Your Daily Reminder That the Future is Near

In chemopreservation [= plastination], one fills a brain with plastic-like chemicals, which make strong cross-links bonds between most everything they touch. So there are two times when brain info can be lost: before it is filled with plastic, and after.

Assuming you can keep them safe from melting, burning, etc., plastic brains should last for a very long time:

Brain researchers have looked at samples preserved many decades ago, and see almost no change. Tissues preserved in amber seem to have remain unchanged for forty million years. (more)

So the main issue is how much info is lost before filling with plastic. Now it is obvious that non-fresh brains with collapsed blood vessels pose a serious problem – the plastic might just not get to some places. But for brains filled with plastic within a few minutes of live blood flow, I just can’t see the problem.

For example, imagine that key brain info is encoded in certain key protein densities at tiny synapse pores, with different nearby pores having different key proteins. As long as there are thousands of copies of each key protein in each pore area, the plastic will almost surely usually preserve the info of which kind of proteins were in which areas. Even if some key proteins move away from their pores, most will stay near, and the amino acid sequences that define the proteins will mostly be preserved by the cross-link bonds the plastic makes.

And even if this isn’t true for twenty percent of the key proteins, there is almost surely enough brain system redundancy for this to not matter. Yes, you’d need a finer scan than the Brain Preservation Prize will use to read it, but the info is still there.

That’s Robin Hanson, with an update on brain preservation science.


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