There's so many things we invent with good intentions but in the end go terribly wrong and I think this is one of those things. I think it's ok to mourn and remember the past, but moving on and accepting reality is important to a healthy life.

Let's be real though, the startup that makes this but appeals to our worst instincts make bank. I can't imagine how much more messed up future generations will be as we keep making more dangerous technology that appeals to our primal instincts.

Let be real: I've worked on the R&D stage of a Chinese research project for a State supported Ancestor Worship software where people's ancestors are recreated in 3D, their "ancestorial home" is made available in pieces and parts the software user must purchase with real currency, and the user is encouraged to discuss their day to day life issues with their observing and consoling animated ancestors. The software is a complete Orwellian Spy while masquerading as all your ancestors listening, offering advice, and demanding gifts that cost real currency. To say the least, I spooked the hell out of that situation.

Wow. I want to know every detail about this.

Me, too, but I'm betting that's already all they can say (and probably more than they should have).

"mourn and move on" is a somewhat Western concept of dealing with death. Plenty of cultures around the world have developed different practices, up to religious forms of ancestor worship.

These practices would typically be associated with the idea that the dead have a genuine existence beyond simply “existing in my memory of them” and would be restricted in the forms they take by surrounding ritual, so I’m not sure there’s a direct point of comparison, though?

Yes, there's a direct comparison. Practices change as times and technology change. When photography became cheap enough, practices like in-home shrines often changed to incorporate photographs of loved ones. I think it's reasonable to speculate that newer forms digital representation can become part of these practices as well.

People often fear losing their memory of a loved one. A memento could help someone heal

Bs. People do different things. But nobody can sit around wallowing in the VR. Having seen what death of my cousin and grand parents did to the family, moving on helped every one heal in a way. VR would have been a torture to live in.

Perhaps starting your comment with "bs" is not a surefire way of getting your thoughts considered seriously..

Sigh. Point taken. You are right.

You are taking the worst possible interpretation of my comment. I was responding to literally the aspect of the GP that said "mourn.... move on"

It is a factual matter, easily discovered through simple searches, that non-Western cultures often take a different approach. Including, literally, ancestor worship. I am not making a judgement on which is better. I believe there are multiple healthy ways of dealing with grief, and "mourn & move on" can be one, but not the only one.

This is very far from an obsessive interaction with a semi-emulated version of a dead person in VR. However things wouldn't have to be that extreme.

In cultures that practice it, it's not uncommon for a small shrine in the home to be setup. And yet that is of limited access to family located further away, so a digital form of this not bound to a specific location could also be of use to people from these cultures. There is no reason that such things couldn't compliment existing practices of honoring ancestors.

I dont know how a grieving person can maintain distance from vr when the memories of their loved ines are tied. Reminds me so much of the movie Reminiscence

I think by "move on" they meant moving forward with life and getting through your grief.

You are absolutely right though that there are different ways of dealing with grief!

I'd say religion is the epitome of not moving on - or, moving on by imagining that it didn't really happen.

Possible the comment was directed towards a Western consumer.

Possibly, I'd give it the benefit of the doubt. Either way, I think it is fair to note that other cultures see death & remembrance in different ways.

Curious how you find other cultures and belief systems are? In Hinduism, at least I can attest that there is the concept of "mourn and move on" in that the body is not even preserved, it is freed of its physical form through cremation. The fire into the funeral pyre is instilled by hand by the eldest son - it's a poetic closure.

If you do a search for "ancestor worship" you'll find a few examples. It seems more common among Asian cultures, perhaps specifically those with a Buddhist tradition, but that's what I happen to be more familiar with so it may be common outside of that as well.

My gut reaction to 'recreating loved ones in VR' is that it would be torturous more than soothing.

Once a person dies, they're gone. The world is different, and nothing will bring them back. Spending time with a simulacrum isn't really spending time with a loved one.

Greg Egan's "zendegi" is a very good exploration of that idea. set in the fairly near future, so relatable.

That might be true for you but lots of people imagine talking to dead loved ones and imagine the responses and advice they'd give. Some of them do that reflection in front of a picture of their dead loved one. Seeing them in VR would just be an enhancement. No need to hate on it.

Heh, that could then be a vector for manipulation of individuals, through their dead loved ones.

