Imperfect Restoration

A Cryonics Society Paper

The Case For Revival Even When Identity Is Not Fully Recoverable

There’s a silent assumption underlying nearly all public discussion of cryonics. The assumption is that cryonics stands or falls on the question of perfect restoration. Advocates, researchers and critics all insist that the cryopreserved individual, upon revival, must awaken mentally continuous and intact. The person who is restored must be the same person. They must be recognizably themselves to themselves and to others.

Memory, personality, temperament, all sense of self-awareness and narrative continuity, as it were, must be a flawless, uninterrupted alignment of the person as they were when they were initially cryopreserved, and the person restored. Otherwise the operation, and cryonics, is a failure.

Organizations providing cryonics services make the same (implied, but rarely precisely stated) promise: that until it is absolutely certain that the person who comes out at the far future end of cryopreservation is exactly the same as the one who went in when first cryopreserved, no resuscitation will be done. You must wake up as you, perfectly and exactly, or you won’t be woken up at all. You’ll be left in cryosleep till a ‘sufficiently advanced technology’ is developed that can bring you back perfectly. A different or damaged version of yourself, a variant, will never be brought to life.

Of course, this assertion is soon hedged. Nor all resuscitation scenarios are as strict. Not neuropreservation scenarios, to be sure. The whole logic of neuropreservation argues that any medical technology advanced enough to repair the cellular damage entailed by even vitrified freezing will surely be able to not only clone an entirely new body, but connect up the neuronal wiring with ease.

Such repair scenarios have even been a selling point. Right now you may be scarred and wrinkled and elderly. Perhaps you left your legs behind in Iraq during Operation Desert Storm. Not to worry. ‘Sufficiently Advanced Technology’ will patch you up. Yes, you’ll wake up different. And that’s a good thing. You’ll wake up stronger, younger, heathier, better. You’ll still be you, but an improved you. At least on the physical level. Psychologically, mentally, spiritually, however, the assurance will still be no more or less than you, with all the memories and emotions and endearing psychological quirks and habits you have now. And if that can’t be accomplished? Then the presupposition is that you must remain in suspension till it can.

I would argue that this presupposition is false, unnecessary, and strategically awkward for the cryonics movement and its patients. As well as unethical.

Existence Over Ideology

The demand for a perfect restoration of identity rests on an intuitive but unstable premise: that selfhood involves a continuous narrative flow, a story anchored in memory.

Obviously, in ordinary day-to-day life, this premise does not hold. Consider the victim of severe retrograde amnesia. He loses decades of autobiographical memory. Yet legally and morally, he continues to be regarded as person, and as the same person. Consider also patients with brain injuries, emerging from comas. Their personalities may be altered, their recall diminished, their cognition impaired. Yet both the law and friends and family unquestionably regard them as “the same individual.”

In particular, consider elderly individuals with advanced dementia, whose memories, preferences, and even emotional responses gradually degrade. We don’t euthanize them. On the contrary, we go out of our way to support, defend and protect them.

In none of these cases do we say, “There’s been a change in the person. Therefore the person who existed before the change is gone, vanished, obliterated. Let them die.”

Instead, we act as though something deeper persists. Something not reducible to explicit memory or narrative continuity. This is an already existing moral understanding. Cryonics inherits it.

More to the point: existing medical practice inherits it as well. An insistence on perfect continuity of identity is not the deciding factor in medical care.

Cryonics too should not such continuity the deciding standard for cryopreservation or restoration. Restoration need not be perfect to be desirable or justified. It requires only that the person who is restored is a person worth restoring.

The question is not, will revival recover the original person in full? Rather, the question is, is there a morally and rationally compelling case to restore a cryopreserved patient even if that restoration is imperfect?

We believe there is.

Strategic Considerations

Why does this issue matter? For two strategic reasons.

First, because the perennial objection to cryonics is that it doesn’t work. That the damage caused by cryopreservation is so extensive that restoration is not possible. Rarely are experts in the field asked whether imperfect restoration is possible, because the answer to that question is, obviously, yes. A single surviving cryopreserved strand of DNA may sufficient to create a clone that in thousands of respects is the same as the individual who contributed it.

