Would you want to raise your child around a "fake" father figure? Ash, a character in the hit TV show "Black Mirror" (Season 2 Episode 4) became a father figure to his own child even though having no history of the way he was raised as a child or any information leading up to that besides pictures he has captured in his own home. Even though he does have a super computer "brain", the experiences you get from having a past life are not the same.
I caught myself near the end of the movie saying, "I wouldn't raise my kids around that thing", and even being a walking and life-like looking being does not make you human. If Ash was faced with the trolley problem, with Martha (Ash's un-ex-wife) on one track with the trolley coming straight for her and his daughter who he has met once a year for seven years is on the safe side of the track. Ash being merely a program written from his own life of old public documents or learned from communication with Marth, and Marth being his "administrator" he would pull the lever. He would have no emotions evoked from killing anyone that was not written into his main program. Until told to do something, he just says conversational pieces to deceive your mind into believing for a little bit that he is processing his own thoughts.
Performing Utilitarian calculus is a common thing to do as a human, but can it be taught to someone or broken down to a simple formula. To perform utilitarian calculus you need to be able to make connections freely and to your own personal experiences, if you were created yesterday where will all of your emotional and personal connections to everything in the world come from? Ash is not a free thinking individual, he can have artificial intelligence but still couldn't create the reasoning for why he should learn without being told.
I think if we wanted to have a passed on loved one in our lives to be able to communicate, we need to keep it to a text only relationship to keep from too much attachment and to slowly let the person go instead of trying to let them reenter your life through a fake rendering of what they used to look like. With the ability to bring back a loved one after they have died gets rid of the idea of a funeral. It would still be prevalent, but would lose a lot of the meaning and sincerity.
1 comment:
SO you state that having a full re-embodiment of a person would be harmful to both those who were close to the deceased and the children of the person. I disagree that a full embodiment would cause adverse effects on a person of child if it was only in the person's life for a short amount of time. I say this because of the situations where loved ones may be suddenly lost, say through a car accident, a heart attack, or other various sudden causes. This re-embodiment would give those who were close to the person a chance to say goodbye and part with the person, and possibly avoid more serious emotional scarring. This could be especially true for children who may not fully comprehend the situation. They could see the person they loved once more and then peacefully part with them rather than have them ripped from their lives'. This whole process would happen before the funeral of course, in order for that to still be the final goodbye, but this could help those who were traumatized by a sudden death. Or would you disagree with this and why?
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