In The Physics of Immortality, Frank J. Tipler proposed a high level concept:
Future technology may be able to resurrect the dead of past ages by some kind of “copying them to the future”
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Posted by
Giulio Prisco on 05/31 at 11:34 AM
Hi,
I have not read the new book yet, and on the basis of the comments I have seen so far I do not feel very much inclined to read it. Analogies are very useful, but they tend to break down at a certain point.
G.
Posted by
Roko on 06/11 at 10:23 AM
I think there's a potential physics-based objection to a lot of the scenarios that involve "copying people to the future". I have a degree in physics, so I have a reasonable perspective on this.
If you want to propose a system to copy a dead person's mind from the past to the future, you had better not break causality by letting information go backwards in time. Quantum mechanics tells us that you cannot observe a system without actually changing it (collapsing it's wavefunction), so it seems that any system of the type you are proposing is just as bad as a fully-fledged time machine.
Scenarios where all possible minds are instantiated at some point in the future by a "brute force search" don't really count, in my opinion, as actually bringing people back from the dead. If you instantiate every possible mind, how do you actually know which one is the mind of the real historical person? I can imagine having 10^100 or so minds who all seem to fit closely enough with the known facts about the person in question, but there being no way to tell which one is the "genuine" one. It would be bizzare, but since the instantiation of a particular mind in this scenario does not depend on whether it existed in the past, I don't think we can honestly call it "bring people back"!
I can see why the idea of packaging a "soft" version of the afterlife in with transhumanism seems tempting from a memetic engineering point of view, but I think the temptation should be resisted, because I think it's just the sort of wishful thinking that led to religious dogma in the first place.
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