I think it depends on what is the physical correlate of consciousness, memory and identity. At this point we know very little about it. Clearly single molecules do not matter, and single neurons can die without obvious ill effects. It’s not clear how glial cells affect consciousness. We have to learn a lot more about the issue to figure out what can be compressed out from such a scan, and once we understand it, we can probably use a simpler scanning technique.
That’s a good point, shminux. But don’t you think that the entire organ needs to be scanned at high resolution first before storing a compressed copy?
I think it depends on what is the physical correlate of consciousness, memory and identity. At this point we know very little about it. Clearly single molecules do not matter, and single neurons can die without obvious ill effects. It’s not clear how glial cells affect consciousness. We have to learn a lot more about the issue to figure out what can be compressed out from such a scan, and once we understand it, we can probably use a simpler scanning technique.