Critics will say (correctly) that genetic identity is not personal identity, but that reply ignores the titanic contribution of genetic identity to personal identity. A clone may not be the exact same person as the person cloned, but he or she is so extremely close to being that person that cloning may well be used in the future to supply a ‘road map,’ as it were, for proper reconstruction of the cryonics patient.

But that close an equivalence is not really the issue. Recently over 330 U.S. physicians were polled and asked, “How plausible do you find the idea that preservation could potentially allow for some form of revival in the future?” About 28 percent of the physicians said that was “somewhat plausible” or “very plausible.” (Neurosurgeons rated the possibility of revival the highest.)

It’s fair to say that if these doctors were asked whether the reconstruction of every last atom of a restored brain, flawlessly in sync with the original cryopreserved brain, were plausible, the answer would be no. Doctors receive patients in a damaged state, and their goal is to restore them to a healthy state as far as that is possible. 28% of physicians now think it is possible; provided that the question is phrased in a way that excludes perfect restoration.

The same factor is involved when people opt for cryonic suspension. Ask them if they expect to come back perfectly unaltered, and no one with any familiarity of the damage cryopreservation entails will say yes. And that is the common sense view. No one hit by a car expects to recover without a long recovery period, and possibly with some injuries and limitations that may be lifelong. But no one would prefer to be put to death instead.

Such a common sense view of cryonics restoration could make signing up, as well as researching the processes involved, much easier. The bar is lowered. But remains high enough to preserve life.

Identity Without Memory

For many, however, life is not enough. What they want to preserve is Ego, that sense of individual uniqueness, of self, that they feel (or have been told) is what they are. They feel that their sense of self is self. But what that sense consists of is rarely something they explore. Often it consists of thinking that identity requires the support of memory. We are this because we remember having thought or did that. Philosophical tradition has discussed the interpenetration of identity and memory. From John Locke onward, memory has been treated as the thread that binds the self across time.

But is that true? Modern neuroscience offers a more complicated picture. We now know that memory is fragmentary, reconstructive, error-prone, and often inaccessible. Much of what makes up a person isn’t stored as explicit memory at all, but as dispositional tendencies, emotional patterns, perceptual biases, habits of interpretation, and structural features of cognition. Human memory is not a computer database cataloguing and preserving every thought and experience. We do not remember our lives like archives calling up microfiche documents. We revise them ceaselessly, unconsciously editing, omitting, rearranging, and mythologizing the past into forms psychologically tolerable to the present self. Even when autobiographical memory is lost, these deeper structures often remain.

A person without memory is not a blank slate. This is obvious even to introspection. Do you remember the name of everyone you knew in high school? Or the plot of every episode of I Love Lucy you ever saw? Or the content of every page you’ve ever read? We all once knew things that we’ve forgotten. We even ‘sort of’ remember things that we know we once knew but can no longer call to mind. Our self-awareness simply isn’t reducible to an accessible list of all the information that it once contained.

If cryopreservation retains even partial aspects of this awareness and its substrates (the neural architecture, synaptic patterns, cognitive organization, etc.) then restoration need not reconstruct the full self in every mnemonic particular in order to recover a subjective awareness recognizably continuous with the original individual.

The insistence upon perfect restoration is especially curious when one considers that no medical restoration is ever perfect. The survivor of stroke does not return unchanged. The recipient of major neurological intervention often emerges altered in affect, cognition, or temperament. The psychiatric patient restored from psychosis acts, thinks, and seems to have become another person entirely. Yet medicine regards such interventions as successes, not failures.

What might cryonic restoration recover instead of memories, which is to say, instead of information? The entirety of one’s genetic heritage, of course; but also temperament, individual cognitive style, one’s habitual pattern of acting and responding to the world, one’s particular way of perceiving things, one’s unique preferences and aversions and emotional responses.

