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Source: (consider it)
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Thread: Cryogenics, body and soul
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Marvin the Martian
Interplanetary
# 4360
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Raptor Eye:
AFAIK once revived from a coma, the same old self comes through. As it does when someone is brought back having died for a few minutes. But there is a point of no return - not only for the body, as many have indicated, but surely for the spirit too.
I guess it would depend on whether the spirit actually left the body or not during the freezing process. Which would in turn depend on the nature of the process itself - would it be more like a coma, or a death-and-revival?
How long would a coma have to be for the spirit to get bored and wander off to the afterlife? Is that even a valid question?
I find myself thinking of the stasis booths in Red Dwarf - a technology that stops time for anyone/anything inside and thus effectively freezes them until the booth is opened. But for the person inside it's as if the door shuts then immediately reopens - there's no chance for them (or their spirit) to have "been" anywhere else in the interim, because there hasn't been an interim for them. Maybe cryonic freezing would be the same?
quote:
Of course, none of us can know for sure how it all works until we're there ourselves, but I wonder how cruel it would be to bring someone back once they had moved on.
As someone else said, that does rather depend on where they had "moved on" to.
In Dungeons and Dragons (nerd alert!) there is a spell that enables you to resurrect a dead person - but it only works if the person's soul agrees to return from whichever plane of the afterlife they ended up on. Maybe something similar could apply to cryonics if the soul does in fact spend the frozen time away from its body.
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Hail Gallaxhar
Posts: 30100 | From: Adrift on a sea of surreality | Registered: Apr 2003
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Martin60
Shipmate
# 368
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Posted
What's a spirit?
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Love wins
Posts: 17586 | From: Never Dobunni after all. Corieltauvi after all. Just moved to the capital. | Registered: Jun 2001
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Humble Servant
Shipmate
# 18391
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Posted
quote:
Originally posted by Raptor Eye:
AFAIK once revived from a coma, the same old self comes through. As it does when someone is brought back having died for a few minutes. But there is a point of no return - not only for the body, as many have indicated, but surely for the spirit too.
It would seem we as a society have a pretty romantic view of a "coma". I'm not denying that there are cases where a patient has been unconscious for a lengthy period and then wakes up and can be rehabilitated to full health. But my experience has been that there is likely to be some significant brain damage involved in the process, and the degree to which the person will ever be the same as prior to the event that caused the coma, is likely be severely limited. An that's without any freezing and thawing.
Posts: 241 | Registered: Apr 2015
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mdijon
Shipmate
# 8520
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Posted
It depends a lot on the cause of the coma. People given sedative drugs to induce a coma during an intensive care stay (or briefly during an operation) are generally fine.
People who have a brain abscess or a head injury as the cause of coma are, as you say, at high risk of personality and cognition altering injuries.
What does that say about a soul? What about someone who has Alzheimer's and loses the ability to relate to their friends?
Somehow they must be the same person, but the relationships are all different. Their sense of morality may change, or even their ability to have a sense of morality at all may be lost.
I can't think that there is any mileage in pursuing the medieval notion of when the soul might leave the body here. Maybe it just gradually becomes less well attached and more eternal. Or do we hope for a less abstract and more bodily resurrection?
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mdijon nojidm uoɿıqɯ ɯqıɿou
ɯqıɿou uoɿıqɯ nojidm mdijon
Posts: 12277 | From: UK | Registered: Sep 2004
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