Speaking of what to do with functionally dead bodies (yes, vanilla frosting will be fine, thank you)…Rand Simberg has a lengthy and interesting post on the thinking behind cryonics. Here’s a bit:

Cryonics is often, and mistakenly, lumped in with UFOlogy, ESP and other pseudoscience, but it actually has a very sound scientific and philosophical conceptual basis.

Most people think of death as an objective, unambiguous, and verifiable condition. But in fact, it’s a legal fiction, and its declaration is simply function based and arbitrary. It’s also based on the knowledge level and location of the personnel making the declaration.

For instance, a hundred years ago, a simple cessation of breathing (perhaps after drowning) would have been sufficient to declare death, though today such people are often resuscitated through simple CPR, and go on to live many more years. More recently, the lack of heart function was sufficient, though we now routinely stop hearts for cardiac surgery. The current medical standard (in most jurisdictions, which indicates again that it’s a legal standard, and not an objective scientific one) is a flat line on an electroencephalogram (EEG), indicating no brain function. But there’s no reason to believe that this is any ultimate indicator either–it may be possible in the future to revive people who have gone flat line (and in fact, this may already be the case now–I haven’t done a recent literature search).

For these reasons, cryonicists don’t accept a function-based definition of death. Instead, they propose something called information death. This is defined as the point at which, no matter what the level of conceivable future technological capability, it is no longer possible to repair the body to the point that it can be revived, with original memories and personality. Even this definition represents a continuum, rather than a binary condition, because most of us walking around now have lost or altered some of their earlier memories. But it’s a much more promising, and valid, definition for the purposes of offering a chance at future revival.

Read the whole thing, then take a look at the comments section.

The biggest problem many people seem to have with cryopreservation, as Rand and Jay Manifold point out, is the fear that it just might work.

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