### The 10 Salient Points: A Summary
1. **Categorical Obsolescence:** Our traditional binary language of "alive" vs. "dead" is an outdated "map" that fails to categorize individuals in biostasis, who exist in a "third state."
2. **The Information-Theoretic Approach:** Death should be redefined as the irreversible loss of information-structural integrity in the brain, rather than purely biological factors like heartbeat or respiration. [Rick says- there might not be information in the structure... which is an antenna. It’s like trying to find The Andy Griffith Show in the circuits of a television set. The set is the reciever, not the container. ]
3. **The Definition of the Third State:** This is the interval where biological activity has ceased, but personal identity (memory, personality, etc.) stored in the brain's physical structure remains intact and recoverable. [Rick says not likely IMO anymore but for most people who are monists, certainly worthy of consideration which is why it’s a mystery that monists are not all signed up and cryonics is not a trillion dollar industry like AI data servers-- but maybe AI data servers are what the CEO techs are now viewing as resurrection machines... they why are they not putting another trilliion into Seung/Hayworth/Sparks multicity Gluonics Operations? ... or even standard Alcor/ci cryonics/vitrification as step one? ]
4. **Information Preservation vs. Destruction:** The "third state" is functionally similar to a computer that is powered off but has its data preserved; it is not "dead" because the necessary information for restoration is still available. [Cryonics hopes and assumes]
5. **Historical Conceptual Potholes:** Misleading terminology—like "survival of the fittest" or the "Big Bang"—can derail scientific progress and public understanding for decades.
6. **Comparative Analogies:** Science frequently adds new categories to accommodate discoveries, such as adding plasma to the familiar states of matter or creating new legal statuses (e.g., "permanent resident") to address complexity.
7. **The "Dimmer Switch" Model:** Dying is a progressive breakdown of neural architecture, not a sudden event; therefore, the third state acts as a "bridge" waiting for the "traffic" of consciousness to resume in the future.
8. **Digital Continuity:** The third state may eventually encompass non-biological substrates, such as digital brain emulations, provided that personal continuity is maintained via informational integrity.
9. **Terminological Debate:** Proposed terms like "deanimated," "ametabolic coma," and "inactivate" face challenges ranging from linguistic awkwardness to negative pop-culture connotations.
10. **The Favoring of "Biostasis":** The author concludes that "in biostasis" is the most versatile term because it balances technical clarity with accessible, natural-sounding language.
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### Critique: The Unquestioned Assumption of Physicalism
While the article effectively argues for a more nuanced linguistic framework for cryonics, it rests entirely on the foundational—and arguably dogmatic—assumption that personality and memory are strictly embedded in the physical structure of the brain. It treats this not as a philosophical stance, but as a scientific fact.
**1. The "Configuration" Bias:**
Cryonics operates on the "information-theoretic" view that if you preserve the physical state (the connectome, the synapses, the proteins), you preserve the *person*. This assumes that "you" are simply an emergent property of your specific neural wiring. However, this ignores the valid philosophical debate regarding whether a "reconstructed" brain—or a digital emulation—would actually be the continuation of the original consciousness or merely a very high-fidelity replica. By ignoring this, the article bypasses the most profound question in the field: is the "self" a process, or is it a substrate-dependent phenomenon?
**2. Lack of Phenomenological Inquiry:**
The article treats the "third state" as a matter of technical taxonomy. It assumes that as long as the "hardware" is intact, the "person" is merely paused. This is a massive leap of faith. If consciousness is not merely the sum of informational bits, then the "third state" might involve a permanent, ontological break in identity that no amount of physical preservation can bridge. Cryonics practitioners rarely question whether the "I" survives the cessation of biological time, preferring to treat the problem as a purely engineering-based "data recovery" task.
**3. The Risk of Category Error:**
The author rightly points out that "scientific and technical developments reveal the need for new categories." However, by framing the "third state" as a bridge waiting for travel to resume, they assume that "travel" (re-animation) is a possibility rather than an unknown. If the assumption that the brain *is* the person is incorrect—or incomplete—then we aren't just finding a new room in a house; we might be building a wing onto a structure that has already collapsed. For cryonics to be intellectually honest, it must occasionally pivot from debating *what we call the patient* to questioning *whether the patient remains* during the period of suspension.
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