How high a probability do you place on the information content of the brain depending on maintaining electrochemical potentials? Why? Why do you think your information and analysis are better than those of those who disagree?
In order: 90%; because personality seems to me state-ful (that is, there is clearly some sort of long-term storage with quite rapid (relative to nerve growth) writing going on, which seems to me hard to explain purely in terms of the interconnections), and a neural network with no activation information in the nodes will not respond to a given input in the same way as the same network with some excited nodes; and because you have not given a convincing counterargument nor a convincing appeal to expertise.
Certainly the internal state of a neuron includes things that are preserved by uploading other than the wiring diagram. Anyway, are you doing a calculation where another factor of 10 makes a critical difference?
Uploading, yes; but we were discussing cryonics. Uploading is a completely different question. Indeed, I would assign a rather higher probability to uploading preserving personality, than to cryonics doing so.
And yes, I generally expect orders of magnitude to make a difference. If they don’t, then your uncertainty is so large anyway that attempting a fake precision is just fooling yourself.
Although… actually… it occurs to me that you could move the order of magnitude somewhere else. Suppose I kept your probability estimate of cryonics working, and multiplied the price by ten? Even by twenty? … That does make a pretty fair chunk of my budget, but still. I think I’ll have to revisit that calculation.
How high a probability do you place on the information content of the brain depending on maintaining electrochemical potentials? Why? Why do you think your information and analysis are better than those of those who disagree?
In order: 90%; because personality seems to me state-ful (that is, there is clearly some sort of long-term storage with quite rapid (relative to nerve growth) writing going on, which seems to me hard to explain purely in terms of the interconnections), and a neural network with no activation information in the nodes will not respond to a given input in the same way as the same network with some excited nodes; and because you have not given a convincing counterargument nor a convincing appeal to expertise.
Certainly the internal state of a neuron includes things that are preserved by uploading other than the wiring diagram. Anyway, are you doing a calculation where another factor of 10 makes a critical difference?
Uploading, yes; but we were discussing cryonics. Uploading is a completely different question. Indeed, I would assign a rather higher probability to uploading preserving personality, than to cryonics doing so.
And yes, I generally expect orders of magnitude to make a difference. If they don’t, then your uncertainty is so large anyway that attempting a fake precision is just fooling yourself.
Although… actually… it occurs to me that you could move the order of magnitude somewhere else. Suppose I kept your probability estimate of cryonics working, and multiplied the price by ten? Even by twenty? … That does make a pretty fair chunk of my budget, but still. I think I’ll have to revisit that calculation.