Our descendents will be more concerned about whether the long-buried brain banks are using cryogenics rather than glutaldehyde / plastination embalming, because in the former case, the brains will still be edible.
Zombie Tom Thumb set to work at once to carve the brain. It was a beautiful shiny yellow, streaked with red. The knife crumpled up and hurt him; he put his finger in his mouth.
“It is not thawed enough; it is hard. You have a try, Zombie Hunca Munca.”
Then Zombie Tom Thumb lost his temper. He put the brain in the middle of the floor, and hit it with the tongs and with the shovel — bang, bang, smash, smash!
No problem. The fundamentally unchanging nature of economic relations(except for the definitely-coming-real-soon-now respect for the rights of dead people who plan to get better) will ensure that my brain’s premortem investments will have made it the richest neural network in the gravity well by the time I thaw out.
OK, I’ll start by saying that I’m a materialist that doesn’t believe there is a nonmaterial mind. “Having enough information to recreate a living brain” is not remotely in the same cosmos as knowing the anatomy of the brain. EM is not recording the atomic structure of a brain.
A partial list of things critically absent:
The properties of membrane channels that determine the electrical dynamics of the cells.
The properties of synaptic channels and receptors that determine connections between cells
The genes that set the scope of possibilities for these properties
The gene expression the determines which of the possible properties are being generated
THE BODY THAT GOES WITH IT.
Seriously, a brain in a dish is not you in any way.
Given how much our microbiome appears to affect our mental functioning, I hope the company also plans to preserve a representative sample of their subjects’ fecal matter.
