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Vladimir_Nesov comments on Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: bekkerd 09 May 2012 03:17PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 13 May 2012 08:43:48PM *  7 points [-]

The point you're making seems to be that performing the repair is impossible in practice. Apart from that difficulty, do you think enough information is preserved in the location of all atoms in a cryopreserved brain, so that given detailed knowledge of how brains work in general this information would in theory be sufficient to reconstruct the initial person (even if this information is impractical to actually extract or process)? One possibility for avoiding the reconstruction of brains out of atoms is to instead reconstruct a Whole Brain Emulation of the original person. Do you think developing the technology of WBE is similarly impossible, or that there are analogous difficulties with use of WBE for this purpose?

Comment author: kalla724 13 May 2012 10:10:28PM 22 points [-]

I don't believe so. Distortion of the membranes and replacement of solvent irretrievably destroys information that I believe to be essential to the structure of the mind. I don't think that would ever be readable into anything but a pale copy of the original person, no matter what kind of technological advance occurs (information simply isn't there to be read, regardless of how advanced the reader may be).