The False Science of Cryonics: What the nervous system of the roundworm tells us

I actually agree with much of what is said in this article but I don't see how it amounts to an argument against cryonics.

While there's no proof that freezing preserves sufficient information to reconstruct a mind/brain there's also no proof that it doesn't. In fact I don't think there's any proof that cremation doesn't preserve enough information to reconstruct a mind/brain (as far as I know the 2nd law of thermodynamics basically says that the universe as a whole never loses information). Nonetheless it seems obvious that reconstruction from a cryonically preserved brain would be easier/more probable than from a cremated one.

As for the question of whether a reconstructed brain would be "you", I'm not sure of that either but here's the way I look at it. I know that "I" occurred once, therefore my existence is mathematically possible. Since I have no reason to think that reality is bounded in space or time (sure this universe might be finite but how do we know another one won't arise in the future ?) it seems reasonable to think that "I" might occur again, since an event of any non-zero probability should occur given infinite time. I don't know how or when this might happen because I don't know what the set of sufficient causal factors for my existence is. Nonetheless it doesn't seem completely unreasonable to think that reconstructing a functional version of my brain that preserves all or most of the information it contained at the moment of my death would have a higher probability of providing those sufficient causal factors as any other event I can easily imagine.

Hence I don't see anything inherently irrational about the practice of cryonics for those who would like to increase the probability that their existence will be preserved or recovered after death.

I posted this article, not because I think it was well done, but rather because it exemplifies how even academics within closely related fields are maddeningly ignorant about cryonics.

For example, as far as I can tell, the author conflates the concepts of uploading, cryopreservation, and reanimation. The fact that we don't currently have the ability to scan preserved brains with enough precision to capture all of the relevant data does not in any way mean that the data is lost during crypreservation. And even if making an external copy of the data stored within the cryopreserved brain is infeasible, it does not follow that reanimation of the brain itself will be impossible.

One of the frustrating aspects of being a cryonics advocate is that even very smart people do not seem to easily grok the idea that cryonics is intended as a bridge to future technology, so the shortcomings in the modern state of the art are of little relevance. And no serious cryonicists think that success is guaranteed. Cryonics is basically an experiment, and all we know is that everyone in the control group is definitely not coming back. So I'd rather take my chances with the experimental group.

The discussion of "copies" and identities is particularly unpersuasive. First, reanimation may not involve a copy in any meaningful sense, if the original biological substrate is simply repaired. Second, intuitions about consciousness and identity are notoriously fallible.

In a sense, this is the ultimate manifestation of the product of induction: Our sense of "self" is an illusion reified by our daily experience of a singular self. But when technology allows us to be duplicated, perhaps the idea of branching versions of ourselves will feel more intuitive.

The pattern theory of mind is really the only defensible position once you realize that over the course of your life, there is almost complete turnover in terms of the specific atoms that compose you. And on a deeper level, we know that particles are fungible: an electron is an electron is an electron. Unless they are concealing little miniature souls inside, the only reasonable conclusion is that consciousness and identity are properties that emerge from the relative positions of the interchangeable subatomic components.