I think you’d have to stretch the meaning of scientific understanding pretty far to claim that the 19th-century writers speculating about reanimating the dead with electricity understood what they were talking about.
Besides, if I’m remembering Frankenstein right, there’s no clear method of reanimation given but it’s at least partly occult: Shelley name-drops several famous alchemists. She might have been inspired at some level by Galvani’s experiments, but the procedure involving a dramatic lightning storm and “give my creation life!” is a cinematic invention—and arguably has a certain occult flavor in its own right, given all the associations with divine fire that lightning’s picked up in culture.
What about: “you’d have to stretch the meaning of scientific understanding pretty far to claim that early 21st-century people speculating about reanimating the dead with uploading understood what they were talking about.”
I could easily see the people who figure out whole brain emulation saying the same of us.
Nah. I can see the scanning procedure needed for whole brain emulation turning out to require some unspecified technology that’s way too difficult for 21st-century science, or Moore’s Law running out of steam before we reach the densities needed to do the actual emulation, but either one would be a Verne-type error; I can’t see a category error on the order of electrical impulse ⇒ true resurrection happening unless we’re very badly wrong about some very fundamental features of how the brain works.
I think you’d have to stretch the meaning of scientific understanding pretty far to claim that the 19th-century writers speculating about reanimating the dead with electricity understood what they were talking about.
Besides, if I’m remembering Frankenstein right, there’s no clear method of reanimation given but it’s at least partly occult: Shelley name-drops several famous alchemists. She might have been inspired at some level by Galvani’s experiments, but the procedure involving a dramatic lightning storm and “give my creation life!” is a cinematic invention—and arguably has a certain occult flavor in its own right, given all the associations with divine fire that lightning’s picked up in culture.
What about: “you’d have to stretch the meaning of scientific understanding pretty far to claim that early 21st-century people speculating about reanimating the dead with uploading understood what they were talking about.”
I could easily see the people who figure out whole brain emulation saying the same of us.
Nah. I can see the scanning procedure needed for whole brain emulation turning out to require some unspecified technology that’s way too difficult for 21st-century science, or Moore’s Law running out of steam before we reach the densities needed to do the actual emulation, but either one would be a Verne-type error; I can’t see a category error on the order of electrical impulse ⇒ true resurrection happening unless we’re very badly wrong about some very fundamental features of how the brain works.