Yes, that post still reflects my views. I should point out again that sleep and many forms of anesthesia don’t stop operation of the brain, they just halt the creation of new memories so people don’t remember. That’s why, for example, some surgery patients end up with PTSD from waking up on the table, even if they don’t remember.
Other cases like temporary (clinical) death and revival also aren’t useful comparisons. Even if the body is dying, the heart and breathing stops, etc., there are still neural computations going on from which identity is derived. The irrecoverable disassociation of the particle interactions underlying consciousness probably takes a while—hours or more, unless there is violent physical damage to the brain. Eventually the brain state fully reverts to random interactions and identity is destroyed, but clinical revival becomes impossible well before then.
Cryonics is more of a weird edge case … we don’t know enough now to say with any certainty whether cryonics patients have crossed that red line or not with respect to destruction of identity.
Yes, that post still reflects my views. I should point out again that sleep and many forms of anesthesia don’t stop operation of the brain, they just halt the creation of new memories so people don’t remember. That’s why, for example, some surgery patients end up with PTSD from waking up on the table, even if they don’t remember.
Other cases like temporary (clinical) death and revival also aren’t useful comparisons. Even if the body is dying, the heart and breathing stops, etc., there are still neural computations going on from which identity is derived. The irrecoverable disassociation of the particle interactions underlying consciousness probably takes a while—hours or more, unless there is violent physical damage to the brain. Eventually the brain state fully reverts to random interactions and identity is destroyed, but clinical revival becomes impossible well before then.
Cryonics is more of a weird edge case … we don’t know enough now to say with any certainty whether cryonics patients have crossed that red line or not with respect to destruction of identity.