Are you referring to the neuroscientist’s discussion linked in the OP? This comment seems quite clear regarding the information-theoretic consequences:
Distortion of the membranes and replacement of solvent irretrievably destroys information that I believe to be essential to the structure of the mind. (...) (information simply isn’t there to be read, regardless of how advanced the reader may be).
In our lingo: the state transformation is a non-injective function (=loss of information).
However, the import of the distance between a “best guess” facsimile and the original is hard to evaluate. Would it be on the order of the difference between before and after a night’s sleep? Before and after a TBI injury (yay pleonasm)?
Undifferentiable from your current self in a hypothetical Turing test variant, with you squaring off against such a carbon copy?
Speculatively, I’d rather think all that damage to not play that big of a role. Disrupted membranes should still yield the location of the synapses with high spatial fidelity, and the way we interfere with neurotransmitters constantly, the exact concentration in each synapse does not seem identity-constituting.
Otherwise, we’d incur information-theoretic death of our previous selves each time we take e.g. a neurotransmitter manipulating drug such as an SSRI. Which we do in a way, just not in a relevant way.
Heh, pleonasm, since the “I” in the TBI acronym already refers to “injury”, thus rendering the second injury as an overkill. Let’s get side-tracked on that, typical LW style :)
Are you referring to the neuroscientist’s discussion linked in the OP? This comment seems quite clear regarding the information-theoretic consequences:
In our lingo: the state transformation is a non-injective function (=loss of information).
However, the import of the distance between a “best guess” facsimile and the original is hard to evaluate. Would it be on the order of the difference between before and after a night’s sleep? Before and after a TBI injury (yay pleonasm)?
Undifferentiable from your current self in a hypothetical Turing test variant, with you squaring off against such a carbon copy?
Speculatively, I’d rather think all that damage to not play that big of a role. Disrupted membranes should still yield the location of the synapses with high spatial fidelity, and the way we interfere with neurotransmitters constantly, the exact concentration in each synapse does not seem identity-constituting.
Otherwise, we’d incur information-theoretic death of our previous selves each time we take e.g. a neurotransmitter manipulating drug such as an SSRI. Which we do in a way, just not in a relevant way.
I thought you meant “neoplasm”, then I actually Googled pleonasm and there’s a good chance you mean that. Which is it???
Heh, pleonasm, since the “I” in the TBI acronym already refers to “injury”, thus rendering the second injury as an overkill. Let’s get side-tracked on that, typical LW style :)
Pleonasm, neoplasm … potato, topota.