Comment by anonmeow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonmeow | Hacker News Reader

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>When a person dies, what made them a person is suddenly gone. What remains is a lifeless shell

This is a quite convenient thought conforming to our current pro-death culture.

Information that is stored in the cell connection structure of the mammal brain isn't irreversibly destroyed at the moment of death, as one of the many similar studies shows [1] . There are existing methods to preserve some (possibly large) part of this information lots of HN readers have probably heard about. Knowing these facts and being really honest with ourselves we will have to conclude that the final death of the individual occurs when this information-storing fine tissue structure of him disintegrates into unstructured matter. The question becomes then - who, by his indifference or by his profession lets this disintegration process run to its end.

Perhaps future generations will look down on us for perpetuating such barbaric customs that lead to rotting of uncountable millions of people into nothingness.

1. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v521/n7552/full/nature1...

Boy am I the wrong person to attack on this. I'm absolutely with you on the idea that we should be working harder on preserving, restoring, and - where possible - functionally reconstituting viable brains (of people who wish it).

As a tangent, because the context applies: I would be totally fine, in fact I would prefer it, to wake up one day having changed substrate from biological matter to living in silico. However, most people would absolutely not be. I know for a fact that my mother and grandmother would have been horrified by the mere suggestion. It's not for everybody, but at the same time I believe it's exceptionally important to have that option as an individual.

> Information that is stored in the cell connection structure of the mammal brain isn't irreversibly destroyed at the moment of death, as one of the many similar studies shows

That's irrelevant. We cannot access that information, so it's presence makes no difference. Once I die, all that's left to humanity at that point is a bunch of meat which I used to control. I can no longer do it, and while most of who I was is probably still stored there, nobody can access it, so either burning the body, or eating it, or whatever makes no difference.

IMHO, bodies of the dead should be treated as resources. People need to learn to cope with death, since we're not cavemen any more, and we can't still believe treating the body differently will change that (at least not until we have a lot more tech).

On the other hand, we know that just a few minutes of hypoxia produces irreversible brain damage. The brain is a delicate organ and begins decaying immediately at the point of death, with massive loss of information.

Yes and no. Most hypoxic brain damage occurs in the form of re-perfusion injuries. If that cascade could somehow be halted, prolonged anoxic episodes would not necessarily lead to the cell death landslides we see today after strokes and cardiac arrests. While anoxia most certainly depolarizes the whole structure, leading to the loss of whatever is currently in short term memory, the more permanent structures of the brain should survive episodes of maybe an hour or more, if we could only stop the apoptosis triggers from happening as soon as blood flow is restored.

This is super interesting. Links or other sources?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ischemic_cascade

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excitotoxicity

http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1161422-overview

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2841970/

The status quo of efforts basically discards the totally anoxic tissue after a stroke, focussing on protecting the (often large) partially perfused border region. This is what's practical now, but the fight about the totally ischemic core regions is far from over.

It's a race between anoxic necrosis (which is the point of no return, where passive cell dissolution happens) and active cell death cascades that are triggered in the fully or partially reperfused cell. The latter one can potentially be halted, the first one leads to irreversible information loss. What the actual timing windows are on both of these in the human brain is subject to active research and the view on them is likely to change over the coming years.

I posted links mainly to stroke and TBI-relevant articles, because that's where the research happens. However it's important to keep in mind that the fully dead brain is relatively static, whereas damaged areas in the living brain are subject to internal "cleanup" mechanisms pretty much right away. In this context, prolonged cardiac arrest might turn out to be preferrable to a stroke.

Thanks you for the link!

On the other hand, butterflies remember things from their caterpillar lives, after their brains turned to mush.

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