After Death Reaction

How the hell would someone who just got defrost from cryonics react?!
[huh]

Yours
~Infernity

With their pupils?

If they just woke up, then they were never really dead, in which case this thread is misnamed isn't it?

---BrianW

Well, they were dead, since you freeze dead people. The technology will let us resuscitate the dead.

And supposing they weren't- how would they react at any rate?

Yours truthfully
~Infernity

They are not really biologicly dead. If they were then how could they have been revived.

You cannot bring a ' dead ' person back to life.

but anyway...

they would think ' well that was quick ! ' Because they were not consciouss and time was irrelevant to them, So I guess it would seem like a blink of an eye.

I guess it depends on the person really... Hmm

Edited by whoa182, 31 March 2005 - 01:13 AM.

Matt, check the definition of death here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death .

And for case you're about to say "yeah, the END of life"- http://www.imminst.o...&f=16&t=5121&s=

new beginnings

Now, did you know that after you are determinate as dead, you actually are in conscious for 8 more seconds? You do. The brain still has enough oxygen for 8 seconds, it makes energy for trying to survive, that's why in such case we already can do nothing, that would be a waste of energy on less important things to do anything but nothing, so we automatically can't.

I wonder if the person will be able to tell about that, or maybe the memory system didn't work as well...

Also of course would love to know as you said, how long was it, I suppose pretty fast as you said.

Yours truthfully
~Infernity

Well, they were dead, since you freeze dead people.

No, infernity, cryonics cryopreserves *legally* deceased people to prevent them from actually dying. In medicine, legal death simply means that doctors have decided not to treat a patient in cardiac arrest because of underlying problems like terminal illness. It doesn't mean that a person is biologically dead. Check out

http://www.alcor.org...arySupport.html

Re your Wikipedia citation, pay careful attention to this part of it

Irreversibility is often cited as a key feature of death. Accordingly by definition it would not be possible to bring an organism back to life; if an organism lives, this implies that it has not died earlier, even if that seemed the case.

You wrote:

The technology will let us resuscitate the dead.

There is NO technology that can resuscitate dead people. There are only technologies for repairing and reviving unconscious sick people, many of whom are mistaken for dead, or abandoned as dead rather than admit that treatment is just being withdrawn.

---BrianW

The body is not dead Brian, but the brain does.
There is NO technology that can resuscitate dead people YET!
The definition of "death" is changing all the time...

Yours truthfully
~Infernity

I wonder if the person will be able to tell about that, or maybe the memory system didn't work as well...

Probably not... AFAIK They use some sedatives during the procedure to prevent any kind of sensory function during the freezing process. If you've ever had an overly large dose of barbituates (which I hope you haven't!), you might have experienced a 'black out', where you don't really retain anything from your short term memory. They'll probably wake up remembering the first things stored in their long term memory before they died.

I think Brian is saying truthfully DEAD people can't be resuicstated, not legally dead. There is certainly a degree of decay and damage at which a mind's information could not reasonably be determined with any more accuracy then guessing random variables; at that point, the person is dead, everything that was them is lost. They might be able to repair the hunk of meat in the future back into a functioning person, but it would be a clean slate. Loss of your mind is the ultimate death definition, and the one Brian is referring too, I think. No amount of nanotechnology can repair something that it doesn't have a blueprint too.

The "frozen" people you talk of infernity are not dead. They are in a state of suspended animation...some people call it deanimated. People who go into cryonics are preserving their physical state so that they can be animated again. "Real" death is destruction of the body and mind.

I think the problem here was just my misunderstanding of the determine *death*, simply I meant something which I suppose the same thing you did, using other terms. Well I'll switch, I see everyone is using the same language except me...
Thank you armrha and Mind. (:

Armrha, are you saying that you think the defrost people will not remember the short term (as for them of course, like the day they died)?

Yours truthfully
~Infernity

infernity wrote:

The definition of "death" is changing all the time...

The definition of death is a constant. It's *the criteria used to pronounce legal death* that constantly change. These criteria not only change with time, but also location and context. The criteria used to pronounce death in the wilderness will be different than the criteria in an operating room. Even in a hospital, the criteria will be different for different patients depending on their underlying condition. For example, a terminal patient will be declared legally dead when their heart stops, but a non-terminal patient will only be declared legally dead when multiple cardiac resuscitation attempts have failed. For a patient with an artificial heart that never stops, criteria for diagnosing legal death will be different again.

If you confuse diagnostic criteria for death with a definition of death, then you are guilty of this

http://www.alcor.org.../hesdeadjim.htm

There is NO technology that can resuscitate dead people YET!

