Yeah, I wondered about that. But I don’t think it makes sense. If you can get enough information about particular ancestors to simulate them (as opposed to simulating other people who happen to resemble them) then surely you have enough to put them directly in heaven / paradise / the New Jerusalem / whatever.
I don’t believe there will ever be any possibility of rerunning a particular human being’s life
I’m inclined to agree. But, since I am the person I am largely because of the life I’ve lived, how can running a simulation that doesn’t replicate my life help to determine the proper mental state to send me to heaven with?
Let me try to imagine the process working as well as possible. I’ve kept a journal for the past ten years, and screenshots of my computer every 30 seconds for nearly the last four (as well as webcam shots that can indicate exactly when I was and was not present at the computer). If someone were to simulate me they would have to simulate someone who went through the experiences and thoughts described in the journal, and who used his computer in the way implied by the screen and webcam shots.
Does all that info actually imply that someone could simply describe my current state, or would you get something more accurate by such a simulation? Perhaps an AI could simply use the info to directly produce a current state, but how would it do that, without simulating something like a process that passes through all that info? In other words, it’s not clear to me that a simulation couldn’t help.
Regarding the last point, basically I was saying that ultimately I don’t expect jacob_cannell’s idea to work, but I don’t think it is unintelligible.
OK, so if I’m understanding correctly your suggestion is that in order to reconstruct your mind it would be necessary to do lots of simulations of you-like minds in order to adjust the (unfathomably many) parameters to find a mind that behaves in the right ways. I concede that that might be so.
It’s an interesting (and disturbing) idea because it suggests that (little bits of?) our lives might be simulated billions of times, with small variations, in the process of trying to reconstruct us. (If, that is, anyone is so interested in reconstructing us at all.) This seems to me to make a big difference to the moral calculus of attempted simulated resurrection—“we can reconstruct your mind-state and put a new instantiation of it somewhere wonderful” sounds like quite a different deal from “we can reconstruct your mind-state and put a new instantiation of it somewhere wonderful—but the reconstruction process will involve billions of simulated minds that more or less closely resemble yours passing through good approximations to all the events of your life that we could find out about”, and I’d be much less happy about the latter.
I have to say that it seems unlikely that enough information exists to do the reconstruction for anyone—even people who save as much information about themselves as you do, which most of us don’t. I mean, in some sense maybe it’s still there since everything we do has effects on everything else in our future light cone, but I’d expect the information to be unusable in something like the way that energy becomes unusable when it turns into waste heat in rough thermal equilibrium with its surroundings.
Yes, there could be moral objections to such a process apart from its likeliness of success. And I agree that there is unlikely to be enough information for it to work in any case.
Yeah, I wondered about that. But I don’t think it makes sense. If you can get enough information about particular ancestors to simulate them (as opposed to simulating other people who happen to resemble them) then surely you have enough to put them directly in heaven / paradise / the New Jerusalem / whatever.
I’m inclined to agree. But, since I am the person I am largely because of the life I’ve lived, how can running a simulation that doesn’t replicate my life help to determine the proper mental state to send me to heaven with?
Let me try to imagine the process working as well as possible. I’ve kept a journal for the past ten years, and screenshots of my computer every 30 seconds for nearly the last four (as well as webcam shots that can indicate exactly when I was and was not present at the computer). If someone were to simulate me they would have to simulate someone who went through the experiences and thoughts described in the journal, and who used his computer in the way implied by the screen and webcam shots.
Does all that info actually imply that someone could simply describe my current state, or would you get something more accurate by such a simulation? Perhaps an AI could simply use the info to directly produce a current state, but how would it do that, without simulating something like a process that passes through all that info? In other words, it’s not clear to me that a simulation couldn’t help.
Regarding the last point, basically I was saying that ultimately I don’t expect jacob_cannell’s idea to work, but I don’t think it is unintelligible.
OK, so if I’m understanding correctly your suggestion is that in order to reconstruct your mind it would be necessary to do lots of simulations of you-like minds in order to adjust the (unfathomably many) parameters to find a mind that behaves in the right ways. I concede that that might be so.
It’s an interesting (and disturbing) idea because it suggests that (little bits of?) our lives might be simulated billions of times, with small variations, in the process of trying to reconstruct us. (If, that is, anyone is so interested in reconstructing us at all.) This seems to me to make a big difference to the moral calculus of attempted simulated resurrection—“we can reconstruct your mind-state and put a new instantiation of it somewhere wonderful” sounds like quite a different deal from “we can reconstruct your mind-state and put a new instantiation of it somewhere wonderful—but the reconstruction process will involve billions of simulated minds that more or less closely resemble yours passing through good approximations to all the events of your life that we could find out about”, and I’d be much less happy about the latter.
I have to say that it seems unlikely that enough information exists to do the reconstruction for anyone—even people who save as much information about themselves as you do, which most of us don’t. I mean, in some sense maybe it’s still there since everything we do has effects on everything else in our future light cone, but I’d expect the information to be unusable in something like the way that energy becomes unusable when it turns into waste heat in rough thermal equilibrium with its surroundings.
Yes, there could be moral objections to such a process apart from its likeliness of success. And I agree that there is unlikely to be enough information for it to work in any case.