How much of a person remains that person even if affected by amnesia or partial amnesia? A great deal. Some would even argue that the affected person is still entirely that person. Or do you become a different person entirely every time you forget where you left your keys?

As far as the bulk of ordinary legal and medical criteria goes, however, human identity is grounded in many continuities, not one. A human being is not a fixed immutable state. We carry a great many things with us from the past to the future. Some are memories, some are habits, some are lost. So long as we continue to exist, we remain.

The Dislocation Objection

Another objection to what I would term modified survival is the notion of self as intrinsically tied to environment. This theory argues that we are so deeply shaped and dependent on our social environment that if that environment vanishes, so does our role in it, and therefore so do we. To be a Victorian gentleman, you require a Victorian era. You cannot be that person if, via some steampunk version of cryonics, you are fast-forwarded into the Lyubyanka in 1939 or inner-city Chicago circa 2026. Even if your mind were perfectly restored, your world would gone. With one’s family dead, one’s culture transformed, one’s social roles erased, can ‘you’ really go on? Wouldn’t such a separation dissolve one’s identity more completely than even memory loss? If so, even perfect cryonic restoration would be useless.

But this objection—that you are no longer you without your world—misunderstands both the role of environment in personal identity, and human nature.

Every human life already undergoes continuous sociotemporal displacement. The child grows into an adult in a different world. The immigrant leaves one culture and is transplanted into another. The elderly no longer inhabit the societies they were born into.

And yet identity persists—not because the environment or the person remains fixed and stable, but because the individual adapts to change.

Cryonics appears to radicalizes this process, but in fact it’s no more than another example of it. It’s simply the human condition. We’re born and live into a social environment that changes. We change along with it. We don’t change so radically that all contributions from our past cease to exist. The simple fact of causality makes that notion silly. The effects of the past that shaped us continue to shape us in the present. They don’t define us, or imprison us.

Imperfect Restoration Is The Medical Norm

The demand for perfect restoration also ignores a fundamental fact of medicine: no restoration is perfect.

Stroke patients recover only partially. Traumatic brain injury survivors live on with altered cognition. Organ transplant recipients live with ongoing complications. Psychiatric patients emerge from treatment and therapy changed in personality and affect.

But in no case is such memory loss or psychic dislocation regarded by any medical authorities as annihilation. The victim of severe amnesia does not cease to be a person. The patient emerging from coma with altered temperament, diminished cognition, and fragmented recollection is not declared dead. We do not incinerate those with dementia. On the contrary. Families continue to love and care for such persons. Laws continue to protect them. We recognize, however imperfectly, that something irreducible remains.

And because of that recognition, physicians continue to treat them.

Cryonics should judge and be judged by the same standard.

Against the baseline alternative of utter nonexistence, even a deeply imperfect restoration is a profound success. And any alteration, as we have pointed out, need not automatically be stigmatized as ‘imperfect.’ Radical improvements are not only possible but likely, and are also variations from the original cryopreserved state. Such variations should not be condemned, but pursued.

Degrees of Survival

We’re accustomed to thinking of survival as binary. You are alive or you are dead. There is no middle ground.

But in practice, survival is a matter of degree. We already accept partial survival of function, partial survival of memory and personality. Cryonics advocates have fetishized the notion of perfect restoration, but a better question to ask would be: what degree of survival is sufficient to justify preservation?

A rational framework would consider degrees of continuity of neural structure even if degraded; the recoverability of cognitive patterns even if incomplete; the potential for reconstruction and augmentation, and ongoing reconstruction and augmentation. And, not least, the capacity of the restored cryonics patient for future experience and agency; for even a person who was never cryopreserved but simply lives on into the future will become a slightly (possibly a very) different person in a slightly (possibly a very) different future world. Identity comprises not only who we are but who we may be.

