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Kawoomba comments on More Cryonics Probability Estimates - Less Wrong
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No they're not, they're describing functional damage and saying why it would be hard to repair in situ, not talking about what you can and can't information-theoretically infer about the original brain from the post-vitrification position of molecules. In other words, the argument does not have the form of, "These two cognitively distinct states will map to molecularly indistinguishable end states". I'm not saying you have to use that exact phrasing but it's what the correct version of the argument is necessarily about, since (modus tollens) anything which defeats that conclusion in real life causes cryonics to work in real life.
Are you referring to the neuroscientist's discussion linked in the OP? This comment seems quite clear regarding the information-theoretic consequences:
In our lingo: the state transformation is a non-injective function (=loss of information).
However, the import of the distance between a "best guess" facsimile and the original is hard to evaluate. Would it be on the order of the difference between before and after a night's sleep? Before and after a TBI injury (yay pleonasm)?
Undifferentiable from your current self in a hypothetical Turing test variant, with you squaring off against such a carbon copy?
Speculatively, I'd rather think all that damage to not play that big of a role. Disrupted membranes should still yield the location of the synapses with high spatial fidelity, and the way we interfere with neurotransmitters constantly, the exact concentration in each synapse does not seem identity-constituting.
Otherwise, we'd incur information-theoretic death of our previous selves each time we take e.g. a neurotransmitter manipulating drug such as an SSRI. Which we do in a way, just not in a relevant way.
I thought you meant "neoplasm", then I actually Googled pleonasm and there's a good chance you mean that. Which is it???
Heh, pleonasm, since the "I" in the TBI acronym already refers to "injury", thus rendering the second injury as an overkill. Let's get side-tracked on that, typical LW style :)
Pleonasm, neoplasm ... potato, topota.