It seems maybe possible in physical principle to bring back even minds lost to thermodynamic chaos. But that seems like an engineering undertaking so utterly massive I’m not sure even a mature civilisation controlling most of the lightcone could pull it off.
I dunno, is the space of possible human minds really so big? The only estimates of this I’ve ever seen are based on estimating the number of possible brain-states, on a neuron-connection basis, which are obviously massive overestimates.
It seems eminently plausible to me that a rough description of the person from the people who knew them + cross-referencing their digital blueprint + using a prior based on the historical period they lived in constrains the space of meaningfully different human minds enough to make resurrecting all possible versions of that person tractable. Let alone if we have a brain scan, which provides tons of data of a different type (even if the brain is damaged). Minor episodic-memory errors probably don’t matter: humans are pretty coarse agents.
(“Resurrecting all stone-age people” or “all medieval peasants” is a taller order.)
I dunno, is the space of possible human minds really so big? The only estimates of this I’ve ever seen are based on estimating the number of possible brain-states, on a neuron-connection basis, which are obviously massive overestimates.
It seems eminently plausible to me that a rough description of the person from the people who knew them + cross-referencing their digital blueprint + using a prior based on the historical period they lived in constrains the space of meaningfully different human minds enough to make resurrecting all possible versions of that person tractable. Let alone if we have a brain scan, which provides tons of data of a different type (even if the brain is damaged). Minor episodic-memory errors probably don’t matter: humans are pretty coarse agents.
(“Resurrecting all stone-age people” or “all medieval peasants” is a taller order.)