[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.

[bduerst]

Splitting hairs on physics just means you're missing the point of Arthur C. Clarke's quote - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws#Origins

[garmaine]

I don't think I'm splitting hairs. The quote, in context, is applied in the other direction: a sufficiently advanced technology which exists has mechanisms which seem indistinguishable from magic to a primitive mind. But you can't apply it in the other direction and say anything which seems like magic could exist with sufficiently advanced technology. This is because there are physical limits which constrain what any future technology could do.

To a pre-industrial mind, a cell phone would be magic. Other things that would seem like magic are faster than light travel, perpetual motion machines, or exact quantum state duplicators. However baring radically new and highly unlikely physics (which would be the hugest cop-out to assume), there will never ever be faster-than-light travel, perpetual motion machines, or quantum replicators. Such technology is simply impossible. Not "we don't know how to do it" but "we know that it cannot be done."

Likewise, once your brain is cremated or reduced to worm food, there is absolutely no way to recover that connectome information which defines who you are. The laws of physics disallow it.

I have only the slightest idea of what technology that is able to revive a cryo preserved brain would look like, and it would certainly seem like magic to someone today. But to revive a cremated brain would require actual magic. There's an important difference there.