Don't knock it til you try it?
I mean, already in recent years people have made some very low fidelity 'resurrections' and gotten some measure of comfort from it, never mind the many years of history of people who visit gravestones to 'chat' (some even believing they get replies to some extent or another). When markov chains were hip, "talk with Charles Dickens!" (play with a markov model trained on his works) was at least interesting to some, GPT of course can do a lot better. Imagine we had actual superintelligent AI working on this, which actually tried to recreate brain models, or even restore a sense of existence to the resurrection that can continue independently and to their own delight rather than just being some static VR experience turned on and off whenever. (I jotted some thoughts a few years ago... https://www.thejach.com/view/2017/6/how_you_might_see_some_o...)
I'm in agreement though at least for now that even if you dialed up the fidelity to the point I can't point to anything objectively "off", let alone went with a low fidelity VR thing or just a chat bot, I'd still always think in the back of my mind that this isn't really the same person. Nevertheless, it could still be comforting to some, and interesting to others, and so if it's at all possible for potential future humans/ems/aligned AIs to work at it, they will.
Curiously I don't have the same back of the mind feeling at all when considering the idea of someone preserved with cryonics and then brought back as an em, the person would be the same to me, even if there was a bit of damage from the vitrification process that was error-corrected. I have a disagreement with a friend on that point, who thinks it would be something similar but not the same. Anyway, I think this is due to just having a much higher fidelity "source of truth" to work from that is the preserved adult brain, whereas someone supposedly information-theoretically dead requires a lot more guess-work, perhaps truly impossibly too much more even for a superintelligence, to bring back convincingly.
I mean, already in recent years people have made some very low fidelity 'resurrections' and gotten some measure of comfort from it, never mind the many years of history of people who visit gravestones to 'chat' (some even believing they get replies to some extent or another). When markov chains were hip, "talk with Charles Dickens!" (play with a markov model trained on his works) was at least interesting to some, GPT of course can do a lot better. Imagine we had actual superintelligent AI working on this, which actually tried to recreate brain models, or even restore a sense of existence to the resurrection that can continue independently and to their own delight rather than just being some static VR experience turned on and off whenever. (I jotted some thoughts a few years ago... https://www.thejach.com/view/2017/6/how_you_might_see_some_o...)
I'm in agreement though at least for now that even if you dialed up the fidelity to the point I can't point to anything objectively "off", let alone went with a low fidelity VR thing or just a chat bot, I'd still always think in the back of my mind that this isn't really the same person. Nevertheless, it could still be comforting to some, and interesting to others, and so if it's at all possible for potential future humans/ems/aligned AIs to work at it, they will.
Curiously I don't have the same back of the mind feeling at all when considering the idea of someone preserved with cryonics and then brought back as an em, the person would be the same to me, even if there was a bit of damage from the vitrification process that was error-corrected. I have a disagreement with a friend on that point, who thinks it would be something similar but not the same. Anyway, I think this is due to just having a much higher fidelity "source of truth" to work from that is the preserved adult brain, whereas someone supposedly information-theoretically dead requires a lot more guess-work, perhaps truly impossibly too much more even for a superintelligence, to bring back convincingly.