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Mitchell_Porter comments on A proposal for a cryogenic grave for cryonics - Less Wrong
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I must have been, at some point, but a long time ago and don't remember.
Clearly there are situations where extra facts would lead you to conclude that the impression of continuity is an illusion. If you woke up as Sherlock Holmes, remembering your struggle with Moriarty as you fell off a cliff moments before, and were then shown convincingly that Holmes was a fictional character from centuries before, and you were just an artificial person provided with false memories in his image, you would have to conclude that in this case, you had erred somehow in judging reality on the basis of subjective appearances.
It seems unlikely that reliable reconstruction of cryonics patients could occur and yet the problem of consciousness not yet be figured out. Reliable reconstruction would require such a profound knowledge of brain structure and function, that there wouldn't be room for continuing uncertainty about quantum effects in the brain. By then you would know it was there or not there, so regardless of how the revivee felt, the people(?) doing the reviving should already know the answers regarding identity and the nature of personal existence.
(I add the qualification reliable reconstruction, because there might well be a period in which it's possible to experiment with reconstructive protocols while not really knowing what you're doing. Consider the idea of freezing a C. elegans and then simulating it on the basis of micrometer sections. We could just about do this today, except that we would mostly be guessing how to map the preserved ultrastructure to computational elements of a simulation. One would prefer the revival of human beings not to proceed via similar trial and error.)
In the present, the question is whether subjectively continuous but temporally discontinuous experience, such as you report, is evidence for the self only having an intermittent physical existence. Well, the experience is consistent with the idea that you really did cease to exist during those 3 hours, but it is also consistent with the idea that you existed but your time sense shut down along with your usual senses, or that it stagnated in the absence of external and internal input.
Which is to say, decision theory for algorithms, understanding of how an algorithm controls mathematical structures, and how intuitions about the real world and subjective anticipation map to that formal setting.
Logics allow to work with classes of mathematical structures (not necessarily individual structures), which seems to be a good enough notion of working with "all mathematical structures". A "measure" (if, indeed, it's a useful concept) is aspect of preference, and preferences are inherently non-canonical, though I hope to find a relatively "canonical" procedure for defining ("extracting") preference in terms of an agent-program.
Any given concept is what it is. Truth about any given concept is not a matter of preference.
But in cases where there is no "canonical choice of a concept", it is a matter of choice which concept to consider. If you want a concept with certain properties, these properties already define a concept of their own, and might determine the mathematical structure that satisfies them, or might leave some freedom in choosing one you prefer for the task.
In case of quantum mechanical measure, you want your concept of measure to produce "probabilities" that conform with the concept of subjective anticipation, which is fairly regular and thus create illusion of "universality", because preferences of most minds like ours (evolved like ours, in our physics) have subjective anticipation as a natural category, a pattern that has significant explanatory (and hence, optimization) power. But subjective anticipation is still not a universally interesting concept, one can consider a mind that looks at your theories about it, says "so what?", and goes on optimizing something else.
That preference is a cause of a given choice doesn't prohibit physics to also be a cause. There is rarely an ultimate source (unique dependence). You value thinking about what is real (accords with physical laws) because you evolved to value real things. There are also concepts which are not about our physical laws which you value, because evolution isn't a perfect designer.
This is also a free will argument. I say that there is a decision to be made about which concepts to consider, and you say that the decision is already made by the laws of physics. It's easier to see how you do have free will for more trivial choices. It's more difficult to consider acting and thinking as if you live in different physics. In both cases, the counterfactual is physically impossible, you couldn't have made a different choice. Your thoughts accord with the laws of physics, caused by physics, embedded within physics. And in both cases, what is actually true (what action you'll perform; and what theories you'll think about) is determined by your decision.
As an agent, you shouldn't (terminally) care about what laws of physics say, only about what your preference says, so this cause is always more relevant, although currently less accessible to reflection.
I don't agree with this claim. One would simply need an understanding of what brain systems are necessary for consciousness and how to restore those systems to a close approximation to pre-existing state (presumably using nanotech). This doesn't take much in the way of actually understanding how those systems function. Once one had well-developed nanotech one could learn this sort of thing simply be trial and error on animals (seeing what was necessary for survival, and what was necessary for training to stay intact) and then move on to progressively larger brained creatures. This doesn't require a deep understanding of intelligence or consciousness, simply an understanding of what parts of the brain are being used and how to restore them.