(February 6, 2025 at 10:59 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: Here's a good definition: Life is disequilibrium. What this means is that life is the act of maintaining differentiation from the environment. You maintain a temperature difference, a pressure difference, a concentration difference, and so on, through homeostatic processes. Conversely, you are dead when you are at equilibrium with the environment. So, life is something like an entropy problem. This means that the problem is in principle solvable regardless of complexity.
If you're going with basic time reversibility, then every problem is solvable, in principle. You asked if it was "possible in theory or even probable in practice". I think that we've answered the probability of our current or reasonably foreseeable practice with a resounding no. As for possible in theory, since everything is possible in theory let's have a look at the odds. Honestly, I don't know the odds, but let's look at the ballpark we'd expect to find them in. We aren't looking at the loss of a few axons here, we're looking at wholesale mass cellular death across the entire brain. What you need to do is take that, find a point at which to begin the repairs, good luck with that BTW most of the cells that would aid in repair are also dead and decaying, and somehow work your way back to restoring the very fine-detail of exact synapse width, positioning, firing sensitivity, a host of molecules on and in the nerve cells that change the behavior of the neuron to help produce memory, etc. It's absurdly detailed work. And that's just the brain. Keep in mind that the rest of the body that you need to keep the brain working is similarly dead or dying on a cellular level.
In the realm of improbability, there's the old question of 'what are the odds of all the air molecules around me spontaneously buggering off?' That's possible in principle, but in practice the probability is so vanishingly small that you could watch the entire universe from now until the end of time and never observe it. Taking a skull full of foul-smelling decay and trying to get the original owner* back is so much less likely than having all of your air rush away that it's absurd. You'd have much better luck unscrambling eggs.
So while it's "possible in principle", the odds are so vanishingly small that, for any normal usage of the word, it isn't possible.
*Sidenote: You'd be just as likely to get Elvis Presley or Charles Manson as you would anybody else. Good luck sticking the landing with a specific individual.
