This gem of an article is all about "Harvard's Brain Tissue Center, a federally-funded brain bank located on the sprawling grounds of McLean Hospital".
http://www.boston.com/news/daily/reporters/03/brains.htm
I think brain banks serve as a great contrast to cryonics facilities. We currently seem to live in an unfortunate moral dark ages, where we don't have the resources to achieve anything close to an aspirational moral ethics of immortality for everyone, here and now. I understand the desire to retreat to various self-deceptions or to simply ignore these hard apparent realities, but it's not a need I feel personally, and I think there's a significant danger it could reduce our persistence odds to indulge in this type of self-deceptive thinking too much.
The bottom line is I think we have to accept a Donner Party type situation. The Donner Party felt the need to resort to cannibalism to maximize their persistence odds. Similarly, we who wish to maximize our persistence odds need to enable, and probably even encourage people to donate their brains and bodies to medical science. And according to the above linked article, we especially need to encourage people who die with healthy brains to do so.
So, those of us plan to be cryonically preserved and yet encourage others to donate their brains to medical science -one could make a case that we're attempting to exploit, that we're freeriders, that we're angling to maximize our odds of persistence by maximizing the odds of information theoretic death for others. As for me, I'm interested in exploring these ideas more thoroughly. How far can we push conventional moral boundaries to maximize our persistence odds? How transparent can we be in the process (because there's probably lower collaboration costs with increased transparency)?
I'd love to have thousands of clones of myself that could be used for all sorts of medical experimentation, used for various trials testing all sorts of ways to maximize my persistence odds. Various limitations on that reality notwithstanding, I'm not concerned about the prospect of thousands of HA's suffering for the purpose of maximizing this HA's survival odds. But that remains the realm of science fiction -at least for now.
More narrowly, I wonder if we can get the default option for bodies to be that the be donated to medical science and organ donation. I wonder if there are any nations, states, or cities where we could get that done. Then I wonder how high we can raise the barrier costs to excepting out of that default option.
I HA am not an organ donor, but I accept transplant organs should I need them.
I HA will not donate any portion of my body to medical science, but I look forward to profitting from the discoveries off of those who do.
I HA aspire to only give to charity such that it maximizes my personal persistence odds (factoring in how the loss of wealth will adversely harm my personal persistence odds).
One might conclude from this post that I would discourage people from cryonic preservation and encourage them to donate their bodies to medical science and organ transplantation instead. Not so. To improve cryonic technology and increase constituents for rejuvanation, we probably need many more people to be cryonically preserved, just like we need many, many more people to donate their bodies to medical science to improve our health solutions.
That's all I have time to write and think about tonight. Good luck to all of us for tomorrow!
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