It’s something of a mental stretch to think of ourselves not as who and what we are, but as a sketch of what we may yet become in a post-revival world. But why should the only contributor to our sense of self be the past? Doesn’t our sense of our future shape us now as well? Identity, in practice, has never depended exclusively upon autobiographical memory. Much of what constitutes a human being lies deeper than explicit recollection. Underneath mnemonic consciousness there persists a structure of dispositions, emotional tendencies, perceptual habits, reflexive attitudes, temperamental inclinations, and characteristic modes of response to our environment that are as individual and unique as any contributed by memory. Personality survives in the architecture of cognition long after the library of conscious memory has closed for the night.

Such a person would represent a continuation under conditions of damage and reconstruction, which is precisely what medicine already confronts in countless other contexts.

The implication for cryonics is profound. Even if future restoration was not able to recover the patient’s memory in complete detail, or even in great detail, the preservation of deeper structural features of the mind might still suffice to sustain meaningful continuity with the original individual. A restored patient may not awaken as a perfect replica of his or her former self. But they may well awaken with recognizably similar sensibilities, preferences, intellectual rhythms, emotional predispositions—a continuity of form rather than of exhaustive content.

(Nor does cryonics restoration have to end with revival from cryonics suspension. It sometimes takes and amnesia patient years to recover lost memories. It may be that some seemingly irreversible damage to a revived patient may be reversible as ongoing restoration science advances after restoration.)

If these thresholds are met, then the restored individual is not a clone, not a simulation, nor a replacement, nor a descendant, not someone ‘wholly other.’ Like an adult who was once a child, they are someone continuous with their past but also someone new; yet new in a way that maintains as much as possible (or desirable) of the old.

Think of it as a house that has been suffered storm damage and has been remodeled. Yes, there have been a few changes. But it’s the same house.

And such continuations are already recognized everywhere in medicine.

An Ethical Reimagination

Once we allow imperfect restoration as a sufficient condition for revival, the ethical landscape shifts for cryonics organizations. The question is no longer, “Should we keep cryonics patients suspended for centuries till absolutely perfect restoration is assured,” but “Should we restore patients at the earlier possible moment even if it involves the risk of memory loss or personality changes?”

That’s not a small question. It’s reasonable to assume that the sooner a patient is restored, the easier it will be for him or her to adjust to a novel new social environment. Twenty years from today the world may be wildly different, but it’s not unreasonable to assume that in twenty years there will still be computers, cars, nations, races, popular music, love and marriage, war, possibly even Disneyland and the Buffalo Bills. If you’re suspended to today and restored in twenty years, you may well find yourself meeting existing friends and family, homes and places.

Human beings are perpetually displaced in time. Every old man already inhabits a world substantially alien to the one into which he was born. Every immigrant crosses into a partially incomprehensible social reality. Entire generations routinely discover that the moral vocabulary, technological assumptions, and social structures that formed them have dissolved beneath their feet. The experience of temporal estrangement is not exceptional; it is the common condition of human life, merely intensified by cryonics into dramatic visibility.

A person who entered a coma in 1950 would be able to adjust to the world of 1970, even if that person revived with a degree of memory loss and personality change. Would any ethical physician advocate having the patient remain in coma till 2025 on the assumption that the later medical technology would be better, and so the patient might wake up in a healthier condition? Almost certainly not. The existing medical practice defaults to sooner rather than later.

But if the cryonics provider does wake up the patient in a less than ideal state, might they then be legally liable?

This issue can—and should—be addressed beforehand. It’s not impossible to have a cryonics patient specify beforehand how close to ‘perfect’ a restoration needs to be before a cryonics provider is authorized to proceed. Nor is it impossible for cryonics providers to have them sign legal waivers and leave the decision to the organization’s discretion. For imperfection, and a certain degree of social alienation, will surely accompany every cryonic restoration.

But this is no objection to choosing cryonics. Human beings are extraordinarily resilient creatures. They acclimate to new languages, new moral systems, new technologies, and new metaphysical assumptions with remarkable speed when circumstances demand it. A revived patient will undoubtedly suffer some disorientation and cultural alienation. But these aren’t arguments against revival. They’re arguments against existence

The general ethical question is much clearer. Is it justifiable to allow irreversible destruction, to sanction the complete obliteration of a person, when partial preservation may be possible? No. We simply do not know how much restoration is possible—not even when the destruction to brain tissue is total.

