OK., I think I understand your position.
So, suppose I develop a life-threatening heart condition, and have the following conversation with my cardiologist:
Her: We've developed this marvelous new artificial heart, and I recommend installing it in place of your damaged organic heart.
Me: Oh, is it easier to repair my heart outside of my body?
Her: No, no... we wouldn't repair your heart, we'd replace it.
Me: But what would happen to my heart?
Her: Um... well, we typically incinerate it.
Me: But that's awful! It's my heart. You're proposing destroying my heart!!!
Her: I don't think you quite understand. The artificial heart can pump blood through your body just as well as your original heart... better, actually, given your condition.
Me: Sure, I understand that, but that's mere function. I believe you can replicate the functions of my heart, but if you don't preserve my heart, what's the value of that?
I infer that on your account, I'm being completely absurd in this example, since the artificial heart can facilitate my survival just as well (or better) as my original one, because really all I ought to value here is the functions. As long as my blood is pumping, etc., I should be content. (Yes? Or have I misrepresented your view of heart replacement?)
I also infer that you would further say that this example is nothing at all like a superficially similar example where it's my brain that's injured and my doctor is proposing replacing it with an artificial brain that merely replicates the functions of my brain (representation, information storage, computation and so forth). In that case, I infer, you would not consider my response absurd at all, since it really is the brain (and not merely its functions) that matter.
Am I correct?
If so, I conclude that I just have different values than you do. I don't care about my brain, except insofar that it's the only substrate I know of capable of implementing my X. If my survival requires the preservation of my brain, then it follows that I don't care about my survival.
I do care about preserving my X, though. Give me a chance to do that, and I'll take it, whether I survive or not.
I wouldn't say that a brain transplant is nothing at all like a heart transplant. I don't take the brain to have any special properties. However, this is one of those situations where identity can become vague. These things lie on a continuum. The brain is tied up with everything we do, all the ways in which we express our identity, so it's more related to identity than the heart. People with severe brain damage can suffer a loss of identity (i.e., severe memory loss, severe personality change, permanent vegetative state, etc). You can be rough and ready w...
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.