What deserves cryocide?

Goddamn! "Dying of thirst to avoid laws on suicide that'll screw with your body" is something our grandchildren might well think to be made up if someone told them; who'd believe our society could really be that insane?

I've never heard someone say this before and would be interested to hear more :-)

Huh. My temperament is quite different than it was a few years ago, but I wouldn't consider my 2009 self to be dead.

I would tend to agree, maybe because I don't have much of value in my rear view mirror at this point (I'm still young, and yes there are exceptions to this). Basically as long as I remembered my best friend I wouldn't have any particularly strong attachments to the rest of my memories of events, though it would be an inconvenience to lose them. My general knowledge is fairly important to me, though.

What age is that 14+% for? Looking at Wikipedia I see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alzheimer%27s#Epidemiology

In the United States, Alzheimer prevalence was estimated to be 1.6% in 2000 both overall and in the 65–74 age group, with the rate increasing to 19% in the 75–84 group and to 42% in the greater than 84 group.

So depending on what age that is for, 14% might actually be great news...

Sorry to neglect your question. I intended to write something initially and then didn't get around to it. I can think of two brain diseases off the top of my head that spare various brain structures that might be thought to implement and store "the self". This suggests that you at least need to do a case by case analysis?

A probably self-sparing disease is Encephalitis_lethargica which causes (or caused?) physical catatonia (probably by damaging some components of the brain that use or produce dopamine) while seeming to spare other things for long periods of time, such that they can be temporarily "mentally recovered" by the administration of L-DOPA even decades after the onset of catatonia. This was done experimentally in the 1960's and is reasonably accurately documented in vivid form by "Awakenings", a doctor's memoir turned into a Williams/DeNiro film). The symptoms are similar to Parkinson's which, from what I understand, can also sometimes be temporarily treated to "bring the person back for a while" using things like stem cell treatments.

The second thing I can think of that potentially "spares the person's soul" is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. This is what Hal Finney and Stephen Hawking. Hal Finney has been signed up with Alcor for decades and announced being diagnosed with the disease here on LW in 2009, in his essay Dying Outside.

In contrast, trying to think of a disease off the top of my head that probably doesn't spare the soul, I would expect CJD to take out everything. My understanding is that it basically involved exponentially progressing conversion of "nearly all brain matter" into misfolded protein that catalyzes misfolding of protein that catalyzes misfolding of protein...

Maybe with nanotechnology something could be recovered from what's left after CJD? But my rough impression is that brain tissue is being thermodynamically scrambled. Its probably a matter of degree but at some point you might be "making up" what the brain was like, rather than "measuring" it... and my poorly informed shoot-from-the-hip guess is that CJD leaves behind stuff where you'd be making things up more than measuring them.

About 3 minutes of googling and clicking around trying to find lists of diseases to check into produced Wikipedia's relevant category and a document with one paragraph per disease but no simple list that could be ordered by importance and checked one at a time. Such lists might be fodder for an article if someone were feeling enterprising?

Thanks, good stuff, that's how I found the alcor article I link below.

I will keep the whole "don't get it banned for other people" thing in mind should this ever actually come up, but as I can't predict ultimate outcomes I can't make any promises.

Choosing not to eat or drink doesn't seem likely to provoke that response, especially if I only explain it as "I don't want to live through [whatever]".

I would make such a choice long before I was considered legally incompetent; the Russian roulette of "any day a fond memory could disappear" is to horrible for me; unlike other people in this thread, I consider my memories a central part of who I am.

That is, indeed, huge. With two babies and a full time job and some moonlighting, I don't think it's feasible for me to read it, but I appreciate the link none the less.