That is a ‘double take’ inspiring line. For a couple of days, people have been writing about M.I.T.’s project to make digital copies of people that can look and speak like the person. Of course, it is hype based people’s curiosity.

M.I.T. has developed an amalgam of technology that allows the creation of an avatar that looks and sounds like a specific person. (Example) But, that is about it.

See Technology Review’s How to Save Your Digital Soul.

From CG Cookie Tutorial – Click

Second Life has been doing the ‘looks’ part for years. The voice part is new tech. Prior voice imitation was about almost only pitch and word speed. The new tech controls pronunciation, word choice, cadence, and the other factors that make voices recognizable as a specific person. The idea is to have more AI interacting with people. Sort of a replacement for customer service people.

In psychology, the idea of the soul is self-aware life. Figuring these things out gets complicated because we can’t know what another person experiences. There is the challenge of whether the color you perceive as red is the same perception I have.

All your life you have looked at a color people call red. So, you too call it red. We can measure the frequency of the color we all agree is red. The color-blind show us that we are not all perceiving the color the same. For me, there is a huge difference between a bright green and bright red. That isn’t true for the color-blind, as the colors are nearly the same.

We can’t know what color others actually perceive. So, how do we know when another person or creature is self-aware? Are animals self-aware? If so, do they have souls?

Some concepts are just hard to define.