Suppose someone takes a snapshot of a human brain, accurate down to synaptic gaps.

Now they make exactly one change to one neuron.

There are a *lot* of neurons, which means that there'd be a *lot* of resulting snapshots which are all imperceptibly different.

Now they change exactly two neurons.

Now you've got several trillion versions of that person, all imperceptibly different.

At some amount of change, at some mindboggling number of versions, those differences will stop being imperceptible.

Some versions now remember different things, don't remember certain things. Some behave differently, etc.

Instead of identical clones, you're getting nearly identical versions of that person.

And as you continue making bigger changes, you make even more possible versions, with even larger and more noticeable differences.

At some point, you've generated every possible version of that person.

(This is a finite number)

Now the interesting thing is this:

Suppose you stored all these countless brainscans on a magically vast hard-drive.

What is the probability you randomly pull up the original, unaltered brainscan?

Or: how exactly would you even be able to test that the brainscan you grepped, was the original?

Below a certain noise floor, you'd literally have no way of knowing it was the original no matter how you tested it.

In other words:

A customer pays you to spin up the brainscan of their dead loved one.

There is an infinitesimal chance you actually boot up their dead loved one.

Almost certainly it'll be something that merely resembles them, to some degree.

A statistical inevitability that whatever you spin up, is not their dead loved one. And, absurdly more likely than not, very *very* unlike their loved one.

Not one of the mere few quadrillion who are literally indistinguishable.

Of course, error correction and detection codes exist but actually existing storage is a lossy channel. Bits get reversed, garbles happen, etc.

If you took that ultra-accurate brainscan right now, there'd be a possibility of reading off any one of those due to error.

So, you spin up someone's kindly grandma.

There, on the screen, is a very realistically GAN rendered sweet old lady face. Her voice is similarly perfectly recreated.

Now consider: just how unlike granny the thing behind that face could possibly be?

The odds of you spinning something up very *unlike* granny, far outweighs the odds of you spinning something up almost identical to granny.

Face it: you're probably summoning a demon.

Whatever you're spinning up, and hiding behind a kindly face, is likely to be very far outside the range granny could possibly have been.

It's not gonna be granny's twin, or granny if she'd gone to a different college, or granny if she was a marine biologist instead of coder

No, overwhelmingly the odds are that you couldn't describe the kind of life that version of granny would have had to live.

What you spun up, is not a granny that could have plausibly lived.

No, this granny is from the Dark Anthropic Zone. A place where no actual granny could survive.

A granny-shaped thing, pretending to be granny, with goals and motivations that do not at all resemble hers.

You spin up this person's granny, and respectfully leave the room.

What do you expect to find when you return an hour later?