Part of the reason why I make available records of e.g. the books I own, the music I listen to and the board games I’ve played (though this last list is horribly incomplete) is to make it possible for someone to reconstruct me in the future. There’s a lot of stuff about me available online, and if you add non-public information like the contents of my hard drive with many years worth of IRC and IM logs, an intelligent enough entity should be able to produce a relatively good reconstruction. A lot would be missing, of course, but it’s still better than nothing.
I don’t put that big of a priority this, though—I haven’t made an effort to make sure that the contents of my hard drive will remain available somewhere after my death, for instance. It’s more of an entertaining thought I like to play with.
There’s a lot of stuff about me available online, and if you add non-public information like the contents of my hard drive with many years worth of IRC and IM logs, an intelligent enough entity should be able to produce a relatively good reconstruction.
That’s orders of magnitude less than the information content of your brain. The reconstructed version would be like an identical twin leading his own life who coincidentally reenacts your IRC chats and reads your books.
If I had surviving friends, then optimally the process would also extract their memories for the purpose. If we have the technology to reconstruct people like that, then surely we also have the technology to read memories off someone’s brain, though it might require their permission which might not be available.
If they gave their permission, though, they wouldn’t be able to tell a difference since all their memories of me were used in building that copy.
Part of the reason why I make available records of e.g. the books I own, the music I listen to and the board games I’ve played (though this last list is horribly incomplete) is to make it possible for someone to reconstruct me in the future. There’s a lot of stuff about me available online, and if you add non-public information like the contents of my hard drive with many years worth of IRC and IM logs, an intelligent enough entity should be able to produce a relatively good reconstruction. A lot would be missing, of course, but it’s still better than nothing.
I don’t put that big of a priority this, though—I haven’t made an effort to make sure that the contents of my hard drive will remain available somewhere after my death, for instance. It’s more of an entertaining thought I like to play with.
That’s orders of magnitude less than the information content of your brain. The reconstructed version would be like an identical twin leading his own life who coincidentally reenacts your IRC chats and reads your books.
Sure. What about it?
Your surviving friends would find it extremely creepy and frustrating. Nobody would want to bring you back.
If I had surviving friends, then optimally the process would also extract their memories for the purpose. If we have the technology to reconstruct people like that, then surely we also have the technology to read memories off someone’s brain, though it might require their permission which might not be available.
If they gave their permission, though, they wouldn’t be able to tell a difference since all their memories of me were used in building that copy.