That's a good point, shminux. But don't you think that the entire organ needs to be scanned at high resolution first before storing a compressed copy?
I think it depends on what is the physical correlate of consciousness, memory and identity. At this point we know very little about it. Clearly single molecules do not matter, and single neurons can die without obvious ill effects. It's not clear how glial cells affect consciousness. We have to learn a lot more about the issue to figure out what can be compressed out from such a scan, and once we understand it, we can probably use a simpler scanning technique.
To all my physicists in the house, will it ever be possible for a device to scan the contents of a human head at the molecular level (say, 5 x 5 x 5nm) while the subject is still alive? I don't have a physics background, so if you could also just point me to the materials I need to read to be able to answer the question, that would be wonderful as well.
The background: I want to live to see the far future and so I'm researching the feasibility of alternatives to cryonics that'll let people "back up" themselves at regular intervals rather than at the point of death. If this is even theoretically possible then I can direct my time and donations towards medical imaging researchers. If not then I'll continue to support cryonics and plastination research.
I'm looking forward to your responses!