Resurrection is merely a technical challenge
An invitation to turbo-narcissism.
Half joking. No more, no less.
Resurrecting modern people
What would you be like if we did your life over again? Say you’re born into the same family, go to the same schools, with the same friends, and the same jobs. But the little details are different. Instead of hanging out with Kyle one day you’re with Michael. Or you fail a test because you had one too many drinks last night.
How different would you really be? I think for most people, you would be substantially the same person1.
Consider those spooky stories of twins separated at birth and reunited as adults who are so similar they named their children the same. This isn’t as crazy as it sounds. You’ve got two people with the same genes, living in the same culture, at the same time, in similar regions, as foster children in families with similar socioeconomic status. We know that these things matter for life outcomes, two people with the same circumstances should end up being very similar.
All this to say that if your clone redid your life, that person could reasonably be called a copy of you. A partial copy to be sure, but would any of your loved ones be able to tell the difference?
We can go a step further. Say we can run a simulation of you and your experiences. We watch carefully to see if your simulated life diverges from your real life. Choose the wrong college? Tweak some parameters and reroll.
At the end of this process we have a simulation of your life that hits all the same beats. A clone that made all the same decisions that you did. If you avoid overfitting, this clone might be essentially identical to you.
Such a simulation is beyond today’s technology, but may be possible in the future. But how will people in the far future know enough details of your life to resurrect you? What can they benchmark your simulation against?
Your social media posts of course. Social media provides a timestamped record of what you were thinking about. A simulation of you might reproduce a post word-for-word at the exact same time. That would provide strong evidence of your resurrection.
There’s a few things you can do to improve your chances of being resurrected in this glorious post-human future. Post on social media a lot, more data points gives you a better chance of surviving. Photobomb other people’s photos too. That gives the simulators a chance to cross-reference information about where you were. Also publish lots of information about yourself like your full genome, your biography, etc. in some permanent repository.
Social media companies are naturally the most important companies in the world. Let us pray that they survive millions of years so we might be reborn in the Dyson swarm.
Turbo-narcissism
Like every post on the simulation hypothesis, we can say something like and this is what’s happening right now you’re a simulation oooh. Resurrection is fun because it imbues the simulation with purpose. You’re not mold growing in someone’s simulation, you’re the center of attention.
Now you can enjoy a god complex by believing that you grow into a great mind the future desperately wants back. Or this life is a bizarre form of torture constructed by your enemies. Or perhaps you are merely here to entertain posthuman beings (did you hear a laugh track?).
The best part is these stories are unfalsifiable, you’re free to believe whatever you want.
Backchaining further in the past
Resurrecting social media poasters is a far cry from resurrecting everyone. Can we bring back people from before social media?
If those people interacted with someone who eventually used social media, you may be able to back out some information about them. Your grandparents behavior influenced you and left a mark on your digital traces. In reproducing your mind, your interactions with your grandparents can be used as a free parameter.
For people further in history, at the very least we can use their genes, social structure, and life history to produce a person very similar to them. We’d need to find social events with a known outcome which involve a smallish number of people. The result of a spelling bee or baseball game perhaps. The minds of the people involved become the free parameters, tweaking and rerunning the simulation until things play out the same way2. This won’t achieve the same fidelity as a social media post, but you can narrow things down to a feasible set.
Further in the past, things get fuzzier. You might still be able to infer their genes, but the best you can do is shotgun sample many different lives, keeping the broader sweep of history consistent.
All possible humans?
Why resurrect only the people who had lived? Why not resurrect all possible human minds?
You see, your genes contain only 1.5 MB of information. For a being that can rerun simulations of human society, sampling different genomes in different societies might be trivial.
What would be the purpose of instantiating all (human) minds? Perhaps they’re doing a The Egg thing. Or perhaps this parliament of minds can solve philosophy behind a veil of ignorance. You should ask them when you get there.
Conclusion
Resurrection creates some tantalizing possibilities. We can learn more about history, kill Hitler again, and discover how hot famous people were.
It’s far beyond our capabilities, but might be possible in the future. Indeed, it may be happening right now.
With the exception of people who experienced life-altering chance events like car accidents.
I thought I was creative for thinking of this, but this is kind of the plot of the Adjustment Bureau. Sigh.