What about genetic mutations from stray cosmic rays? Would evolution have occurred the same way? Would my genetic code be one allele different?
I feel like the quantum level would matter a lot more the earlier you started your simulation.
I’m worried about how motivated my cognition is. I really want this to be possible for very personal reasons- so I am liable to grasp tightly to any plausible argument for close-enough simulation of dead people.
Well if you started a sim back a billion years ago, well yes I expect you’d get a very different earth.
How different is an interesting open problem. Even if hominid-like creatures develop say 10% of the time after a billion years (reasonable), all of history would likely be quite different each time.
For a sim built for the purpose of resurrection, you’d want to start back just a little earlier—perhaps just before the generation was born.
Getting the DNA right might actually be the easiest sub-problem. Simulating biological development may be tougher than simulating a mind, although I suspect it would get easier as development slows.
Hopefully we don’t have to simulate all of the 10^13 cells in a typical human body at full detail, let alone the 10^14 symbiotes in the human gut.
It’s still an open question whether it’s even possible in principle to create a conscious mind from scratch. Currently complex neural net systems must be created through training—there is no shortcut to just fill in the data (assuming you don’t already have it from a scan or something which of course is inapplicable in this case).
So even a posthuman god may only have the ability to create conscious infants. If that’s the case, you’d have the DNA right and then would have to carefully simulate the entire history of inputs to create the right mind.
You’d probably have to start with some actors (played by AIs or posthumans) to kickstart the thing. If that’s the general approach, then you could also force alot of stuff—intervene continuously to keep the sim events as close to known history as possible (perhaps actors play important historical roles even when it’s running? open). Active intervention would of course make it much more feasible to get minds closer to the ones you’d want.
Would they be the same? I think that will be an open philosophical issue for a while, but I suspect that you could create minds this way that are close enough.
This is interesting enough that it could make a nice follow up paper to the current SA/simulism stuff—or perhaps somebody has already written about it, not sure.
I’m worried about how motivated my cognition is. I really want this to be possible for very personal reasons- so I am liable to grasp tightly to any plausible argument for close-enough simulation of dead people.
It’s good you are conscious of that which you wish to be true.
If uploading is possible, then this too should be possible as they rely on the same fundamental assumption.
If there is a computer program data set that recreates (is equivalent to) the consciousness of a particular person, then such a data set also exists for all possible people, including all dead people.
Thus the problem boils down to finding a particular data set (or range) out of many. This may be a vast computational problem for a mind of 1^15 bits, but it should be at least possible in principle.
How different is an interesting open problem. Even if hominid-like creatures develop say 10% of the time after a billion years (reasonable), all of history would likely be quite different each time.
What about genetic mutations from stray cosmic rays? Would evolution have occurred the same way? Would my genetic code be one allele different?
I feel like the quantum level would matter a lot more the earlier you started your simulation.
I’m worried about how motivated my cognition is. I really want this to be possible for very personal reasons- so I am liable to grasp tightly to any plausible argument for close-enough simulation of dead people.
Well if you started a sim back a billion years ago, well yes I expect you’d get a very different earth.
How different is an interesting open problem. Even if hominid-like creatures develop say 10% of the time after a billion years (reasonable), all of history would likely be quite different each time.
For a sim built for the purpose of resurrection, you’d want to start back just a little earlier—perhaps just before the generation was born.
Getting the DNA right might actually be the easiest sub-problem. Simulating biological development may be tougher than simulating a mind, although I suspect it would get easier as development slows.
Hopefully we don’t have to simulate all of the 10^13 cells in a typical human body at full detail, let alone the 10^14 symbiotes in the human gut.
It’s still an open question whether it’s even possible in principle to create a conscious mind from scratch. Currently complex neural net systems must be created through training—there is no shortcut to just fill in the data (assuming you don’t already have it from a scan or something which of course is inapplicable in this case).
So even a posthuman god may only have the ability to create conscious infants. If that’s the case, you’d have the DNA right and then would have to carefully simulate the entire history of inputs to create the right mind.
You’d probably have to start with some actors (played by AIs or posthumans) to kickstart the thing. If that’s the general approach, then you could also force alot of stuff—intervene continuously to keep the sim events as close to known history as possible (perhaps actors play important historical roles even when it’s running? open). Active intervention would of course make it much more feasible to get minds closer to the ones you’d want.
Would they be the same? I think that will be an open philosophical issue for a while, but I suspect that you could create minds this way that are close enough.
This is interesting enough that it could make a nice follow up paper to the current SA/simulism stuff—or perhaps somebody has already written about it, not sure.
It’s good you are conscious of that which you wish to be true.
If uploading is possible, then this too should be possible as they rely on the same fundamental assumption.
If there is a computer program data set that recreates (is equivalent to) the consciousness of a particular person, then such a data set also exists for all possible people, including all dead people.
Thus the problem boils down to finding a particular data set (or range) out of many. This may be a vast computational problem for a mind of 1^15 bits, but it should be at least possible in principle.
How on earth can we know that 10% is reasonable?
The “even if” and “say” should indicate the intent—it wasn’t even a guess, just an example used as an upper bound.
I’m not convinced the evolution of hominids is a black swan, but it’s not an issue I’ve researched much.
The (reasonable) assertion was what struck me.