Topic 1.2
Science of pausing life
The central claim of Biostasis is that identity survives if information survives. But you can't just assert this and move on. You need to grapple with what identity actually is at.
Memory, identity and the brainYou are not your atoms, you are the way they are arranged. Why memory and identity live in the brain's structure, and what that means for what we actually have to preserve.What makes you, you? by Tim UrbanEXTERNALTL;DR: Personal identity appears to depend on the information and organization of the brain, not on keeping the same individual atoms throughout life. Loading the interactive.Preservation without freezing Preservation without freezing: what vitrification is, what it achieves, and what it explicitly does not do.What is ischemia and how does it influence cryopreservationCryonics is an emergency, not a storage problem. Why oxygen starvation in the first hours is the field's biggest enemy, and how a standby team fights the clock.What is the difference between Freezing and Vitrification?Cryonics does not freeze people. The difference between shattering tissue with ice and setting it gently in glass is the whole game.The medical antifreeze (aka Cryoprotectant)The medical antifreeze that makes vitrification possible, and the toxicity tradeoff the entire procedure is built around.Vitrification vs fixationTL;DR: Vitrification uses cryoprotectants and cooling to avoid ice while preserving a possible biological repair route. Fixation chemically stabilizes structure but prevents.Advancing the fieldCryonics is an active research field. The four problems it is working on, with cryoprotectant toxicity first, what has actually been demonstrated and in which species, and how.Relevant research papersAn annotated reading list grouped by what the papers actually establish: the premise the field rests on, what has been preserved, what has recovered function, and what has not been.