I will be your resident biologist tonight (not working in cognition/memory but I will try to make a more general point). Putting aside the philosophical proble

I will be your resident biologist tonight (not working in cognition/memory but I will try to make a more general point). Putting aside the philosophical problems for a moment, the notion that the only relation between a brain and a mind is the pattern of neuronal connections is pretty naive. The formation and maintenance of memory is controlled at multiple levels: single atoms (ionic gradients determining the polarization of neurons), small chemicals and hormones (e.g. neurotransmitters in the synapses and signalling peptides), DNA (epigenetic control, mainly methylation), proteins (constant synthesis and degradation in the process of memory consolidation and long-term potentiation) and finally cells (pattern of connections between neurons). I highlight these different levels because they are formed by compounds that are very different from a biological and chemical point of view. You can't just snap-freeze them all in their place. And freezing is the easy part -- how do you thaw a brain and preserve the state of all these components (all of which have different thermodynamic properties)? Assuming you don't want to thaw it but, as the article suggests, 'scan it' you would have to be able to determine the conformation and activation state of each involved protein and compound, along with all their density gradients in intracellular spaces... Not by 2100, sorry. Biology is hard because it's all relations, thresholds, gradients and fuzzy logic. To escape this probabilistic haze into a clean world of ones and zeroes -- I read HN.