There’s another problem with the hard drive analogy—he’s comparing the goal of completely erasing a hard drive to erasing just enough of a person for them to not be the “same” person anymore.
With the kind of hardcare hard drive erasing he talks about, the goal is to make sure that not one bit is recoverable. If the attacker can determine that there may have been a jpeg somewhere at sometime, or what kind of filesystem you were using, they win.
The analogous win in cryonics would be for future archeologists to recover any information about who you were as a person, which orders of magnitude easier than doing a near-complete reconstruction of the algorithm-that-is-you.
Where, exactly, in the brain that information is stored is all too relevant a question. For all we know it could be more feasible to scrape identity from IRC logs and email history. I would not personally be upset if I no longer had a favorite flavor of ice cream, for example.
There’s another problem with the hard drive analogy—he’s comparing the goal of completely erasing a hard drive to erasing just enough of a person for them to not be the “same” person anymore.
With the kind of hardcare hard drive erasing he talks about, the goal is to make sure that not one bit is recoverable. If the attacker can determine that there may have been a jpeg somewhere at sometime, or what kind of filesystem you were using, they win.
The analogous win in cryonics would be for future archeologists to recover any information about who you were as a person, which orders of magnitude easier than doing a near-complete reconstruction of the algorithm-that-is-you.
Where, exactly, in the brain that information is stored is all too relevant a question. For all we know it could be more feasible to scrape identity from IRC logs and email history. I would not personally be upset if I no longer had a favorite flavor of ice cream, for example.