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XiXiDu comments on Could/would an FAI recreate people who are information-theoretically dead by modern standards? - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: AlexMennen 22 January 2011 09:11PM

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Comment author: XiXiDu 23 January 2011 11:34:03AM *  1 point [-]

It might be possible if there are a lot of information available about you, e.g. chat transcripts, videos and people who knew you very well. This is called a beta level simulations as described in some of Alastair Reynolds’ novels.

Resurrection without a backup. As with ecosystem reconstruction, such "resurrections" are in fact clever simulations. If the available information is sufficiently detailed, the individual and even close friends and associations are unable to tell the difference. However, transapient informants say that any being of the same toposophic level as the "resurrector" can see marks that the new being is not at all like the old one. "Resurrections" of historical figures, or of persons who lived at the fringes of Terragen civilization and were not well recorded, are of very uneven quality.

Encyclopedia Galactica - Limits of Transapient Power

The above is of course fictional evidence but I think the idea is very interesting and might not be impossible given a large amount of information and a superhuman AI.

It might work even better if some of your DNA is available so that you can be cloned and your clone imprinted with recordings, extrapolations and behavioural patterns based on lifelogs. I suppose that even without a DNA sample, given sufficiently powerful AI, such a beta-level simulation might be sufficiently close so that only a powerful posthuman being could notice any difference compared to the original. At least that's a nice idea :-)

ETA In any case, I'd go with cryonics. Because beta-level simulations are just crude simulations. Further I believe that if you don't want to go with cryonics you can find some reassurance in the many many-worlds ideas. MWI, the simulation argument, dust theory, Tegmark's mathematical universe etc. If one of them is factual, there will be some "copies" of you alive and happy somwhere.