Personally I have some reservations about the plastination approach to personal longevity. Depending on your philosophical views on the nature of consciousness, it may be that under this procedure you would die and cease to exist, while some future emulation of your brain thinks it is you -- i.e. biological-you and future-emulated-you are two separate people that just share memories.
It is however interesting science and may be a short-cut path to getting necessary scanning resolution for whole brain emulation.
If you don't 'feel' your death but all parts in your brain are eventually replaced by 'equivalent' ones, are you still yourself?
In the beginning, only the most "valuable" neural mappings will be worth the computing time required to simulate them. And rights! Does a simulated neural network of a human being have the same rights as a human being? One couldn't argue that simply because the underlying processor is silicon-based instead of carbon-based rights are lost.
Many philosophical questions to answer.
A brain just sitting there for hours after death at room temperature isn't idea - however, there is some good news in the area. It turns out that the most destruction happening to a brain after an ischemic episode is actually due to a cascade triggered by eventual re-perfusion. Since the dead brain is never re-perfused, this cascade is never triggered. Cellular decay after death makes a biological re-animation infeasible, but speaking as someone who did prepare a lot of neuro slides at uni, it takes more than a few hours for the structure itself to decay heavily, so we should be good for a scan/upload scenario.
Pertaining to the article, the first hours after death are nowhere near as problematic to the brain's information content as the plastination procedure they're using!
Brain trauma before death is another matter. Since we don't have the capability to create backups or checkpoints of our neuronal structure, what's physically destroyed is simply lost beyond recovery. However, for example in aggressive brain cancers, a functional copy of the person might still be recovered in principle even if their neocortex was severely compromised, as long as the actual data is still there.
Presumably you're assuming if the information is there at all - if the necessary data hasn't been scrambled beyond the noise floor of the scrambling process - then there's something for magic (because you're really talking about magic here) to work with.
So, please (a) set out your claim with precision (b) back up your claim.
* What is the information you need to recover?
* To what degree is it scrambled?
* What of it is scrambled below the noise floor of the process?
* How do you know all this? (wrong answer: "here's a LessWrong/Alcor page." right answer: "here's something from a relevant neuroscientist.")
For comparison: even a nigh-magical superintelligent AI can't recover an ice sculpture from the bucket of water it's melted into. It is in fact possible to just lose information. So, since you're making this claim, I'd like you to quantify just what you think the damage actually is.
