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shminux comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (July 2012) - Less Wrong
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Just to be a cryo advocate here for a moment, if the information of interest is distributed rather than localized, like in a hologram (or any other Fourier-type storage), there is a chance that one can be recovered as a reasonable facsimile of the frozen person, with maybe some hazy memories (corresponding to the lowered resolution of a partial hologram). I'd still rather be revived but having trouble remembering someone's face or how to drive a car, or how to solve the Schrodinger equation, than not to be revived at all. Even some drastic personality changes would probably be acceptable, given the alternative.
Oh, sure. Or if the sort of information that gets destroyed relates to what-I-am-currently-thinking, or something similar. If I wake up and don't remember the last X minutes,or hours, big deal. But when we have to postulate certain types of storage for something to work, it should lower our probability estimates.
Do you have a sense of how drastic a personality change has to be before there's someone else you'd rather be resurrected instead of drastically-changed-shminux?
Not really. This would require solving the personal identity problem, which is often purported to have been solved or even dissolved, but isn't.
I'm guessing that there is no actual threshold, but a fuzzy fractal boundary which heavily depends on the person in question. While one may say that if they are unable to remember the faces and names of their children and no longer able to feel the love that they felt for them, it's no longer them, and they do not want this new person to replace them, others would be reasonably OK with that. The same applies to the multitude of other memories, feelings, personality traits, mental and physical skills and whatever else you (generic you) consider essential for your identity.
Yeah, I share your sense that there is no actual threshold.
It's also not clear to me that individuals have any sort of specifiable boundary or what is or isn't "them", however fuzzy or fractal, so much as they have the habit of describing themselves in various ways.