My estimate of P(B|A) would be lower, too, had I not read Drexler’s Engines of Creation. The theoretical limits of useful nanotech allow for devices way smaller and more efficient than the behemoths of weakly-bonded amino acid chains that make up our cells, so that cheaply repairing intracellular damage is not unreasonable at that point. (Let alone the alternative of scanning the contents and doing the real work on a computer simulation.)
At that point, it becomes a question not of whether cells are structurally intact, but of whether their inter-relationships at the necessary scale remain stably encoded after the vitrification process. (Since there are several different scales which might be “the necessary scale” for recovering a mind, this does involve some uncertainty.) Pending the outcomes of the BPF Prize and the NEMALOAD Project, I’m pretty optimistic on that front. (See here for my declarations of how I’d update given bad news on either of those projects.)
My estimate of P(B|A) would be lower, too, had I not read Drexler’s Engines of Creation. The theoretical limits of useful nanotech allow for devices way smaller and more efficient than the behemoths of weakly-bonded amino acid chains that make up our cells, so that cheaply repairing intracellular damage is not unreasonable at that point. (Let alone the alternative of scanning the contents and doing the real work on a computer simulation.)
At that point, it becomes a question not of whether cells are structurally intact, but of whether their inter-relationships at the necessary scale remain stably encoded after the vitrification process. (Since there are several different scales which might be “the necessary scale” for recovering a mind, this does involve some uncertainty.) Pending the outcomes of the BPF Prize and the NEMALOAD Project, I’m pretty optimistic on that front. (See here for my declarations of how I’d update given bad news on either of those projects.)