I suspect it may turn out to be dismayingly simple for superintelligences to recover a usable version of us from our genome, writings, brain, and knowledge of our environment.
I think an important point may be to distinguish between producing a usable version of us that functions in a very similar way, and producing a version similar enough to be the ‘same’ person, to preserve continuity of conciousness and provide immortality, if indeed this makes sense. Perhaps it doesn’t, maybe the Buddhists are correct, the self is an illusion and the question of whether a copy of me (of varying quality) really is me is meaningless.
Anyway, I don’t deny that it would be possible to create someone who is extremely similar. People are not randomly sprinkled through personspace, they cluster, and identifying the correct cluster is far simpler. But my intuitions are that the fidelity of reconstruction must be much higher to preserve identity. Comas do not necessary involve a substantial loss of information AFAIK, but wrt more traumatic problems I am willing to bite the bullet and say that they might not be the same person they were before.
As you say, some lesions cause bigger personalty changes than others. But it seems to me that its easy to gather information about superficial aspects, while my inner monologue, my hopes and dreams and other cliches , are not so readily apparent from my web browsing habits. Perhaps I should start keeping a detailed diary. Of course, you might derive some comfort from the existence of a future person who is extremely similar but not the same person as you. But I’d like to live too.
So to summarise, I don’t think the brain is maximally random, but I also don’t think orders of magnitude of compression is possible. If we disagree, it is not about information theory, but about the more confusing metaphysical question of whether cluster identification is sufficient for continuity of self.
And thanks for the reply, its been an interesting read.
I think an important point may be to distinguish between producing a usable version of us that functions in a very similar way, and producing a version similar enough to be the ‘same’ person, to preserve continuity of conciousness and provide immortality, if indeed this makes sense. Perhaps it doesn’t, maybe the Buddhists are correct, the self is an illusion and the question of whether a copy of me (of varying quality) really is me is meaningless.
Anyway, I don’t deny that it would be possible to create someone who is extremely similar. People are not randomly sprinkled through personspace, they cluster, and identifying the correct cluster is far simpler. But my intuitions are that the fidelity of reconstruction must be much higher to preserve identity. Comas do not necessary involve a substantial loss of information AFAIK, but wrt more traumatic problems I am willing to bite the bullet and say that they might not be the same person they were before. As you say, some lesions cause bigger personalty changes than others. But it seems to me that its easy to gather information about superficial aspects, while my inner monologue, my hopes and dreams and other cliches , are not so readily apparent from my web browsing habits. Perhaps I should start keeping a detailed diary.
Of course, you might derive some comfort from the existence of a future person who is extremely similar but not the same person as you. But I’d like to live too.
So to summarise, I don’t think the brain is maximally random, but I also don’t think orders of magnitude of compression is possible. If we disagree, it is not about information theory, but about the more confusing metaphysical question of whether cluster identification is sufficient for continuity of self.
And thanks for the reply, its been an interesting read.