Talk:Information-theoretic death

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[edit] Requested move

The term used in this article (and the quote given therein) is information-theoretic death, rather than "information theoretical death". The hyphen is used to create a compound adjective which reads less clumsily than "information theoretic death" to this native english speaker's eyes. - 69.174.134.88 03:13, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

I support this move.Cryobiologist 18:09, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Wrong in any case

There is a meaningful concept here but the use of the term "information theoretic" is presumptious and misleading. There is a well established body of knowledge, originally formulated in English and a hard (in the sense of "hard science") mathematical topic and sense associated with the adjectival form of Information Theory and no real connection between it and the subject matter of this article has been established. This is OK but I don't want it to go uncalled that the term "information theoretic death" is anything other than a neologism and not a well founded extrapolation of the mathematical theory of the same name.

Further, it is by no means clear, and on the other hand almost certainly false, that a brain whose process state had been lost by virtue of the cessation of all the electrical activity significant to said process state had avoided "information theoretic death" even in the sense intended.

Lycurgus (talk) 09:24, 12 January 2008 (UTC)

It is well-known that only short-term memory depends on electrical activity, otherwise nobody would ever survive cardiac arrest and the rapid loss of brain electrical activity that accompanies it.

“We know that secondary memory does not depend on continued activity of the nervous system, because the brain can be totally inactivated by cooling, by general anesthesia, by hypoxia, by ischemia, or by any method, and yet secondary memories that have been previously stored are still retained when the brain becomes active once again. Therefore, secondary memory must result from some actual alterations of the synapses, either physical or chemical.” — Page 658, Textbook of Medical Physiology by Arthur C. Guyton (W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia, 1986) Cryobiologist (talk) 21:15, 15 February 2008 (UTC)

Typical mindless equivocation on "electrical activity". Obviously no organism can survive the complete cessation of electrical activity in it's CNS and the situations mentioned do not constitute same. Note that only hard freezing as in the crude early cryogenics and not simulated hybernation by hyperthermia come close but these are completely destructive of cells anyway. 74.78.162.229 (talk) 04:54, 8 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Link to Fiction?

Is it worthwhile to link to the wiki entry for Lem's novel Fiasco? The first part of the book involves a cyrogenics revival - and neither the patient nor his doctors can figure out which of two possible people he might be.

He's forced eventually to assume a third identity. In the context of this article, the original him (whoever him might be) died. - Jason —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.125.33.112 (talk) 21:41, 12 January 2008 (UTC)