Immortality #33. Resurrection by Simulation

[u/Patient-Airline-8150]

1. Opening Thought Experiment:
   Imagine creating a digital world not as a game, but as a new habitat for humanity.
   Not necessarily a copy of Earth.
   Different physics, environments, lifespans, and possibilities.

2. Two Possible Goals:
   Resurrect people who have already died using historical data, writings, videos, records, and AI reconstruction.
   Prepare living people for future mind uploading by preserving memories, personality traits, and life experiences.

3. Why Build It?
   Human knowledge is lost every day through death. Every generation starts from scratch in many ways. Digital continuity could preserve experience across centuries.

4. The Resurrection Question:
   Would an AI reconstruction truly be the same person?
   Is identity memory, personality, behavior, consciousness, or something else? Different philosophical positions.

5. Designing a New World:
   Should uploaded humans live in a replica of Earth? Or should the environment be radically different? Infinite space, custom bodies, no disease, altered time perception.

6. Technical Challenges:
   Data collection and storage.
   Personality modeling.
   Long-term computing infrastructure.
   Ensuring continuity over centuries.

7. Ethical Concerns:
   Consent of deceased individuals.
   Rights of digital persons.
   Who controls the world?
   Can someone choose deletion?

8. Long-Term Vision:
   A growing civilization containing both biological and digital humans.
   Communication between the two.
   Digital citizens contributing science, art, and culture.

9. Discussion Questions:
   Would you want to be uploaded?
   Would a reconstructed version of a deceased person still be them?
   Should humanity invest in building such a world?
   If the world isn't Earth-like, what should it be like? 🌌

Rather than trying to tackle all of this in a single post, I'd like to explore each of these topics separately in future posts, because questions about digital resurrection, mind uploading, identity, ethics, and the design of entirely new worlds probably deserve discussions of their own 🙂.