"You know, you should really do XYZ..." (whatever the agenda is)

Pretty dystopian.:(

Don't knock it til you try it?

I mean, already in recent years people have made some very low fidelity 'resurrections' and gotten some measure of comfort from it, never mind the many years of history of people who visit gravestones to 'chat' (some even believing they get replies to some extent or another). When markov chains were hip, "talk with Charles Dickens!" (play with a markov model trained on his works) was at least interesting to some, GPT of course can do a lot better. Imagine we had actual superintelligent AI working on this, which actually tried to recreate brain models, or even restore a sense of existence to the resurrection that can continue independently and to their own delight rather than just being some static VR experience turned on and off whenever. (I jotted some thoughts a few years ago... https://www.thejach.com/view/2017/6/how_you_might_see_some_o...)

I'm in agreement though at least for now that even if you dialed up the fidelity to the point I can't point to anything objectively "off", let alone went with a low fidelity VR thing or just a chat bot, I'd still always think in the back of my mind that this isn't really the same person. Nevertheless, it could still be comforting to some, and interesting to others, and so if it's at all possible for potential future humans/ems/aligned AIs to work at it, they will.

Curiously I don't have the same back of the mind feeling at all when considering the idea of someone preserved with cryonics and then brought back as an em, the person would be the same to me, even if there was a bit of damage from the vitrification process that was error-corrected. I have a disagreement with a friend on that point, who thinks it would be something similar but not the same. Anyway, I think this is due to just having a much higher fidelity "source of truth" to work from that is the preserved adult brain, whereas someone supposedly information-theoretically dead requires a lot more guess-work, perhaps truly impossibly too much more even for a superintelligence, to bring back convincingly.

I suppose... but I'll always know that it's some sort of cheap trick to make me think they're still here when really their consciousness ceased.

Will the simulacrum age? Will it change? Will it ever surprise me or intrigue me? And if it does, is it something the dead person truly would have done?

It's sort of like a photograph; a photograph seems to capture reality but all it shows is some abstraction of a physical reality at one point in time. The photograph tells me nothing about the current reality of anything depicted within.

A simulacrum gives me the person I knew, when they died, and that's it. Perhaps comforting and interesting, but ultimately unfulfilling and unsettling I would imagine.

To me, the whole idea of a recreation of a person for my own daily comfort just cheapens the former existence of that person. It's one thing to have genuine photographs or even videos since there's an obvious delineation between memory and reality. Photos can make it even more obvious that the person is no longer alive. But to turn someone into an AI for the sake of coping (and denial) turns them into a product.

Maybe that's fine for some people. To me there's a line where it crosses over into offense. In no way do I think the status quo of my mental well-being is so important that I'd replace someone with a digital robot facsimile.

Have you lost someone you've loved?

Yes, but I get the unstated implication. I don't think it would be fair to apply it to me even though I think it may be fair to apply it to e.g. Kurzweil, unless he's made recent statements suggesting otherwise (I don't keep up with him). I currently have no expectation of seeing a convincing simulation/resurrection/recreation/continuation of any of them, or the ones I currently anticipate losing over the next few decades, even should I go on indefinitely living, and don't expect anything at all if/when I should die.

Would you want to have an avatar of them? I don't think I would.

If the 'avatar' is convincing and can have a continued existence as a person independent of my interaction with it, i.e. I don't "have" them as a form of possession, yes. It does seem better than 50/50 to me though that some (maybe all) wouldn't want continued existence and would decide to go back to not existing (for all I can tell), there may even be strong predictive signs of that in the brain models such that they don't even need to be temporarily brought back and asked or first made to listen to arguments or just have some final-final talks with me/others before deciding. I'd accept that.

For less convincing avatars where the point is just my own benefit of conversing with something like them when I want, from slightly like them to eerily like them, for one it's a weak yes, for the others I'm more indifferent -- it'd be more in the realm of curiosity than desire, like talking to a historical figure or a fictional character. The weak yes I expect will get weaker (as it already has, despite non-linear flare-ups/resurgences where it's temporarily stronger) and eventually match the others after long enough.

> it would be torturous more than soothing

Relevant Asimov story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past

I was going to suggest the HBO film "Reminiscence", which was panned as mediocre but I liked it for being Noir and somewhat original. It features a machine that can replay your own memories and record them for others -- useful for investigating crime, but otherwise highly addictive to the nostalgic.

