I’ve thought about questions like this to some extent. For my moral philosophy, I think it would be morally better to recreate a once-existing person.
I do not think that personal thoughts would be sufficient to reverse engineer a persons brain. Preserving DNA would probably be much better, but still insufficient. Really good brain scans might do the trick. Really really not sure.
It may just happen that you get reincarnated even without trying. If time is infinite and you have a theory that allows the recreation of people, you would expect to be born again. When I die, I might just wake up in a new body in a new world. (https://philpapers.org/archive/HUEEIE.pdf)
It seems like if simulated people can exist and live blissful lives and there will be trillions and trillions, then I should be living as a simulation. The fact that my life is good but not entirely blissful is perhaps evidence against utilitarianism or that simulating minds is possible. This depends on what your view on observer selection effects (https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/observation-selection-effect).
Anyway, very interesting thoughts. This stuff is cool but hard to think about.
I’ve thought about questions like this to some extent. For my moral philosophy, I think it would be morally better to recreate a once-existing person.
I do not think that personal thoughts would be sufficient to reverse engineer a persons brain. Preserving DNA would probably be much better, but still insufficient. Really good brain scans might do the trick. Really really not sure.
It may just happen that you get reincarnated even without trying. If time is infinite and you have a theory that allows the recreation of people, you would expect to be born again. When I die, I might just wake up in a new body in a new world. (https://philpapers.org/archive/HUEEIE.pdf)
It seems like if simulated people can exist and live blissful lives and there will be trillions and trillions, then I should be living as a simulation. The fact that my life is good but not entirely blissful is perhaps evidence against utilitarianism or that simulating minds is possible. This depends on what your view on observer selection effects (https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/observation-selection-effect).
Anyway, very interesting thoughts. This stuff is cool but hard to think about.
Thanks for the thoughts and pointers. I hadn’t considered this anthropics connection, interesting thought.
Thanks. I wrote about it here: https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/utilitarianism-casts-doubt-on-the. I don’t really hold to these ideas very strongly. Just something to consider.