Michael Anissimov just posted a link to the site brainpreservation.org.

The site advocates a plastic-based alternative to cryonics - pump the brain full of plasticy resin that prevents the structure from being disrupted, and then wait for brain slicing and scanning technology to arrive.

The interesting part is the old chestnut about "normal people" being too "irrational" to see that this is a worthwhile thing to do, and accepting the Ancestral-Judeo-Christian account of death - roughly speaking, the idea that when you are alive you have something like a "soul" or "essence of aliveness", and that at some definite point, that essence disappears.

In the past, before scientific medicine, that point tended to be pretty easy to identify: you stop breathing, your heart stops, and your body stops moving (apart from rigor mortis). From the point of view of other people, your "agenthood" and "personhood" cease - there is now simply a human-like piece of meat lying on a bed. Nowadays, legal death is harder to define: stopped heart, cessation of breathing, etc are not sufficient conditions, because doctors can make the human-like piece of meat with no pulse or breath turn back into a walking, talking person again.

Cryonicists and transhumanists might endorse an information-theoretic criterion of death: you die if the future can no longer cause a walking, talking breathing, thinking you to come into existence from some record of you. Hence, cryopreservation and plastination are akin to being in a coma.

Information, of course, is not absolute like the Ancestral-Judeo-Christian "Essence Of Life". The fundamental laws of physics - as far as we know - do not destroy information, they merely disperse it to various degrees. Even cremation doesn't destroy the information in your brain, it merely distributes it so thinly over your future light-cone that it is unlikely that any physical entity could piece it back together. There may be edge cases where the information required to piece someone back together is not impossible to gather, but too difficult for anyone to bother attempting.

From the site:

I do want to change the world – I want to put an end to death. I want to make it every person’s right to experience the future centuries from now, and to live without the constant fear that aging and crippling disease will take away their joy for life, make them a burden to their loved ones, and strip them of their dignity. We have it within our power today to create that world. Let me say that again, we have it within our power today to create that world. From a medical and technical standpoint all that is needed is the development of a surgical procedure for perfusing a patient’s circulatory system with a series of fixatives and plastic resins capable of perfectly preserving their brain’s neural circuitry in a plasticized block for long-term storage. Such a procedure would, in effect, put the patient into a long dreamless sleep where they can wait out the decades or centuries necessary for the development of the more advanced technology required to revive them.

How could a patient ever be awoken from such an unconventional sleep? The necessary technology exists in primitive form today – the plasticized brain block will be automatically sliced into thin sections and these scanned in an electron microscope at nanometer resolution. Such scanning can map out the exact synaptic connectivity among neurons while simultaneously providing information on a host of molecular-level constituents. This map of brain connectivity will then be uploaded into a computer emulation controlling a robotic body – the patient awakes to a new dawn of unlimited potential.

Given our current state of knowledge it is quite likely that the perfection of a surgical brain-preservation procedure could be accomplished in less than five years with minimal amounts of research funds. However, aside from a few underfunded research groups, no serious brain preservation research is currently being performed. More tragically, even if such a surgical procedure were available today the legal system would prevent its proper use as a life saving measure by preventing it from being administered before the declaration of legal death. The reasons are social and political, and from those standpoints such a world is much harder to reach. It requires large numbers of people to viscerally accept a new metaphor — a metaphor that the last 150 years of biological science has demonstrated to be accurate — the metaphor that we are machines.

Michael Comments:

Amen! The above is not so much a proposal for new technology, as it is a proposal for new attitudes. If I want to preserve my brain now, and “commit suicide” according to the Judeo-Christian-influenced standard meme complex, then I should be allowed to do so.