This post is well written but i feel like the conclusion is a little vague. What I got from it is that as an individual the most rational beliefs or actions won’t necessary just be “follow the science”. Science requires a great deal of time, energy, funding etc. In situations where these limitations strip you of a clear scientific answer to your problem, you aren’t suddenly stripped of the responsibility to make a choice. It is a matter of fact that current cryogenics either will or will not work. Science hasn’t told us, but there still is a right answer. And not choosing in this case is still a choice. So the best practice is to bet on the odds.
Cadensuperj
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Ughhhhh. Lovely, my brain broke. To mean this whole topic seems to revolve around two issues.
First it seems a question of Entanglement in the Less Wrong evidence sense of the word. It’s an epistemological question of whether internal consciousness possesses any evidential relationships to external observable qualities. Or assuming for a second that two individuals are actually conscious and are interacting with each, have access to the full sum of material tools possible and are both trying to discover if the other is conscious. In this example is there any entanglement between both individuals awareness. My honest guess is no.
The second issue is more so the fundamental question of what consciousness is made of. If it were say some particular fundamental field of the universe that is attracted to certain information structures but for whatever reason not simulated information structures. Not information structures of information structures. In this case if we copied everyone’s information onto some computer you might very well have created a zombie world. I think this is a what a lot of people are afraid of for a lot of transhumanist stuff. They want to mess with the vessel that hold their awareness as little as possible in the fear that they could become a zombie.