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Luke_A_Somers comments on Plastination is maturing and needs funding, says Hanson - Less Wrong
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It loses any data that is not structural in the neurons' physical shape - whose importance is not currently known. We can presume that electrical signals can be rebooted, but can chemical ones? Will the brain fail as badly as a drunkard or someone who drinks twenty espressos, if shorn of its chemical context?
This is particularly plausible because the brain is full of low-level feedback loops controlling endocrine stuff - I could fully expect them to go completely bugfuck if their sensor inputs suddenly read "0.0".
To give an example here: "gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogue" drugs are used to block secretion of sex hormones. They were originally designed to increase them. GNRH is the "on switch" signal, the drugs mimic it. And indeed they do initially increase hormones - then the brain's regulatory feedback slams on the brakes, all the way to zero. Nobody knew that particular feedback was there before they poked it with a drug.
This tech may make testing the above much easier though.
Freeze, slice, stain, and microscope can check chemicals in the way this cannot.
So... set a reasonable endocrine state, not 0.
There are few enough degrees of freedom in the endocrine system that having it arbitrarily reset to some normal level... won't alter your identity, it'll just alter your mood.
Especially since this is going to have to be emulated anyway.
Your claim seems important if true. My personal tendency is to preserve data where I don't understand what's going on, and my impression is that lots of data is stored in the biochemistry itself... precisely which receptors exist, how deeply they're embedded in membranes, what kinds of fatty acids a membrane is made of, and so on. Dendrites and axons engage in chemotaxis where they follow genetically programmed ion and/or protein gradients. If you wipe out the chemical gradient information then how do you know what sorts of ways that the dendrites should regrow in the weeks and months post-resuscitation?
A divergence of opinions here could be due to different assumptions about what kind of knowledge will be available in the context of resuscitation. If your resuscitators have vast and deeply tested knowledge of the operation of many kinds of brains, then they might be able to mock up plausible values for all the chemistry and produce someone "similar enough" (and its certainly better than nothing but a bunch of letters and photos and Madeleines). If they're doing this for the first time in a sort of "1950's plucky engineer mode", then I would naively suspect that plastination pushes someone closer to information theoretic death than even membrane-damaging no-vitrification cryonics of the sort that was standard operating procedure in the mid-1970s.
If I wake up and I feel like myself on a second to second basis, I will not be upset if my path through mind space is drastically altered on a time scale of weeks and months, so long as it doesn't lead me to insanity. Hell, I hope I'll be able to drastically change my mind on that time scale anyway once I'm uploaded.
That's pretty much my take on it, though with different details.
Is the idea to upload the record on to a generic brain? Do the details of DNA and its methylation matter to identity?
Yeah, but my point being, you don't know all those feedbacks. There are probably scads of them. And realistically the only way to find out would be to boot up a great many nonhuman animals first, and watch them bug out in informative ways. Which is likely to be cruel work, and not fun at all.
Also "only alter your mood"? Well, only as much as being hypoglycemic, or hypoxic, or panicking for breath, or ravenous, or various other hormone or feedback linked things alter your mood, especially with them all firing at OHSHITGONNADIE levels all at once - ie, it would be instantly and horribly incapacitating.
It wouldn't be nice at all, but it wouldn't be death, and it would be fixable even with current psych meds.
No, it would not. Those meds rebalance an unbalanced system, they don't rebuild a completely undercut system. And you are assuming that simulating the chemical effect of the meds would be easy - lest you forget, we've thrown away the chemicals, that's the problem.
That works fine if it's just the endocrine system whose information you lose. It works less well if there are a hundred systems, each with several degrees of freedom, whose joint state needs to be in some relatively narrow region in order to preserve one's identity.