From: Mark Crosby (crosby_m@rocketmail.com)
Date: Wed Jul 23 1997 - 14:21:40 MDT
Yakwax2 wrote:
<For a rerun to occur (a being that develops so similar to yourself it
carries on your consciousness) the surrounding world would have to be
exact in every detail up to the point of your death (so that the being
has the same memories and 'thinks' it is you).>
Hal Finney replied:
<Not at all, you could be created "from scratch" as an exact match of
your current body/mind. There is no reason why the surrounding world
would have to match. You would experience a discontinuity if the
external world changed, of course.>
Cosmology aside, this is precisely what I never understood from _The
Physics of Immortality_: My body/mind is a product of innumerable
interactions with my environment. How can neural nets, or whatever
Omega might use, spring full-blow like Athena from the head of Zeus
without some kind of interactive growth or training? How can
‘brute-force resurrection’ create something human-level or greater
*that once existed* ‘from scratch’ without also simulating all the
environmental input factors that conditioned that being?
Even if there are only x^y states of ‘matter’ possible and infinite
computational resources at Omega could compute all possible
combinations, how could ‘The System’ ever *select* those
configurations that might have had some resemblance to actual history
(which would seem to be required in order to call this a
‘resurrection’)?
Mark Crosby
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