I'll quickly point you at Drexler's Nanosystems and Freitas's Nanomedicine though they're rather long and technical reads. But we are visualizing molecularly specified machines, and 'hell no' to thawing first or pulping the cell. Seriously, this kind of background assumption is why I have to ask a lot of questions instead of just taking this sort of skeptical intuition at face value.
But rather than having to read through either of those sources, I would ask you to just take on assumption that two molecularly distinct (up to thermal noise) configurations will somehow be distinguishable by sufficiently advanced technology, and describe what your intuitions (and reasons) would be taking that premise at face value. It's not your job to be a physicist or to try to describe the theoretical limits of future technology, except of course that two systems physically identical up to thermal noise can be assumed to be technologically indistinguishable, and since thermal noise is much larger than exact quark positions it will not be possible to read off any subtle neural info by looking at exact quark positions (now that might be permanently impossible), etc. Aside from that I would encourage you to think in terms of doing cryptography to a vitrified brain rather than medicine. Don't ask whether ethylene glycol is toxic, ask whether it is a secure hard drive erasure mechanism that can obscure the contents of the brain from a powerful and intelligent adversary reading off the exact molecular positions in order to obtain tiny hints.
Checking over the open letter from scientists in support of cryonics to remember who has an explicitly neuroscience background, I am reminded that good old Anders Sandberg is wearing a doctorate in computational neuroscience from Stockholm, so I'll go ahead and name him.
Do you have a page number in Nanosystems for a references to a sensing probe? Also, this is tangential to the main discussion, so I'll take pointers to any reference you have and let this drop.
Don't ask whether ethylene glycol is toxic, ask whether it is a secure hard drive erasure mechanism that can obscure the contents of the brain from a powerful and intelligent adversary reading off the exact molecular positions in order to obtain tiny hints.
I was using cytotoxic in the very specific sense of "interacts and destabilizes the cell membrane,&...
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