Question:
What are your thoughts on cryogenic preservation and the idea of medically treating aging?
His response:
A marvelous way to just convince people to give you money. Offer to freeze them for later. I'd have more confidence if we had previously managed to pull this off with other mammals. Until then I see it as a waste of money. I'd rather enjoy the money, and then be buried, offering my body back to the flora and fauna of which I have dined my whole life.
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?
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).