In the documentary about him, Transcendent Man, it is shown that Ray Kurzweil wants to bring his father back from the dead, and I have a big problem with that.

What Ray is proposing is that we could build a new person who was so much like his father, that that person may as well be his father. I think that many people may dismiss this as rediculous; but I think that it is evil. In order to make my case, I think I need to explain what Ray is proposing.

In linear algebra, we frequently work with matrices. Many of them are quite complex and large; and we'd like approximations to them that are easier to work with. Eigen vectors, values, and spaces provide means of working with stand-ins which are not distinguishable from the originals. This doesn't mean that they are the same: it means that there are frequently more than one matrix which will behave the same in a given equation; and that there are ways of finding these matrices.

Imagine, instead, that we're working with people. Say, Ray's Dad. Ray had a real father, who's dead. But that man was a member of a family of men that were very, very similar to him, and differed only slightly in brain structure; so slightly that in the course of their lives they would have done the same things. Let's call these men Eigen Fathers. Ray argues that we can pick any Eigen Father, and it will be equivalent to any other for all outside measurements; so he wants to find one.

Now, Ray actually has a chance. A very slim chance, but it may be doable.

First, he needs his father's genetic material. That's easy, he can just dig him up. Even with decay, a corpse that young has more than enough copies of all the DNA to let us get an essentially perfect map.

Second, he needs to know as much as possible about his father's life. Well, Ray remembers his father, so he can extract his own memories. And he has a very large amount of his father's writings. And maybe some others are still living who remember him. And of course, there are all the academic and professional records of his dad's life.

Finally, we need to find a mind that fits in the genetically described brain, but satisfies the constraints imposed by the records, letters, and memories. This is essentially a brute force problem, and its very, very, very hard. Find any mind which fits, give it a body, and presto:

Hello Eigen Dad.

But it isn't impossible. Given enough compute; it may not even be improbable. But it is wrong.

It isn't wrong that Ray wants to make a person per se. It is wrong that Ray wants to make a person to be a good-enough copy of another. This new person will know or learn what Ray did. They will know that the memories they have are the ones that Ray wanted them to have. They will be, in effect, a slave to Ray's whim. And that's pretty ugly.