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Strange7 comments on Neil deGrasse Tyson on Cryonics - Less Wrong Discussion
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Shake your head. Vigorously. (Do it.)
There, I've just caused you to scramble a vast array of concentration gradients, proteins tumbling around in a merry free-for-all. I have thus killed the old king, vive le roi nouveau!
If that's not enough, consider the forces inertia exerts on all those precious gradients and precise molecule orientations when on a rollercoaster. Uh oh.
The molecular states may not have to be exactly similar after all to yield functional equivalency within an acceptable margin, a margin we deem acceptable throughout our lives. Let's not worry about a few non-injective transformations?
I was initially swayed by Kalla724's arguments (as well as a little molecular biology background), but it's missing the forest for the trees.
Shaking your head applies relatively uniform forces, which elasticity and natural repair mechanisms can deal with. Even then it can be a close thing; people have been known to take permanent damage from trivial-seeming head injuries.
Freezing applies non-uniform forces. It's the difference between riding an elevator and hopping into a blender.
I'm not interested in damage so much as in changes in e.g. "the exact orientation of presynaptic vesicles" not being integral to our personal identity.
If e.g. someone said "we have no scanning techniques that can tell us how exactly each molecule was oriented, it could have been one of many ways (since you're e.g. trying to reverse a non-injective function", I'd say "well, we constantly change that orientation by random body movements, yet don't mind. So we can assume that change is not identity-constituting."
Edit: Even a uniform force will affect soluble elements differently from other elements. The stiffness is different for various body elements, which will lead to all sorts of tiny changes: Erythrocytes being pressed against the cell wall etcetera. That's not a significant change so that we'd say "we leave the elevator a different person", but that's precisely the point in the comparison with certain information that can't be read from a cell: It may not make all that much of a difference.