Yes, I think something functionally similar might be recreatable (assuming that people in charge of the cryogenic storage care about it in difficult situations on par with caring about actively living humans; it’s a big assumption, but not completely impossible). It would behave approximately like me.
But I don’t think I care about something functionally similar to me more than I care about something functionally similar to many other people I know. I actually would not mind quite a bit of information loss, I mostly care about the first-person subjective focus (in Camp 2 terminology), and I don’t see why I should hope for keeping that if it’s just an approximate restoration. But yes, we just don’t understand that part of reality enough to make a confident judgement.
On the other hand, I am not sure that with stronger tech a frozen brain can’t be literally revived. Certain animals are nicely revivable in this sense; it’s just (for some strange reasons I don’t quite understand) we have not solved this problem for animals which are not already adapted to survive freezing. It’s weird that we don’t know how to avoid crystallization damage in the first place (say, in mice, given that many frogs survive this), but with a stronger tech this kind of damage might be fixable… I don’t know if that makes the chances of keeping the subjective focus good enough...
But yes, perhaps, I should reconsider. I have made a decision that I don’t want cryonic preservation, and that I am more or less certain that that would not work, that odds are indistinguishable from zero, but perhaps that’s a mistake on my part.
Thanks!
Yes, I think something functionally similar might be recreatable (assuming that people in charge of the cryogenic storage care about it in difficult situations on par with caring about actively living humans; it’s a big assumption, but not completely impossible). It would behave approximately like me.
But I don’t think I care about something functionally similar to me more than I care about something functionally similar to many other people I know. I actually would not mind quite a bit of information loss, I mostly care about the first-person subjective focus (in Camp 2 terminology), and I don’t see why I should hope for keeping that if it’s just an approximate restoration. But yes, we just don’t understand that part of reality enough to make a confident judgement.
On the other hand, I am not sure that with stronger tech a frozen brain can’t be literally revived. Certain animals are nicely revivable in this sense; it’s just (for some strange reasons I don’t quite understand) we have not solved this problem for animals which are not already adapted to survive freezing. It’s weird that we don’t know how to avoid crystallization damage in the first place (say, in mice, given that many frogs survive this), but with a stronger tech this kind of damage might be fixable… I don’t know if that makes the chances of keeping the subjective focus good enough...
But yes, perhaps, I should reconsider. I have made a decision that I don’t want cryonic preservation, and that I am more or less certain that that would not work, that odds are indistinguishable from zero, but perhaps that’s a mistake on my part.