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MichaelVassar comments on Normal Cryonics - Less Wrong
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I reject your framing. I would say that I had made a bad mistake. Errors do not a bad parent make. Or, to put it another way, suppose you woke up in the Christian Hell; would you plead that you had made the best decision on the available information? Scary what-ifs are no argument. You cannot make me reconsider a probability assignment by pointing out the bad consequences if my assessment is wrong; you can only do so by adding information. I understand that you believe you're trying to save my life, but please be aware that turning to the Dark Side to do so is not likely to impress me; if you need the power of the Dark Side, how good can your argument be, anyway?
The brain's functioning depends on electric and chemical potentials internal to the cells as well as connections between the cells. I believe that cryonics can maintain the network, but not the internal state of the nodes; consequently I assign "too low to meaningfully consider" to the probability of restoring my personality from my frozen brain. If the technology improves, I will reconsider.
Edit: I should specify that right now I have no children, lest I be misunderstood. It seems quite possible I will have some in the near future, though.
How high a probability do you place on the information content of the brain depending on maintaining electrochemical potentials? Why? Why do you think your information and analysis are better than those of those who disagree?
In order: 90%; because personality seems to me state-ful (that is, there is clearly some sort of long-term storage with quite rapid (relative to nerve growth) writing going on, which seems to me hard to explain purely in terms of the interconnections), and a neural network with no activation information in the nodes will not respond to a given input in the same way as the same network with some excited nodes; and because you have not given a convincing counterargument nor a convincing appeal to expertise.
Certainly the internal state of a neuron includes things that are preserved by uploading other than the wiring diagram. Anyway, are you doing a calculation where another factor of 10 makes a critical difference?
Uploading, yes; but we were discussing cryonics. Uploading is a completely different question. Indeed, I would assign a rather higher probability to uploading preserving personality, than to cryonics doing so.
And yes, I generally expect orders of magnitude to make a difference. If they don't, then your uncertainty is so large anyway that attempting a fake precision is just fooling yourself.
Although... actually... it occurs to me that you could move the order of magnitude somewhere else. Suppose I kept your probability estimate of cryonics working, and multiplied the price by ten? Even by twenty? ... That does make a pretty fair chunk of my budget, but still. I think I'll have to revisit that calculation.