Memories are very important, but they're only part of the package. Personality matters as much or more. I think the right answer would be to kill yourself once the degradation has erased most of your memories but your personality is still mostly untouched.
If you are revived, a lot of memories can be created out of all your documented evidence and buried (but nano-accessible) memories; this is especially true if you were smart enough to start lifelogging early - then you can retrieve a great many memories just by replaying the video stream and crosschecking your reactions against the videoed reactions and documentation like emails or social network updates.
This would represent a tradeoff between the 'alpha' and 'beta' simulation strategies, but that makes sense, since deciding when to kill yourself with Alzheimer's is another tradeoff between highly certain life and highly uncertain revival.
This would represent a tradeoff between the 'alpha' and 'beta' simulation strategies
What are those?
The diagnosis of a legendary women's basketball coach at my school, Pat Summit, with early onset dementia, Alzheimer's type, got me thinking about Cryonics and Alzheimer's. For the purposes of this thought experiment, we will ignore the legal implications of the fact that you can't be frozen until you are legally dead. Let us further assume (which given my knowledge of Alzheimer's, is pretty reasonable) that the damage done by Alzheimer's is complete, and that future technology will be unable to reconstruct the destroyed components.
If you were diagnosed with Alzheimer's, or really any neurodegenerative disorder, at what point in the degradation would you want to be frozen? This would fairly easily prevent further degradation, but might further damage you/all of the other risks associated with cryonics that everyone knows. Obviously, you wouldn't have the agency of mind (or perhaps you still would, depending on when you made the decision) to do it yourself, but suppose you were caring for a loved one, or writing a living will. Assume you operate healthily at the onset of your diagnosis.
Things to consider:
How would your loved ones react to your being frozen versus coping with you having Alzheimer's? Should this matter in your decision? If it does, what implications does that have for a duty to die?
How much degradation of the mind is acceptable (and the added damage potentially done by cryonics) before one should freeze onesself?
Would you avoid the risk of being frozen all together because you believe we will or may have a cure for Alzheimer's soon, and waiting for it would do less damage than cryonics?