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Tim_Walters comments on You Only Live Twice - Less Wrong
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Can you point me to any positive evidence that the information needed for resuscitation survives death and freezing, rather than being carried in volatile state?
Without that, it seems to me that your argument boils down to "you can't prove it won't work." Which is true, but not much of an inducement to part with cash.
This.
I understand this is from ages ago but is worth a response. See the Wiki page on Deep hypothermic circulatory arrest (a procedure used in some surgeries today):
The existence and success of this procedure seems like incredibly strong evidence in favor of people having a purely chemical identity stored in their head. When timely applied and non-lossy preservation techniques (which I consider modern cryonics to be) are used, you should be able to be successfully re-animated.
There's a bit of a difference, as I'm sure you're aware, between being refrigerated for seven minutes and frozen for a decade or more. Proteins denature, lipid membranes break down, cells and tissues are destroyed either by expanding liquids or toxic antifreeze compounds.
Some of that damage might be reversible. Much could well be to fungible parts of the body; having to replace an ear or a spleen shouldn't overly impact whether the reanimated person is you or not. But in the absence of knowledge about how / where "chemical identity" is stored in the brain and how vulnerable those systems are to damage (much less how one would go about putting the bits back together), it is preposterous to make a definite claim that cryonics is reversible.
Some damage cannot be reversed, some information cannot be recovered/decrypted within the time until heat death, and there is not sufficient evidence to believe that a frozen brain is any less 'erased' than a letter which has been dissolved in acid.
There is, in fact, ridiculously good evidence to think that more information is preserved by cryonics than a letter dissolved in acid. The incredibly important question is 1) How much information is preserved, and 2) whether it is the right information.