There will NEVER be a technology can resuscitate people who are truly dead. On the other hand, there are certainly technologies for resuscitating most people declared legally dead today. Think about it. What happens if you do CPR, and pull out all the medical stops, on a terminal patient declared dead the instant their heart stops. You'll resuscitate them of course. But this isn't done because they are terminal and there would be no point to living a few more hours or days in pain. In principle, you can take anyone with a cardiac cause of legal death, put them on a blood pump/oxygenator, and get the brain back if you do it fast enough. Papers have actually been published on this. There is a reason why anesthetic is used in cryonics protocols!

The body is not dead Brian, but the brain does.

And why isn't the brain part of the body? Since in an earlier post you already said that people remain conscious for several seconds after clinical death, and since a living brain is required for consciousness, I think you've already disproven your assertion!

Boorishly yours,

---BrianW

Brian
Ugg, you got me in all points [8)] thanks .

Only one thing you said cannot be said reasonably for what aspires to be certain, but still quite reasonable I'd say:

There will NEVER be a technology can resuscitate people who are truly dead. On the other hand, there are certainly technologies for resuscitating most people declared legally dead today. Think about it. What happens if you do CPR, and pull out all the medical stops, on a terminal patient declared dead the instant their heart stops. You'll resuscitate them of course. But this isn't done because they are terminal and there would be no point to living a few more hours or days in pain. In principle, you can take anyone with a cardiac cause of legal death, put them on a blood pump/oxygenator, and get the brain back if you do it fast enough. Papers have actually been published on this. There is a reason why anesthetic is used in cryonics protocols!

Simply, nothing is for sure, heh I held on it, I still am, seem to find it always correct. The fact it cannot be proved... you see. But I suppose you are correct, know what I mean?

[sfty]

Yours truthfully
~Infernity

Simply, nothing is for sure, heh I held on it, I still am, seem to find it always correct. The fact it cannot be proved... you see. But I suppose you are correct, know what I mean?

Not sure what you mean. My statement that "There will NEVER be a technology that can resuscitate people who are truly dead" is always and for sure true because it is a tautology, like 1=1. We agree as a matter of definition that whenever medicine finds new ways to resuscitate people that they were never really dead. Of course there will always be a minority that likes to believe some resuscitated people really were dead (so that experiences surrounding resuscitation can be upheld as evidence of life after death), but that is not a mainstream view. In medicine, if you are resuscitated, then your death was prevented, not reversed.

Returning to your original question that spawned the thread, it takes an hour or more for newly-acquired memories to move from electrical patterns into chemical and structural changes for long-term storage. Theoretically it's possible that a cryonics patient might not lose any memory if they spend the last hours or days of their life unconscious, as is often the case with terminal patients. So the whole thing might be like waking from general anesthesia.

A well-known side effect of general anesthesia is that there is no sense of time having past because anesthesia shuts off the brain's internal clock (among many other things). So a patient under for 8 hours might only feel that only a few minutes have passed (the peri-anesthesia sedation period when the brain clock is still running). Cryonics, if it works, would be the same experience with centuries in between instead of hours.

---BrianW

I intend to take a deep breath, look around the room, yell at the top of my lungs "I live AGAIN" and then laugh manically for about a half an hour.

Hmmm, that's interesting Brian, you know when I woke up from a general anesthesia once after a surgery, gee it was a good sleep!

Well Elrond, I am not sure you'd know you 'died' since you were frozen AFTER 'dying' so you supposedly should not know you were in cryonics...

Yours truthfully
~Infernity

It is all dependent on how successful the repair of damaged cortical neurons is and how much of the fidelity of the neural pattern that existed prior to death/stasis is maintained. Thus the perception of suspension could vary from awakening from a nap to awakening from a long term coma. I would say that the first cryonauts to be reanimated will be variably memory and persona deficient and may need to re-learn basic motor skills. I am assuming that the repair process ensures that no brain damage is sustained but that the neural pattern fidelity is variable. In time, of course, the knowledge of how such neural patterns are associated with memory may be such that deficits could simply be filled in using extrapolative methodology.

Hmmm... Well prometheus, in one hand the brain will be able to tell the body to move and will supposedly remember how to do it, but in the other hand, the body didn't do it for YEARS, perhaps DECADES! so I wonder if the unawareness to that you supposedly can't because of not exercising will affect on it...

Yours truthfully
~Infernity

The repair methodology would have to be sufficiently sophisticated to account for that sort of neural rewiring and reconfiguration -- after all, exercising simply induces alterations in neural networks in specific motor cortical regions. It seems likely that by the time this sort of technology emerges we would also have the ability to bypass conventional learning and training and imprint such facilities directly into the cortex.

POPE John Paul II pulls up some interesting rhetorical questions.

I'm not really religious but its been all over the news. Can't help but notice. Whats the church's stand on cryonics and life extension?
I wonder if the Vatican would arrange something like a brain cryo. As a religious relic?
Something as valuable as his brain- surely warrants some kind of mummification or preservation?

Of course an ordinary mortal like me can't possibly fathom the complexities of that. [tung]