I don't believe any of the various purely computational definitions of personhood and survival
So, this goes well beyond the scope of cryonics. We aren't discussing whether any particular method is doable - rather, we're debating the very possibility of running a soul on a computer computer.
To reproduce the latter would require, not just the recreation of memory banks adjoining the vortex-self, but the shaping and seeding of the inner dynamics of the vortex.
...but all you are doing here is adding a more complex element to the brain, Russel's-Teapot style. It's still part of the brain. If the vortex-soul thing is physical, observable, and can be described by a computable function then there is no theoretical reason why you can't copy the vortex-thing into a computer.
I'm a particular "vortex" already; when that definitively sputters out, that's it for me.
...so why did we even bother with this whole vortex-soul-thingy then? Why not just say "when my brain stops computing stuff, that's it for me"? How does the insertion of an extra object into the cognitive machinery in any way facilitate this argument?
They read as if I'm a vortex true believer.
I don't mean that you believe in the vortex specifically. I mean that your exact argument can be made without inserting any extra things (vortexes, souls, whatever) into our current understanding of the brain.
What you are basically saying is that you can't copy-paste consciousness...it doesn't matter what the specific substrate of it is and whether or not it has vortexes. If you were running as software on a computer in the first place, you'd say that cutting and pasting program would constitute death, no?
...Right? Or did I miss something important about your argument?
I reject the computational paradigm of mind in its most ambitious form, the one which says that mind is nothing but computation - a notion which, outside of rigorous computer science, isn't even well-defined in these discussions.
One issue that people blithely pass by when they just assume computationalism, is meaning - "representational content". Thoughts, mental states, are about things. If you "believe in physics", and are coming from a naturalistic perspective, then meaning, intentionality, is one of the great conundrums, up there w...
In June 2012, Robin Hanson wrote a post promoting plastination as a superior to cryopreservation as an approach to preserving people for later uploading. His post included a paragraph which said:
This left me with the impression that the chances of the average cryopreserved person today of being later revived aren't great, even when you conditionalize on no existential catastrophe. More recently, I did a systematic read-through of the sequences for the first time (about a month 1/2 ago), and Eliezer's post You Only Live Twice convinced me to finally sign up for cryonics for three reasons:
I don't find that terribly encouraging. So now I'm back to being pessimistic about current cryopreservation techniques (though I'm still signing up for cryonics because the cost is low enough even given my current estimate of my chances). But I'd very much be curious to know if anyone knows what, say, Nick Bostrom or Anders Sandberg think about the issue. Anyone?
Edit: I'm aware of estimates given by LessWrong folks in the census of the chances of revival, but I don't know how much of that is people taking things like existential risk into account. There are lots of different ways you could arrive at a ~10% chance of revival overall:
is one way. But:
is a very similar conclusion from very different premises. Gwern has more on this sort of reasoning in Plastination versus cryonics, but I don't know who most of the people he links to are so I'm not sure whether to trust them. He does link to a breakdown of probabilities by Robin, but I don't fully understand the way Robin is breaking the issue down.