Get a whiff of xenon to see what small alteration to electrical properties of the neurons amounts to.
My initial reaction was shock that a heavier-than-air radioactive gas might go into someone's lungs on purpose. It triggers a lot of my "scary danger" heuristics for gases. Googling turned up a bunch of fascinating stuff. Thanks for the surprise! For anyone else interested, educational content includes:
Neat!
Heh. Well, it's not radioactive, the radon is. It is inert but it dissolves in membranes, changing electrical properties.
In this video, long about 48:00, Eliezer talks about uploading and about how it wouldn't be murder if his meat body were anesthetized before the upload and killed without regaining consciousness.
It's arguable that it wouldn't be murder, but I'm not clear about why Eliezer would want to do it that way. I've got some guesses about why one might want to not let the meat body wake up (legal and practical complications of a double but diverging identity, the meat version feeling hopelessly envious), but I'm not sure whether either of them apply.
On the other hand, I can think of a couple of reasons for *not* eliminating the meat version-- one is that two Eliezers would presumably be better than one, though I don't have a strong intuition about the optimum number of Eliezers. The other, which I consider to be more salient, is that the meat version is a backup in case the upload isn't as good as hoped.
More generally, what would folks here consider to be good enough evidence that uploading was worth doing?