Cryonics - Premises of Cryonics

Premises of Cryonics

A central premise of cryonics is that long-term memory, personality, and identity are stored in durable cell structures and patterns within the brain that do not require continuous brain activity to survive. This premise is generally accepted in medicine; it is known that under certain conditions the brain can stop functioning and still later recover with retention of long-term memory. Additional scientific premises of cryonics are that (1) brain structures encoding personality and long-term memory persist for some time after legal death, (2) these structures are preserved by cryopreservation, and (3) future technologies that could restore encoded memories to functional expression in a healed person are theoretically possible.

Cryonics is controversial because the technologies of premise (3) are either not understood or not accepted by many scientists, who therefore do not understand the relevance of premises (1) and (2). Whether biological structures that encode memory and personality might persist after legal death and remain inferable following cryopreservation is of little interest to most scientists until cryopreservation can be reversed. At present only cells, tissues, and some small organs can be reversibly cryopreserved. Medical science is primarily concerned with what is demonstrably achievable, not what is theoretically possible. There are, therefore, no established scientific specialties or journals directly concerned with the scientific questions posed by cryonics.

Cryonics advocates say it is possible to preserve the fine cell structures of the brain in which memory and identity reside with present technology. They say that demonstrably reversible cryopreservation is not necessary to achieve the present-day goal of cryonics, which is preservation of brain information that encodes memory and personal identity. They say current cryonics procedures can preserve the anatomical basis of mind, and that this should be sufficient to prevent information-theoretic death until future repairs might be possible.

A moral premise of cryonics is that all terminally ill patients should have the right, if they so choose, to be cryopreserved. Some cryonicists believe as a matter of principle that anyone who would ordinarily be regarded as dead should instead be made a "permanent patient" subject to whatever future advances might bring.