I know at least in our specific community, that we’d rather be resurrected than not, and especially in a techno-utopian future, almost goes without saying, but it still worries me that you don’t seem to mention consent. At least the top paragraph suggests a third party collecting information about someone else so that they can be resurrected after their death, and even if we skip over the more normal issues with doing that, resurrecting someone without their permission seems like a violation.
In the mix with the problems you’ve listed under 1. is whether this kind of resurrection is even necessary. Personally, I doubt those identity problems can be conclusively solved even in principle, at least to a level that people’s intuitions don’t dominate, although I’m inclined to give up on what’s actually factual there and try to convince myself of the weakest notion of identity I can find believable. I can’t do much pushing there, but the notion I default to using based on my intuitions (sleeping doesn’t kill you, uploading does kill you) is hard to justify so I don’t mind trying to push away from it. Should really be stepping up my DI efforts.
Basically we do it all the time when we communicate with a person and create his model in our head. I think that it is moral to return to life everybody, except whose who explicitly and rationally were against.
We don’t know how to solve identity problem now, but maybe we will do some kind practical research and we will find it in the future. Or may be AI will help us. Until that I suggest conservative approach to identity—try to preserve as much as possible and accept copy creation only if alternative is death.
May be we could build mechanism of identity transfer which is independent from information. If identity has any substance, like soul or causal links, we could build machines that find it and preserve it.
There is also two type of immortality. Immortality for me, that is immortality from the point of view of the observer, which is most interesting, but also immortality-for-others, thats is immortality for your friends. Big world immortality from the link may work, but only for immortality-азк-me, but not for my friends who may want to see me alive in 20 years here on Earth.
Also big world immortality helps cryonics and DI because resurrected DI and cryo client will dominate big-world resurection landscape and some of these resurrections will be exact as originals. So big world immortality help to fill gap lost during cryo
Storing data that might be used to reconstruct someone in the future isn’t really objectionable, but that seems separate from actually using that data to create the resurrection. And it probably works out fine in the utilitarian calculus unless you count the sunk cost vs creating a “better” new person or a utility monster, but bringing someone back to life just because they didn’t mention that they didn’t want it, or you thought the reason they gave for not wanting it was irrational, sounds really skeevy. We have rules about consent for interacting with other people’s bodies, I think that includes implanting their consciousness in new bodies.
Most people hadn’t chance to rationally evolute would they want to be resurrected and especially by the means of DI. Of course we could model their answer, but we have to create their model first which create circular logic in this case. many religious people probably will prefer not be resurrected by DI, because they bet that they could get better type of immortality in the other world.
Also a person whose body is cryopreserved would rationally prefer be resurrected based on this body, but not using DI.
It is large open field of ethical and legal questions here.
What if a child died, and his father wants his DI (+DNA) immortality and his mother doesn’t?
I know at least in our specific community, that we’d rather be resurrected than not, and especially in a techno-utopian future, almost goes without saying, but it still worries me that you don’t seem to mention consent. At least the top paragraph suggests a third party collecting information about someone else so that they can be resurrected after their death, and even if we skip over the more normal issues with doing that, resurrecting someone without their permission seems like a violation.
In the mix with the problems you’ve listed under 1. is whether this kind of resurrection is even necessary. Personally, I doubt those identity problems can be conclusively solved even in principle, at least to a level that people’s intuitions don’t dominate, although I’m inclined to give up on what’s actually factual there and try to convince myself of the weakest notion of identity I can find believable. I can’t do much pushing there, but the notion I default to using based on my intuitions (sleeping doesn’t kill you, uploading does kill you) is hard to justify so I don’t mind trying to push away from it. Should really be stepping up my DI efforts.
Basically we do it all the time when we communicate with a person and create his model in our head. I think that it is moral to return to life everybody, except whose who explicitly and rationally were against.
We don’t know how to solve identity problem now, but maybe we will do some kind practical research and we will find it in the future. Or may be AI will help us. Until that I suggest conservative approach to identity—try to preserve as much as possible and accept copy creation only if alternative is death.
May be we could build mechanism of identity transfer which is independent from information. If identity has any substance, like soul or causal links, we could build machines that find it and preserve it.
There is also two type of immortality. Immortality for me, that is immortality from the point of view of the observer, which is most interesting, but also immortality-for-others, thats is immortality for your friends. Big world immortality from the link may work, but only for immortality-азк-me, but not for my friends who may want to see me alive in 20 years here on Earth.
Also big world immortality helps cryonics and DI because resurrected DI and cryo client will dominate big-world resurection landscape and some of these resurrections will be exact as originals. So big world immortality help to fill gap lost during cryo
Storing data that might be used to reconstruct someone in the future isn’t really objectionable, but that seems separate from actually using that data to create the resurrection. And it probably works out fine in the utilitarian calculus unless you count the sunk cost vs creating a “better” new person or a utility monster, but bringing someone back to life just because they didn’t mention that they didn’t want it, or you thought the reason they gave for not wanting it was irrational, sounds really skeevy. We have rules about consent for interacting with other people’s bodies, I think that includes implanting their consciousness in new bodies.
Most people hadn’t chance to rationally evolute would they want to be resurrected and especially by the means of DI. Of course we could model their answer, but we have to create their model first which create circular logic in this case. many religious people probably will prefer not be resurrected by DI, because they bet that they could get better type of immortality in the other world. Also a person whose body is cryopreserved would rationally prefer be resurrected based on this body, but not using DI. It is large open field of ethical and legal questions here. What if a child died, and his father wants his DI (+DNA) immortality and his mother doesn’t?