According to the PM I got, I had the most credible vegetarian entry, and it was ranked as much more credible than my actual (meat-eating) beliefs. I'm not sure how I feel about that.

Straw man. Connectonomics is relevant to trying to explain the concept of uploading to the lay-man. Few cryonics proponents actually believe it's all you need to know to reconstruct the brain.

I don't think so, Cryonics is predicated upon the hypothesis that the fine structural details which probably can't be preserved with current methods are not important to reconstruct personal identity.

The fact that someone can be dead for several hours and then be resuscitated, or have their brain substantially heated or cooled without dying

I don't think that substantial heating is survivable. Where did you get that information?

Anyway, the type of disruptions that occur to brain tissue during cryopreservation (hours-long warm ischemia, cryoprotectant damage and ice crystal formation and thermal shearing) are very different than those which occur in all known survivable events. Warm ischemia can be reduced with prompt cryopreservation (but even in the highly publicized case of Kim Suozzi, where death was expected and a lot of preparation took place, they still couldn't avoid it), it's unclear how much ice crystal formation can be reduced (it's believed to also depend on cryopreservation promptness, but that's more speculative) and cryoprotectant damage and thermal shearing are currently unavoidable.

This is not, to the best of my knowledge, true, and he offers no evidence for this claim. Cryonics does a very good job of preserving a lot of features of brain tissue.

You are reversing the burden of evidence. It's the cryonics supporters that have to provide evidence that cryonics preserves relevant brain tissue features. To my knowledge, this evidence seems to be scarce or absent. AFAIK, no cryopreserved human brain, or a brain of comparable size, was ever analyzed. There were some studies done by ALCOR on dog brains, but these were never replicated by independent researchers. Dog brains, anyway, are smaller and hence easier to vitrify than human brains.

Whether that's a showstopper depends on how important you think the fine-grained structure of white matter is.

Considering that damaging large amounts of white matter gives you things like lobotomy and alien hand syndrome, or sensorimotor impairment, and that subcortical structures are vitally important...

Since I don't have much academic knowledge on this subject, I appreciate Your feedback a lot. Can I just ask what is Your level of competence in this field?

BR

If we could “upload” or roughly simulate any brain, it should be that of C. elegans. Yet even with the full connectome in hand, a static model of this network of connections lacks most of the information necessary to simulate the mind of the worm. In short, brain activity cannot be inferred from synaptic neuroanatomy.

Straw man. Connectonomics is relevant to trying to explain the concept of uploading to the lay-man. Few cryonics proponents actually believe it's all you need to know to reconstruct the brain.

The features of your neurons (and other cells) and synapses that make you “you” are not generic. The vast array of subtle chemical modifications, states of gene regulation, and subcellular distributions of molecular complexes are all part of the dynamic flux of a living brain. These things are not details that average out in a large nervous system; rather, they are the very things that engrams (the physical constituents of memories) are made of.

The fact that someone can be dead for several hours and then be resuscitated, or have their brain substantially heated or cooled without dying, puts a theoretical limit on how sensitive your long-term brain state can possibly be to these sorts of transient details of brain structure. It seem very likely that long-term identity-related brain state is stored almost entirely in relatively stable neurological structures. I don't think this is particularly controversial, neurobiologically.

While it might be theoretically possible to preserve these features in dead tissue, that certainly is not happening now. The technology to do so, let alone the ability to read this information back out of such a specimen, does not yet exist even in principle. It is this purposeful conflation of what is theoretically conceivable with what is ever practically possible that exploits people’s vulnerability.

This is not, to the best of my knowledge, true, and he offers no evidence for this claim. Cryonics does a very good job of preserving a lot of features of brain tissue. There is some damage done by the cryoprotectants and thermal shearing, but it's specific and well-characterized damage, not total structural disruption. Although I will say that ice crystal formation in the deep brain caused by the no-reflow problem is a serious concern. Whether that's a showstopper depends on how important you think the fine-grained structure of white matter is.

