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ocr-fork comments on Is cryonics necessary?: Writing yourself into the future - Less Wrong
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Is a vitrified brain conscious?
No idea. We haven't yet revived any vitrified brains and asked them whether they experience personal continuity with their pre-vitrification selves. The answer could turn out either way.
They remember being themselves, so they'd say "yes."
I think the OP thinks being cryogenically frozen is like taking a long nap, and being reconstructed from your writings is like being replaced. This is true, but only because the reconstruction would be very inaccurate, not because a lump of cold fat in a jar is intrinsically more conscious than a book. A perfect reconstruction would be just as good as being frozen. When I asked if a vitrified brain was conscious I meant "why do you think a vitrified brain is conscious if a book isn't."
You don't know that until you've actually done the experiment. Some parts of memory may be "passive" - encoded in the configuration of neurons and synapses - while other parts may be "active", dynamically encoded in the electrical stuff and requiring constant maintenance by a living brain. To take an example we understand well, turning a computer off and on again loses all sorts of information, including its "thread of consciousness".
EDIT: I just looked it up and it seems this comment has a high chance of being wrong. People have been known to come to life after having a (mostly) flat EEG for hours, e.g. during deep anaesthesia. Sorry.