Those who disagree should thoughtfully consider the latest developments in the use of AI in archeological reconstruction, which is are opening entire new vistas in what can be inferred from radically damaged sources. It used to be said that vitrification would leave all the information need to restore a cryonics patient one day, but nothing could restore a cremated person reduced to char and ash. AI is now examining char and ash, and inferring the supposedly lost manuscript content from the flakes. Is something of the sort possible for neurons and synapses?

The saying is that the less damage done going in, the less recovery needed to come out. It’s a good saying. But it doesn’t mean that that growing capacities for recovery won’t be able to mitigate even the most severe initial damage.

The Value of the Imperfectly Restored

If a patient is revived with fragmented memories, personality changes, and revived into an environment where their original social world is gone, are they still worth preserving and restoring?

The answer depends on whether we think a human life derives its value from perfect continuity with the past, or from its capacity for experience, growth, and meaning in the future.

The former is not a tenable position, for the simple reason that we don’t have perfect continuity with our past now. Do you remember all your kindergarten classmates, your score on your first math test, the top 100 hits of 1968? You experienced them. Your memory of them since then has vanished. Yet you’re still you. (Or let’s say, rather, that you’re satisfied that you’re still you.) Certainly you wouldn’t prefer total obliteration because those memories are gone. You might well be happier that certain memories are gone. Memory editing may well be a growth industry as brain science develops.

But that is beside the pont. The simple fact is that the restored cryonics patient constitutes a new instantiation of a prior life, extended forward under altered conditions.

And this is enough.

Conclusion: A More Realistic Standard

The philosophical significance of this shift can’t be overstated. For once imperfect restoration is admitted as morally meaningful, the burden of proof begins subtly to ebb. The question stops being whether cryonics can guarantee perfect resurrection. Instead, one starts to ask whether permitting the irreversible destruction of a person’s brain, when some meaningful degree of preservation may be possible, constitutes a form of medical and ethical negligence.

Future generations may look upon our strange acceptance of irreversible death much as we now regard earlier ages’ certainty in the impossibility of resuscitation after a heart attack. There was once a time when a stopped heart signified absolute finality. Advances in medicine transformed that certainty into embarrassment. It would be rash indeed to assume that our present definitions stand at the terminus of history.

Suppose, then, that the restored cryonics patient wakes up changed—even diminished. Suppose his memories are fragmentary, his personality altered, his relation to the past attenuated almost beyond recognition. Is such a being still worth restoring?

The answer depends upon whether one believes the value of human existence lies solely in perfect continuity with the past, or whether it lies also in the capacity for future consciousness, future experience, future flourishing. Nearly every moral instinct of civilization suggests the latter. We do not value human beings merely as archives of prior memories. We value them as centers of experience capable of growth, attachment, discovery, adaptation and meaning.

The imperfectly restored patient would still possess these capacities. He would remain a conscious bridge—however damaged—between a vanished world and a future one. His or hers would not be a perfect resurrection. But perfection is not a standard by which life has ever justified itself.

Cryonics, therefore, should not be formulated as a leap into transhumanist godhood and immortality. Such dreams may be inspirational, but, practically speaking, cryonics is something much more modest and much more defensible: a disciplined attempt to preserve as much of the human person as possible against the total violence of oblivion. And judged by that standard, even imperfect restoration would not constitute failure.

Perfect restoration remains an ideal—perhaps achievable, perhaps not—but it need not be a prerequisite in order to opt for cryonics or to support it. The true standard is lower and more plausible and therefore more powerful. It is the recognition that much of a person can be salvaged, can survive, and can perhaps be brought forward into a life worth living.

Once this is accepted, the entire cryonics project changes character. It’s no longer and all-or-nothing gamble on survival or obliteration, but a disciplined attempt to preserve as much of oneself and others as possible, as opposed to embracing a universal and irreversible loss.

By that standard, even imperfect restoration is not a failure but a victory.

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