Connectomics and Cryonics

 Connectomics  

Currently there are two methods on the table for preserving a brain so that it may be reanimated, or uploaded in the future. Alcor has been cryopreserving people for 40 years, while the techniques for bringing back frozen flesh, and more importantly neural pathways, are slowly developed. Now connectomics research has introduced chemical brain preservation as a method, albeit destructive, that may someday allow a brain to be brought back to 'life'.

S ebastian Seung may seem like an unlikely person to visit and talk at the Alcor Conference.  The computational neuroscientist, and author of Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, did just that though last year. Specifically, Seung addressed some of the points and criticisms of the last two chapters of the book, which explore more of the transhumanist areas of connectomics research, including how cryonics may not save a person's brain (see video above).

Advances in neuroscience today strongly suggest that appropriately preserved brains will contain our memories, identity, and consciousness, and therefore preservation technology, when it arrives, will make such brains available for future reading of memories, or full revival if desired.

According to Seung, if the connectome is to be preserved, with the gossamer thin strands of neural connnections, that measure end-to-end into the millions of miles, cryopreservation will not work. Seung in his talk does not ever say these words exactly, but does ask the audience to consider what he is saying, by going through the steps that he, and other connectomics researchers like Ken Hayworth use.

Image Source: Brain Preservation Foundation

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Seung and Hayworth use the technology of chemical brain preservation to explore connectomes. Unlike the freezing method of cyronics used at Alcor, chemical brain preservation essentially kills the cells it preserves. Shortly before or moments after death, a scientists will start the process of emergency glutaraldehyde perfusion (EGP) for protein fixation (a kind of advanced embalming process).  

"The human race is on a beeline to mind uploading: We will preserve a brain, slice it up, simulate it on a computer, and hook it up to a robot body," says Hayworth.

At Alcor, many of the members want eventually to return to life in their own bodies, and so the methods of freezing the body (or just the head) at death makes sense.  They do not necessarily want to return as a 'brain in a box' upload, that seems to be the de facto outcome of the chemical brain preservation route.

In another talk at the same conference, Twenty-First Century Medicine cryobiologist Gregory Fahy took aim at the chemical brain preservation researchers (see image below).  Showing his work on advancing cryonics, Fahy says:

All of a sudden something scary happens.  People like Ken Hayworth come along and Sebastian Seung and John Smart wondering if maybe cryopreservation is all wrong - it's not the right way to go at all.  It would be much better too have your brain perfused with gluteraldehyde, then embedded in plastic and then cut into tiny little pieces and bombarded with electron beams.  I don't know but, I have some reservations about my brain being destroyed as a way of preserving it.

Fahy is counting on future nanomedicine to reanimate cryopreserved people.  He prefers what he calls the 'classical' cryopreservation approach.

Image Source: Anders Sandberg

To help decide whether cryonics or chemical brain preservation (or both, or neither) is a feasible method for an eventual uploading/immortality technology, Seung is a judge for the Brain Preservation Foundation's prize.  The Brain Preservation Foundation was started by Hayworth as an organization to advance the use and techniques of chemical brain preservation and long term storage.  The Prize seeks the development of an inexpensive and reliable hospital surgical procedure which verifiably preserves the structural connectivity of 99.9% of the synapses in a human brain if administered rapidly after biological death.

There are currently two competitors for the Brain Preservation Foundation prize.

Seung undoubtedly retains a lingering fascination with the possibility of an intersection between connectomics and transhumanism. At a TED talk he gave, he commented that connectomics might eventually put to the test whether a technology like cryonics will eventually be feasible.  



SOURCE  Alcor Cryonics

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