Philosophy, Science And Society, Technology and Society

In Which I Disagree With @Instapundit

12 Comments

I agree that neurosuspension is better than nothing, but I disagree that whole body is for suckers. This is a topic that’s been going on for years in cryonics discussions.

We simply don’t know how much of our identity is in our body, as opposed to simply our brains. For instance, I suspect that there is a lot of distributed motor intelligence in athletes and musicians — when I play an instrument (or for that matter, simply type on a keyboard) I have a sense that my hands aren’t being directly controlled by the brain, but are rather receiving higher-level commands issued by the brain that are implemented at a lower level, based on local memory. I don’t know that to be the case, but if you can afford to keep the whole body, it might end up being worth not having to reacquire old skills.

12 thoughts on “In Which I Disagree With @Instapundit”

  1. It wouldn’t be surprising if the neurons in the body function as part of the overall processing of the main mass of neurons in the head, just more distributed. Wouldn’t it be interesting if multiple sclerosis and Alzheimers were related diseases with the same cause.

  2. I’d vote for whole body for the simple question of who knows if they’ll be able to grow me a new one. It would suck for 50 years from now to have the doctors saying “Geez, if only he had a body we could have saved him.”

    1. They could put your head in a jar and mount it on one of those telepresence robots, but I agree that’s suboptimal.

      1. Or they could just leave my head in a jar, and I could rent a remotely-controlled body any time I feel I need one.

        Why send your brain outside where it risks being damaged or destroyed when you can just keep it somewhere safe and rent a body? So long as you’re close enough that the transmission delays are small compared to nerve delays, you shouldn’t really notice the difference (other than the kind of local processing Rand mentions, but you could rent a piano-playing body when you feel like playing a concerto, and a boxing body when you feel like a fight).

  3. Well, we know this is true at the simple level of reflexes: when you jerk your hand back from a hot stove, that’s handled (pun intended) at the local ganglia level. But i think that so-called muscle memory exists purely in the brain; Oliver Sacks’ fascinating book Musicophilia has several examples that support my view. However, there is a viewpoint that the gastrointestinal tract contains a huge number of neurons and may be responsible for some level of literal gut feelings.

    Of course, muscle memory is likely configured to a specific set of muscles and limbs. Robert Heinlein’s early-70s novel I Will Fear No Evil (not one of his better efforts; save your money) featured a brain transplant; the main character was formerly a skilled pianist, but in the new body struggled to play “Chopsticks” due to mismatches in the shape and size of arms and fingers. I suspect this is an accurate prediction.

  4. I, too, suspect that whole body could be marginally more important, but there are trade-offs. Even a billionaire might have better uses for the difference (like funding research into powering the refrigeration during long-term blackouts, or defense against vandalism, etc.).

    And by the time you’re ready for reanimation, you might be able to download lost skills.

  6. Well you’d want to at least keep your gut as well.

    “Technically known as the enteric nervous system, the second brain consists of sheaths of neurons embedded in the walls of the long tube of our gut, or alimentary canal, which measures about nine meters end to end from the esophagus to the anus. The second brain contains some 100 million neurons, more than in either the spinal cord or the peripheral nervous system, “

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