In an old post, an LW user asked:
Imagine that the technology has just come available to resurrect a frozen brain. However, the process has low fidelity, … these limitations are purely practical - as the technique is refined, the process of resurrection will become better and better … The results of the process is effectively a copy of the old brain and personality, but with permanent brain damage in several regions … The technology will not progress in refinement without practice, and practice requires actually restoring cryogenically frozen human brains …
If your brain was frozen, at what stage in this technological refinement process would you like your brain to be revived?
The scale given included these two lines:
0.950 - liminal reduction in facilities (IQ loss of 5 to 10 points; occasional slowness in memory recall, occasional mood swings)
1.000 - a perfect reproduction of your original personality and capability
Obviously everyone would prefer 1.0. But I commented that I’d be willing to accept .95 to help the research effort. This was a selfish choice, there were many much worse stages that I wasn’t willing to volunteer for.
I've stated in previous posts that I don’t fully trust reality to be real. And I’ve explicitly stated in the About page that part of this blogs purpose is to be a reconstruction aid in the event that I do die and am cryonically frozen. Looking at the description for 0.95, it strikes me almost immediately that I do have occasional slowness in memory recall (sometimes for the most absurd things. How the hell did I forget my brother’s name for a few minutes?). In general I have a fairly poor memory for personal life events, people recall things I’ve done much more readily than I do. I have occasional mood swings. Less often now, and I’ve developed ways of dealing with them, but they are there.
One might consider this correlation between my willingness to accept such mental impairment and my having this mental impairment as weak evidence that I’ve actually been reconstructed after my death and revived with some impairments per my recorded statements on the matter (which would make this reality a sped-up simulation that's moving me through the intervening years quickly to minimize future-shock once I catch-up to the actual present-day).
Of course it’s far more likely that this is just The Forer Effect. Everyone has trouble recalling things sometimes, and has mood swings on occasion. Right? It’s just part of being human.