[jerf]

A lot of "cryonically-frozen" people are only their heads, since it's been well-known for a while that there's no way to unfreeze the bodies. I suspect it may literally be easier to scan their brains than to unfreeze them, even if they were healthier to begin with. That's not a statement of my belief in the ease of scanning a brain; it's a statement of my belief in just how hard it is to "thaw" a body and get anything back. I'd say it's like getting handed a pile of slag and told to turn it back into a working engine, except that task is multiple orders of magnitude easier.

[bduerst]

But that's my point, why even bother freezing the brain, if simply waiting a few centuries more of tech progress will mean you don't even need the brain to be consciously brought back?

It's just replacing the faith in one omnipotent's afterlife with another.

[garmaine]

How would that work? Future technology, no matter how advanced, would still require the information in your brain to simulate you. The point of cronics is to preserve that information.

[jfk13]

But currently we don't know what "information in your brain" would be required, so it's a huge leap of faith to suppose that cryonics is successfully preserving it.

(That's supposing "information in your brain" would even be sufficient by itself. Another leap of faith.)

[garmaine]

The connectome. Your identity is encoded in the neural network of your brain, which is preserved in vitrification. I don’t know why this is controversial.

[bduerst]

Just simulate the entire universe and pluck the brain structure of the person you're trying to bring back into reality.

You're missing the point though. These solutions entirely rely on future technology development being the omnipotence that gives you afterlife.

[jerf]

That seems more to be an assumption you're bringing in, rather than others. There's a huge gulf between "technology that can read the structure of the brain and recreate it" (which seems to be something merely lacking in know-how and tech, but with no fundamentally-impossible steps), and "simulate the entire universe as-is, in situ, and assume it's 100% accurate, and pluck people out of it" (a la https://qntm.org/responsibility), which seems outright impossible as no system can simulate itself fully. I'm honestly having trouble wrapping my head around how you're both managing to insist on the latter being the only possibility while simultaneously telling people that it's a bad assumption.

[bduerst]

That's the point. Whether it's reviving frozen brains or resimulating consciousness, it's an entirely faith-based argument in technological progress.

[garmaine]

You’re assuming magic.

[bduerst]

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

[garmaine]

But even the most advanced technology can’t accomplish magic. It still exists in the real world and is subject to physical law, such as the laws of statistical mechanics and information loss.