"you" are the countless processes running inside your brain, interacting with each other. When these stop, you're dead. When you're asleep, they interact with each other less, and "you" are reduced. When you're in a coma, they interact with each other much less, and "you" are much reduced. But when you're frozen after your brain activity has stopped, anyone revived out of your body isn't "you" anymore. It'll be someone else with your memories. The only benefit of this would not be to you but to your family and friends (if they're still here) or to projects you're working on but want to have finished even if you won't see the results.
I suppose there's a chance cryonics can be useful, but only if it manages to "preserve" someone before their brain activity stops (which CAN be after the person is clinically dead, e.g. heart stopping != brain dead), and their brain activity continues at a very slow pace, but continues nonetheless.
Assuming as hypothesis that cryonics or some other technology manage to preserve all the information about your mind processes and that we can reinstantiate them in a new substrate, what is exactly the difference?
Exactly what property of these processes is lost when they stop, if hypothetically cryonics stores all the information? There is nothing else!
I think that we have an intuition of having some kind of "ineffable essence", but that's an illusion.
(I could accept that current cryonics is insufficient and that some information is lost in the process, but that is a completely different argument.)
You have a computer running an instance of a web server. Now, you make a clone of the computer, including the ram, L1 cache, exact copy. The second computer would then be running an instance of web server as well. Are you saying the second computer's web server instance is the first computer's web server instance?
I don't think so, even if information was perfectly copied!; from this point on whatever happens to the first web server might not happen to the second. Therefore they are difference instances.
Same with human cloning. You can make a perfect clone of me, and that person won't be me, just an identical copy, who from now on will have separate experiences than me. If I die first before the clone is made, it still doesn't make a difference; I am not my clone.
Now, if I died first, and a clone is made, you're arguing my information theoretic death is prevented. but nonetheless my clone isn't me. and I can't tell how cryonics preserving my body after I am _dead_, and then repairing my body, is different to cloning. It's basically just cloning but reusing my existing parts, and if that is correct, the revived person is not me.
The property is "process continuity" - as long as some of the processes that form "me" at this moment will be present in the next, I will continue to, at least be some part, me; If all the processes are stopped, then any processes after that point are no longer me.
I am saying there's a difference between processes running on hardware and the hardware itself. I am the emergent property of all the processes that are running in my body.
> I can't tell how cryonics preserving my body after I am _dead_, and then repairing my body, is different to cloning
I can't either, but it might be, we just don't know enough to say for sure. People whose hearts have stopped beating have still been brought back, at what point do you declare that when they're brought back they're a "clone" and not their original selves? Where's the line between physical death and "soul"-death?
The idea of there not being any "process continuity" when someone is frozen just seems to be speculation on your part.
Here is what I believe instead:
"you" are the countless processes running inside your brain, interacting with each other. When these stop, you're dead. When you're asleep, they interact with each other less, and "you" are reduced. When you're in a coma, they interact with each other much less, and "you" are much reduced. But when you're frozen after your brain activity has stopped, anyone revived out of your body isn't "you" anymore. It'll be someone else with your memories. The only benefit of this would not be to you but to your family and friends (if they're still here) or to projects you're working on but want to have finished even if you won't see the results.
I suppose there's a chance cryonics can be useful, but only if it manages to "preserve" someone before their brain activity stops (which CAN be after the person is clinically dead, e.g. heart stopping != brain dead), and their brain activity continues at a very slow pace, but continues nonetheless.