Ah, gotcha. Yeah, here again, I just can't imagine why I ought to care.
I mean, I agree that the attributes can't be "stored" if I understand what you mean by that. When I remove the air from a ball, there is no more bounciness; when I add air to a ball, there is bounciness again; in between, there is no bounciness. If I do that carefully enough, the bounciness now is in-principle indistinguishable from the bounciness then, but that's really all I can say. Sure.
That said, while I can imagine caring whether my ball bounces or not, and I can imagine caring whether my ball bounces in particular ways, if my ball bounces exactly the way it did five minutes ago I can't imagine caring whether what it has now is the same bounciness, or merely in-principle indistinguishable bounciness.
To me, this seems like an obvious case of having distinctions between words that simply don't map to distinctions between states of the world, and getting too caught up in the words.
By contrast, I can imagine caring whether I have the same faculties that constitute my identity as the guy who went to bed in my room last night, or merely in-principle indistinguishable faculties, in much the same way that I can imagine caring about whether my immortal soul goes to Heaven or Hell after I die. But it pretty much requires that I not think about the question carefully, because otherwise I conclude pretty quickly that I have no grounds whatsoever for caring, any more than I do about the ball.
So, yeah... I'd still much rather be survived by something that has memories, personality, and other identity-constituting faculties which are in-principle indistinguishable from my own, but doesn't share any of my cells (all of which are now tied up in my rapidly-cooling corpse), than by something that shares all of my cells but loses a significant chunk of those faculties.
Which I suppose gets us back to the same question of incompatible values we had the other day. That is, you think the above is clear, but that it's a strange preference for me to have, and you'd prefer the latter case, which I find equally strange. Yes?
Well, I would say the question of whether ball had the "same" bounciness when you filled it back up with air would either mean just that it bounces the same way (i.e., has the same amount of air in it) or is meaningless. The same goes for your faculties. I don't think the question of whether you're the same person when you wake up as when you went to sleep - absent your being abducted and replaced with a doppelgänger - is meaningful. What would "sameness" or "difference" here mean? That seems to me to be another case of concei...
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.