But what is this replica? Is it subjectively “you” or is it a new, separate being? The idea that you can be conscious in two places at the same time defies our intuition. Parsimony suggests that replication will result in two different conscious entities. Simulation, if it were to occur, would result in a new person who is like you but whose conscious experience you don’t have access to.

Bad philosophy on top of bad neuroscience!

I like your second argument better. The first, I think, holds no water.

There are basically 2 explanations of morality, the pragmatic and the moral.

By pragmatic I mean the explanation that "moral" acts ultimately are a subset of the acts that increase our utility function. This includes evolutionary psychology, kin selection, and group selection explanations of morality. It also includes most pre-modern in-group/out-group moralities, like Athenian or Roman morality, and Nietzsche's consequentialist "master morality". A key problem with this approach is that if you say something like, "These African slaves seem to be humans rather like me, and we should treat them better," that is a malfunctioning of your morality program that will decrease your genetic utility.

The moral explanation posits that there's a "should" out there in the universe. This includes most modern religious morality, though many old (and contemporary) tribal religions were pragmatic and made practical claims (don't do this or the gods will be angry), not moral ones.

Modern Western humanistic morality can be interpreted either way. You can say the rule not to hurt people is moral, or you can say it's an evolved trait that gives higher genetic payoff.

The idea that we give moral standing to things like humans doesn't work in either approach. If morality is in truth pragmatic, then you'll assign them moral standing if they have enough power for it to be beneficial for you to do so, and otherwise not, regardless of whether they're like humans or not. (Whether or not you know that's what you're doing.) Explanation of morality of pragmatic easily explains the popularity of slavery.

"Moral" morality, from my shoes, seems incompatible with the idea that we assign moral standing to things for looking or thinking like us. I feel no "oughtness" to "we should treat agents different from us like objects." For one thing, it implies racism is morally right, and probably an obligation. For another, it's pretty much exactly what most "moral leaders" have been trying to overcome for the past 2000 years.

It feels to me like what you're doing is starting out by positing morality is pragmatic, and so we expect by default to assign moral status to things like us because that's always a pragmatic thing to do and we've never had to admit moral status to things not like us. Then you extrapolate it into this novel circumstance, in which it might be beneficial to mutually agree with AIs that each of us has moral status. You've already agreed that morals are pragmatic at root, but you are consciously following your own evolved pragmatic programming, which tells you to accept as moral agents things that look like you. So you say, "Okay, I'll just apply my evolved morality program, which I know is just a set of heuristics for increasing my genetic fitness and has no compelling oughtness to it, in this new situation, regardless of the outcome." So you're self-consciously trying to act like an animal that doesn't know its evolved moral program has no oughtness to it. That's really strange.

If you mean that humans are stupid and they'll just apply that evolved heuristic without thinking about it, then that makes sense. But then you're being descriptive. I assumed you were being prescriptive, though that's based on my priors rather than on what you said.

I think there's a question of how we create an adequate model of the world

Generally, we don't. A model of the (idealised) computational process of the AI is very simple compared with the real world, and the rest of the model just needs to include enough detail for the problem we're working on.

Doesn't exist? What do you mean by that, and what evidence do you have for believing it? Have you got some special revelation into the moral status of as-yet-hypothetical AIs? Some reason for thinking that it is more likely that beings of superhuman intelligence don't have moral status than that they do?

I greatly dislike the term "friendly AI". The mechanisms behind "friendly AI" have nothing to do with friendship or mutual benefit. It would be more accurate to call it "slave AI".

I think there's a question of how we create an adequate model of the world for this idea to work. It's probably not practical to build one by hand, so we'd likely need to hand the task over to an AI.

Might it be possible to use the modelling module of an AI in the absence of the planning module? (or with a weak planning module) If so, you might be able to feed it a great deal of data about the universe, and construct a model that could then be "frozen" and used as the basis for the AI's "virtual universe."