To add to my comments above, I mean that there is no paradox or unnecessary ache in thinking about minds as physical objects (and hence pausable, storable, and replicable). Everything we’ve ever done happens within minds anyway, and there is nothing we can do about that. Whatever mental representations we conjure when we think of atoms or molecules or electromagnetic forces are inaccurate and incomplete: this “conscious” experience and sensory perception and thought is what a particular collection of molecules and forces is, rather than a visual or abstract representation of it. This requires a certain level of recursiveness to accede, and is essentially the mental flip that shuns treating everyday sensory experience and “life” as your axioms, and instead adopts axiomatically (even though the flip might have been due to evidence processing) that everything you or any human has ever experienced is a subspace of whatever mathematical structure we’re embedded in.
In light of all that, and further confirmations from cognitive science and neuroscience that “the self” is a distributed physical process unlike any Cartesian dualist conception, cryonics strikes me as being as natural as the notion of love or justice prior to performing the mental flip.
Yes.
To add to my comments above, I mean that there is no paradox or unnecessary ache in thinking about minds as physical objects (and hence pausable, storable, and replicable). Everything we’ve ever done happens within minds anyway, and there is nothing we can do about that. Whatever mental representations we conjure when we think of atoms or molecules or electromagnetic forces are inaccurate and incomplete: this “conscious” experience and sensory perception and thought is what a particular collection of molecules and forces is, rather than a visual or abstract representation of it. This requires a certain level of recursiveness to accede, and is essentially the mental flip that shuns treating everyday sensory experience and “life” as your axioms, and instead adopts axiomatically (even though the flip might have been due to evidence processing) that everything you or any human has ever experienced is a subspace of whatever mathematical structure we’re embedded in.
In light of all that, and further confirmations from cognitive science and neuroscience that “the self” is a distributed physical process unlike any Cartesian dualist conception, cryonics strikes me as being as natural as the notion of love or justice prior to performing the mental flip.