Reading about The Dead Past tho, there's a good deal of overlap with the plot device of "Devs", a periscope into deep history, but which Nick Offerman's character uses to re-live moments of his daughter's short life, as Asimov's protagonist does.

Agreed, to me it sounds like the worst possible kind of uncanny valley.

It has the potential to be therapeutic. Perhaps only to be used under the supervision of a mental health professional.

I for one have many things I wish I had said to my parents before they died. I’d like to use it, but not be obsessed or consumed by it.

Precisely. This is going to be used to suck people into the metaverse.

>Imagine living a quadrillion years. Even as a god, that would be miserable.

This seems very subjective, I don't agree at all.

Seriously... the idea of living a quadrillion is hardly an extension of 100. You can still never go backward. You still need to plan your life. Death would still be a common occurrence.

I would much MUCH rather live much longer. I don't hate my life at all.

At some point you will have heard all possible jokes. What is life without humor?

That's nonsense. There are infinite possible jokes.

And memory is limited. What if one were a forgetful god. What if that is _already_ the case?

Possibly where the Alzheimer's patients are told the same joke over and over, and it does bring them joy, comes to mind.

This is not true. Jokes that take more than (say) an hour to tell are boring and thus not really jokes.

Literally there are about the same number of atoms in the universe as the number of shuffles in a 52 card deck (52!). The number of topics that can be played with in a joke is beyond even this limited number.

Remember, jokes about tinder/grinder dates didn’t even exist a decade ago.

Agreed it's subjective.

That said, what would you do with your quadrillion year long lifespan, assuming you're healthy during it? It's way past everything you can do and learn, and cosmic level events are not what the human mind can perceive as they slowly unfold...

I would like to live a couple thousand years though, as long as my loved ones get to be along for the ride. Though I wonder if my loved ones would eventually become my hated ones...

> It's way past everything you can do and learn

Such arrogance, humanity isn't all that far beyond it's banging rocks together phase. We haven't even scratched the surface. There is so much more to learn.

It's not arrogance. There aren't an infinite number of things to do and learn. It may seem so when your lifespan is less than a century, but quadrillion years? You'd run out of things that make sense for a human being.

How do you know it's way past everything you can do and learn?

No one has ever had the experience to be able to say.

I'm fond of my loved ones, but I also like creating new ones. I also would like to see very long term plans come to fruition. It seems very much like a "640K ought to be enough for anybody" problem.

Works of art that require thousands of lifetimes to complete. Deep understanding of the physical world. Exploring the universe. Much more.

I get what you mean, but I don't think the human mind can contemplate things that take thousands of years to unfold; it's just not wired for that. Even things that take years are difficult for us to comprehend.

Re: creating new beings. How long till you also get bored of that? Remember we're talking about quadrillions of years.

An additional thing to consider: if you could live quadrillions of years and still be able to perceive things that take thousands or millions of years to unfold, wouldn't you subjectively be living the lifespan of a normal human being? That is, your life wouldn't feel long to your mind, but normal (your mind would have to adjust to run more slowly). Wouldn't then regret your "short" lifespan and wish you could live longer?

It seems like you assume you would remain human for a quadrillion years. Why? I'd assume a technology to upload yourself into a better substrate (one you have full control over) will appear within next few hundred years. From that point there are no limits on what you can do or become.

Your answer is the only valid counterpoint, in my opinion. Since the human mind cannot perceive the passage of quadrillion years, we would have to become something else, something inhuman.

I don't know whether this is something I would wish for myself. Maybe. I like being human. But maybe, who knows?

What do you like about being human?

This extends to a cohort of people living thousands of years, having memories of each other to thousands of years in the past. Plus they all need beds.

In Ursula Le Guin's book "Changing Planes", there's a story called "The Island of the Immortals." Spoiler alert: living forever is no fun.

If there was no tension the book would be no fun, so I don't think we should pay much attention to story lines created for entertainment.

I mean if you were a god your experience would be qualitatively different. You could make it pass by as fast as a minute takes for a human being.

“Mom do you remember the walk we took around the lake just before you died?”

“Yes what a wonderful day. I also fondly remember the Adidas sneakers I wore. Did you know they’re 25% off at Target this weekend only?”

