to make sense with that word but then you use consciousness later which means it isn't just a spelling error. I'm not asking to be pedantic, but because I'm now getting confused about what you're trying to say in parts of your otherwise interesting comment.

[porejide]

It is clear that you have done a good amount of research, which is great! If you look further, you will find that in fact there are plenty of people who are interested in precisely this aspect of brain preservation/cryonics. See, for example, [1], [2], [3], [4].

[1] http://chronopause.com/chronopause.com/index.php/2012/05/20/...

[2] http://www.brainpreservation.org/preservation-rights/

[3] http://www.oregoncryo.com/aboutCryonics.html

[4] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/zoltan-istvan/should-cryonics-...