» I wish good things for a robot playing me in the future. It may be the best immortality available. However, it seems likely to be me in only a very low resolution form…

This is true, it might be low resolution as it starts out, but hopefully, now that we “know” the extent/limitations of our primary senses, we also know that technology driven replicas can enhance them.

For instance… would it be safe to assume that as we evolve, our sense of hearing might go down, considering the sub-optimal frequency range we are subjecting our ears to, day in and day out (mp3)
Or, eyesight… considering the hours per day we spend in front of electronic displays?
Or… our intellect, and quest for science exploration (if the Luddites have their way)…

Meanwhile, we know that computers are much faster at computation, simulation, logic etc… Cameras can see into the light spectrum better than us… With a simulated/digitally resurrected person, what we would have is a person, far better at sensing the real world, but **edit** with low-rez “consciousness” … emotions..

Which brings up a question “Are emotions and consciousness over rated in the grand scheme of evolution?’

Are emotions holding us back from venturing further…
What is “Home sickness?” What would be the cause of it for a person living on the moon?

Emotions make us human, but evolution it seems, had an (evolving) plan in mind when it took us from apes–>human…and now possibly, Posthuman?

Consciousness, in the logical “being aware” sense can be programmed in AI, — a.k.a low resolution consciousness.

Our next step forward might be up-rezzing consciousness.

The uploads to which I refer are theatrical presentations where a skilled actor, steeped in the writing and history of a prolific author, recreates his or her subject as a theatrical performance.

I have witnessed actors playing Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Mark Twain. All looked quite realistic. I suspect that their internal thoughts, based on intense study of their subject and his writing, were fairly realistic too.

Was I really seeing Franklin, Lincoln, and Twain? In some senses, yes. However, in the ways we usually think of such things, no.

The actor could have been a robot. Indeed at Disneyland, I saw an audio-animatronics robot version of Lincoln. Audio-animatronics is one step from clockwork, so I conjecture that the internal representation was nothing at all like Lincoln, indeed nothing at all line human and nothing at all like intelligence. Even an intelligent robot would have to be carefully designed to have a consciousness that is anything like human consciousness. Indeed it would be difficult to tell if even a robot that passes the Turning test is really anything like conscious at all. Even given robot consciousness, it is likely to be unlike human consciousness. Therefore a robot actor is unlikely to have internal thoughts and experiences that are very similar to its subject. So the idea that we have resurrected a person by having a robot play that person seems likely to be true in only a very loose way. I wish good things for a robot playing me in the future. It may be the best immortality available. However, it seems likely to be me in only a very low resolution form.

We might solve this problem by uploading directly from a human brain. However, this will be extremely difficult to do, and therefore seems unlikely. It appears necessary to read the state and interconnection of trillions of synapses, and then model this in a computer. None of the candidate methods by which this might be done seems at all likely to work.