How do you respond to the thought experiment where your neurons (and glial cells and whatever) are replaced one-by-one with tiny workalikes made out of non-biological material? Specifically, would you be able to tell the difference? Would you still be conscious when the replacement process was complete? (Or do you think the thought experiment contains flawed assumptions?)
Feel free to direct me to another comment if you've answered this elsewhere.
My scenario violates the assumption that a conscious being consists of independent replaceable parts.
Just to be concrete: let's suppose that the fundamental physical reality consists of knotted loops in three-dimensional space. Geometry comes from a ubiquitous background of linked simple loops like chain-mail, other particles and forces are other sorts of loops woven through this background, and physical change is change in the topology of the weave.
Add to this the idea that consciousness is always a state of a single loop, that the property of the loop ...
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.