My best bet is that the self is a single physical thing, a specific physical phenomenon, which forms at a definite moment in the life of the organism, persists through time even during unconsciousness, and ceases to exist when its biological matrix becomes inhospitable.
How much do you want to bet on the conjunction of all those claims? (hint: I think at least one of them is provably untrue even according to current knowledge)
That is just a wild speculation, made for the sake of concreteness.
I don't think it supplied the necessary amount of concreteness to be useful; this is usual for wild speculation. ;)
The physical object is the reality, the virtual machine is just a concept.
A running virtual machine is a physical process happening in a physical object. So are you.
This is false to the robust reality of consciousness
Well, nobody actually knows enough about the reality of consciousness to make that claim. It may be that it is incompatible with your intuitions about consciousness. Mine too, so I haven't any alternative claims to make in response.
How much do you want to bet on the conjunction of all those claims? (hint: I think at least one of them is provably untrue even according to current knowledge)
How much do you want to bet on the conjunction of yours?
In June 2012, Robin Hanson wrote a post promoting plastination as a superior to cryopreservation as an approach to preserving people for later uploading. His post included a paragraph which said:
This left me with the impression that the chances of the average cryopreserved person today of being later revived aren't great, even when you conditionalize on no existential catastrophe. More recently, I did a systematic read-through of the sequences for the first time (about a month 1/2 ago), and Eliezer's post You Only Live Twice convinced me to finally sign up for cryonics for three reasons:
I don't find that terribly encouraging. So now I'm back to being pessimistic about current cryopreservation techniques (though I'm still signing up for cryonics because the cost is low enough even given my current estimate of my chances). But I'd very much be curious to know if anyone knows what, say, Nick Bostrom or Anders Sandberg think about the issue. Anyone?
Edit: I'm aware of estimates given by LessWrong folks in the census of the chances of revival, but I don't know how much of that is people taking things like existential risk into account. There are lots of different ways you could arrive at a ~10% chance of revival overall:
is one way. But:
is a very similar conclusion from very different premises. Gwern has more on this sort of reasoning in Plastination versus cryonics, but I don't know who most of the people he links to are so I'm not sure whether to trust them. He does link to a breakdown of probabilities by Robin, but I don't fully understand the way Robin is breaking the issue down.