From: Harvey Newstrom (harv@gate.net)
Date: Wed Sep 16 1998 - 22:09:21 MDT
Here is a strange idea I had. We have been talking about duplicating
all of a person's thoughts into an upload as a means to recreate a
person. Ignoring the discussion of whether it transfers or copies an
individual, I think we all agree that it creates an individual that is
very similar to the original.
Now, to copy me, I assume that we have to read my thoughts and
memories. My desires, memories, goals, etc., must not only be read and
duplicated, but I think they must be decipherable and interpreted.
Now, suppose that I am cryogenically frozen and brought back in the
future. They may have scanned my entire mind and recreated my thought
processes into a new body for me. What about my family members who were
not recorded, stored and recreated? They are gone and lost forever.
But, I have memories of them. What they looked like, how they acted,
what they said, how they lived. What if all the known data about a
family member is also read out of my mind, and used to recreate that
family member? It wouldn't be a true representation, but it would be a
recreation of my perception of them. If the recreation looked the same,
spoke the same, acted the same, generated the same kinds of reactions
and conversations, I probably couldn't tell the difference. As far as I
would know, that person would have been recreated.
To carry the idea further, what if they gather information about this
person from many different people? Each person would have a different
perspective than me, and would have different data that I wouldn't
know. The resulting recreation would be an individual that would fool
all of us into thinking it was just like the original person. The
recreation would have data from all of us, so it could still tell each
of us things we didn't know about it. It might even be able to
synthesize data together and come up with conclusions about itself that
nobody else knew, because none of us had the complete picture.
Such a person would be a perfect recreation, as far as any outside
observer could tell. Families might be able to recreate lost members
who did not survive. Such a recreation would not know the original's
secret fantasies, desires, or fears. Anything hidden by the original
would be lacking in the recreation. The recreation would be of the
public mask represented to the world, and may or may not be very similar
to the actual original.
Any comments about this method of recreating people? It wouldn't meet
my definition of survival. But it might be interesting to create a new
person to replace a lost person.
-- Harvey Newstrom <mailto:harv@gate.net> Author, Engineer, Entrepreneur, <http://www.gate.net/~harv> Consultant, Researcher, Scientist. <ldap//certserver.pgp.com>
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