I, for one, wouldn't trust that their preservation solution is sufficient for reconstruction of anything even approximating consciousness without a successful bidirectional demonstration. Far too high a risk that what they'd be able to deliver right now is a very smelly paperweight that used to be someone's brain.
I think they wil lose way too many analog details.
The question of doing something similar with a strata running a human brain doesn't seem impossible, just extremely technologically daunting when one considers the sheer number of connections into and out of the physical brain.
Brain plasticity can cover some wiring sins - cochlear implants are pretty awful for connecting where they should go, but it's good enough to get some degree of hearing going. Get enough and the simulated patient can help you out telling you if you've got it right or not.
For the sake of argument, I'm assuming you're talking about a physical, tangible body.
> Dualism is wrong and there is no mind/body split.
Not really seeing any argumentation to back this claim up. Particularly important for a debate that has been ongoing for some centuries now...
> The full state of the brain, simulated perfectly, would perfectly reproduce the experience of a brain in total sensory deprivation paired with total whole-body paralysis.
This segment of your post makes me wonder if you are fully comprehending the end-game proposed. I don't think it would be unfair to say that anyone dreaming of a future down this path intends for these "brains in vats" to have ways to sense/communicate.
> Even just sensory deprivation alone is enough to cause consciousness to entirely evaporate in moments. Add in whole body paralysis and no, you can never hope to have anything approaching 'consciousness.'
Here is where I find a particular loss of argumentation. What evidence do you have to support your claim that without sensing things, consciousness disappears? Don't some groups of monks utilize sensory deprivation to attain "higher states of consciousness"? I'm not arguing that they are truly achieving higher states but rather that the technique itself has a connotation of "consciousness-growing" rather than "consciousness-receding".
unlike cryogenics it will definitely result in a lot of useful and interesting data about the brain, whether it works or not.
[0] From https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/c-elegans-connect...: “Some people say we don't know anything about how C. elegans's brain works and I am like, 'Yes, we do!'" says Cornelia Bargmann of The Rockefeller University, who has studied the nematode for more than two decades and attended the Columbia debate. "A lot of what we know about C elegans's rapid behaviors we have learned through and with the connectome. Every time we do an experiment, we look at those wiring diagrams and use them as a starting point for generating hypotheses."
they have hojillions of firing patterns, some of which are cyclical and constant, other of which are transient and tiny. these stop when the brain is dead. you're not gonna capture these from a dead brain.
what if there's some essential aspect of consciousness that's depending on circles of five or six neurons holding a pattern of action potentials in perpetuity?
i doubt that this is the case, but if it is, cracking the connectome -- which is already an achievement that would require an effort greater than the human genome project -- wouldn't be very helpful at all.
oh yeah, and as far as preserving those circuits go, do you have a solution for clearing neurons from excess sodium or potassium after it accumulates there during death? depending on which ion pump fails from lack of energy first (and my bet is that it's the sodium-potassium ion pump, because it's responsible for some absurd percentage of the body's total energy usage), neurons could very easily be left logjammed with a glut of charged particles that prohibits making action potentials in any capacity even when energy becomes available. you don't wanna be assuming that all those excess ions are signal when they're noise.
finally: have you considered your philosophical disposition wrt substance dualism or materialism? you're gonna have to have a damn good case for some philosophical angle when dennett comes a knockin or he'll immolate your entire project.
Finally, dualism is juvenile bullshit. A neuroscientist who thought the mind WASN'T the brain would be absolutely useless.