[extropy-chat] Sasha is alive!

[Ben Goertzel]

On 1/1/07, Russell Wallace <russell.wallace at gmail.com> wrote:
> Will it ever be possible to bring back people like Sasha? I don't know.
> There's nothing in our current understanding of physical law that would
> permit such a thing even in principle,

According to my understanding of quantum theory, this is not the case.
 Our current understanding of physical law **does** seem to permit
this in principle.

Quantum measurement theory, in the decoherence interpretation which is
the current near-consensus, states that when a quantum system couples
with its environment (thus decohering its quantum state), massive
information about its state is encoded in the environment in subtle
but in-principle decodable ways.

An implication would be that essentially full information about Sasha
Chislenko is contained in the universe, encoded in the
perturbation-patterns of various particles that are now distributed
all over the place.

A rather large amount of physical and computational effort would be
required to gather this information and reconstitute Sasha from it,
but "in principle" it should be possible if quantum theory and the
decoherence interpretation are correct.

I agree with Samantha however that this is not the best place to focus
our efforts right now.  My vote in this regard is with AGI development
as many of you already know.

-- Ben Goertzel