Has anyone noticed that “success” vs. “failure” is not really binary in cryonics? The question is not whether information is preserved but how much information is preserved. In other words, the hypothetical future civilization restoring the cryopreserved person is going to get some person, the question is how similar she will be to the original. One limiting case is zero preserved information which means “restoration” is going to produce a random person. Another scenario is in which only genetic information is retained, so we get essentially an identical twin of the original. If the restoring entity has wide knowledge about the culture to which the person belonged it adds a lot of information. If it has access to e.g. blog posts / tweets / facebook posts / less-wrong comments made by the person, it has a whole lot more information. Who knows, maybe you can get quite close without any physically preserved brain at all.
How close does the restored person have to be to count as “the same” as the original? Of course most people would require at least some extent of memory restoration for it to count as “success”. However, I don’t think there is an unambiguous answer to this. What we have here is a continuous scale, not just two points “success” and “failure”.
This seems like a useful criterion. I would say “all the memories of cryonauts are very likely permanently gone” which I think is stronger than “cryonics is unlikely to prevent information theoretic death”.
“Who knows, maybe you can get quite close without any physically preserved brain at all.”
By what ratio do you think cryogenically preserving the brain improves the chances that someone you identify with will exist in the far future?
I am reluctant to give a ratio but my guess is that the improvement is significant. Personally I am not thrilled by cryonics for a completely different reason, namely I’m not sure the value of restoring my life at a point in the future in which civilization has advanced much beyond its current state is more than the value of things I can do with my money in the present, in particular things that increase the probability this advanced civilization will actually come to pass.
Also we don’t have cryonics in Israel so I don’t have to decide now anyway.
Has anyone noticed that “success” vs. “failure” is not really binary in cryonics? The question is not whether information is preserved but how much information is preserved. In other words, the hypothetical future civilization restoring the cryopreserved person is going to get some person, the question is how similar she will be to the original. One limiting case is zero preserved information which means “restoration” is going to produce a random person. Another scenario is in which only genetic information is retained, so we get essentially an identical twin of the original. If the restoring entity has wide knowledge about the culture to which the person belonged it adds a lot of information. If it has access to e.g. blog posts / tweets / facebook posts / less-wrong comments made by the person, it has a whole lot more information. Who knows, maybe you can get quite close without any physically preserved brain at all.
How close does the restored person have to be to count as “the same” as the original? Of course most people would require at least some extent of memory restoration for it to count as “success”. However, I don’t think there is an unambiguous answer to this. What we have here is a continuous scale, not just two points “success” and “failure”.
“at least some extent of memory restoration …”
This seems like a useful criterion. I would say “all the memories of cryonauts are very likely permanently gone” which I think is stronger than “cryonics is unlikely to prevent information theoretic death”.
“Who knows, maybe you can get quite close without any physically preserved brain at all.”
By what ratio do you think cryogenically preserving the brain improves the chances that someone you identify with will exist in the far future?
I am reluctant to give a ratio but my guess is that the improvement is significant. Personally I am not thrilled by cryonics for a completely different reason, namely I’m not sure the value of restoring my life at a point in the future in which civilization has advanced much beyond its current state is more than the value of things I can do with my money in the present, in particular things that increase the probability this advanced civilization will actually come to pass. Also we don’t have cryonics in Israel so I don’t have to decide now anyway.