I find it deeply weird that nobody has pointed out that the information describing you, written as prose, is not conscious. This is a major drawback. The OP mentioned it, and dared people to take him/her up on it, and nobody did.
I attribute this to a majority of people on LW taking Dennett’s position on consciousness, which is basically to try to pretend that it doesn’t exist, and that being a materialist means believing that there is no “qualia problem”.
I don’t follow. The OP didn’t claim that just having the written information would be enough. They were saying that the information could be used to build a copy of you. The prose might not be conscious, but the copy would be.
No idea. We haven’t yet revived any vitrified brains and asked them whether they experience personal continuity with their pre-vitrification selves. The answer could turn out either way.
They remember being themselves, so they’d say “yes.”
I think the OP thinks being cryogenically frozen is like taking a long nap, and being reconstructed from your writings is like being replaced. This is true, but only because the reconstruction would be very inaccurate, not because a lump of cold fat in a jar is intrinsically more conscious than a book. A perfect reconstruction would be just as good as being frozen. When I asked if a vitrified brain was conscious I meant “why do you think a vitrified brain is conscious if a book isn’t.”
You don’t know that until you’ve actually done the experiment. Some parts of memory may be “passive”—encoded in the configuration of neurons and synapses—while other parts may be “active”, dynamically encoded in the electrical stuff and requiring constant maintenance by a living brain. To take an example we understand well, turning a computer off and on again loses all sorts of information, including its “thread of consciousness”.
EDIT: I just looked it up and it seems this comment has a high chance of being wrong. People have been known to come to life after having a (mostly) flat EEG for hours, e.g. during deep anaesthesia. Sorry.
We haven’t yet revived any vitrified brains and asked them whether they experience personal continuity with their pre-vitrification selves. The answer could turn out either way.
Joke probably? As if the above experiment has any connection to this confusion of a hypothesis.
I find it deeply weird that nobody has pointed out that the information describing you, written as prose, is not conscious. This is a major drawback. The OP mentioned it, and dared people to take him/her up on it, and nobody did.
I attribute this to a majority of people on LW taking Dennett’s position on consciousness, which is basically to try to pretend that it doesn’t exist, and that being a materialist means believing that there is no “qualia problem”.
I don’t follow. The OP didn’t claim that just having the written information would be enough. They were saying that the information could be used to build a copy of you. The prose might not be conscious, but the copy would be.
Oops, you’re right.
Is a vitrified brain conscious?
No idea. We haven’t yet revived any vitrified brains and asked them whether they experience personal continuity with their pre-vitrification selves. The answer could turn out either way.
They remember being themselves, so they’d say “yes.”
I think the OP thinks being cryogenically frozen is like taking a long nap, and being reconstructed from your writings is like being replaced. This is true, but only because the reconstruction would be very inaccurate, not because a lump of cold fat in a jar is intrinsically more conscious than a book. A perfect reconstruction would be just as good as being frozen. When I asked if a vitrified brain was conscious I meant “why do you think a vitrified brain is conscious if a book isn’t.”
You don’t know that until you’ve actually done the experiment. Some parts of memory may be “passive”—encoded in the configuration of neurons and synapses—while other parts may be “active”, dynamically encoded in the electrical stuff and requiring constant maintenance by a living brain. To take an example we understand well, turning a computer off and on again loses all sorts of information, including its “thread of consciousness”.
EDIT: I just looked it up and it seems this comment has a high chance of being wrong. People have been known to come to life after having a (mostly) flat EEG for hours, e.g. during deep anaesthesia. Sorry.
Joke probably? As if the above experiment has any connection to this confusion of a hypothesis.