This reminds me a lot of Black Mirror season 2 episode 1.

Always good to treasure the time we are given.

I miss Black Mirror. Some episodes were hit-n-miss, but many of them made me think. The best part was that each episode was mostly independent of the other.

and then you have to put your loved one's in the attic

Hah! I made this suggestion here about a couple years ago. It's been my dream-pet-project-I'll-never-create for a while now, but it seems like more talented and predisposed individuals have also considered it / may be working on it already...

Some interesting replies there

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24073994

If that technology existed a lot of people would live in misery knowing that they could be seeing their dog and their parents and speak to them one last time, but only when their time to goes come. Either that or people would be able to use it whenever they wanted or could pay for it and it would become a new highly addictive and harmfully dissociative tech product that I venture to guess would be like 10x more harmful to society than Facebook ever was.

I don't even know if it would have some kind of therapeutic use of whatever. Yeah ir would be a wonderful experience and I... ehh... let's say "dreamed" about similar experiences a few times and it was a powerful "dream". But being able to do it on demand would I think change how grieving works in the modern world so much! And we rely on the things that went to not actually be there for us on demand to be able to move on.

It's a beautiful idea but it's as beautiful as the fear of nuclear MAD keeping the first world safe from war in their own land, not as beautiful as a poem or a flower or a good memory.

I suppose I'm less pessimistic. I assume that eternal life wouldn't be the same experience as the corporeal passage of time. Time would exist of course, but would be perceived either as its true essence, or at least as a higher dimensional projection. Rather than be anchored in time at a constant velocity, you would be able to move and exist independently from it.

Upload is a pretty good series on Amazon Prime right now that explores that. It's both amazing and horrifying.

You may also enjoy Marjorie Prime, too

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Prime

We are not too far away from that [1].

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation...

I'm with you on this. I would love to be able to connect with ancestors I barely or never met, even if it only captures a fraction of their essence. I worked on this for a while but Microsoft holds a pretty broad patent on this concept, which scared me off.

Isn’t that the premise of the Amazon series upload

> It would be really great to recreate loved ones after they have past in some sort of digital space.

Tim Heidecker did this with his son Tom Cruise, Jr. Heidecker and it was quite moving: https://youtu.be/2fVQtmMN_ao?t=178

I think it would be a special kind of hell to have your resurrected loved ones sell you ads in virtual reality.

> It would be really great to recreate loved ones after they have passed

That’s probably the basis for most of human religion and philosophy; coping mechanisms.

I’ve always wondered if it might be possible to ”reverse engineer” parents or siblings from one’s own DNA.. at least visually.

You'd probably like Spielberg's A.I., or at least find it topical.

Slightly related VR startup I'm building - Traverse (https://traverse.to)

“I’ve also been thinking what I would want “heaven” to be. Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me much.”

please tell me more!

I can imagine people would also create their exes and talk to them after they've broken up.

what's fun is my mom has a bunch of 3D photo slides from the 1950's and 1960's so we could bring those in to stereo VR really easily. I still need to borrow my friend's slide scanner...

Sounds like the end of the movie: "A.I.".

You mean Westworld ?

More like "Things to do in Denver when you're dead."

> Eternal life doesn’t appeal to me much. Imagine living a quadrillion years. Even as a god, that would be miserable.

That isn't necessarily what eternal life would be. Indeed, eternity is not temporal at all.

For example, in the Catholic understanding of heaven, those in heaven exist in aeveternity or aevum[0], a state in between the temporal and the eternal. Eternity[1] is proper only to God and is by definition timeless, with no beginning or end, so it would not make sense to speak of quadrillions of years. Where God is concerned, there is, loosely, only a now with no beginning, no end, no past, and no future, only the present, to use temporal language analogically.

Furthermore, heaven is in part characterized by the beatific vision[2] which is an immediate, direct, and inexhaustible knowing of God (Being Himself) which is Man's ultimate and supreme happiness. In this life, knowledge of God is generally mediate like much of human knowledge.

In other words, thus understood, the best of this life is but a faint shadow of a shadow in comparison to the ultimate fulfillment of heaven which is Man's proper end.

[0] https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1010.htm#article5

[1] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05551b.htm

[2] https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02364a.htm

This in no way represents my views, it's far from them. But I vouched for this comment because it deserves to be a part of this conversation.