There is an ongoing debate about the ethics of research on lifespan extension: roughly, using medical technologies to extend biological human lives beyond the current "natural" limit of about 120 years. At the same time, there is an exploding interest in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to create "digital twins" of persons, for example by fine-tuning large language models on data specific to particular individuals. In this paper, we consider whether digital twins (or digital doppelgängers, as we refer to them) could be a path toward a kind of life extension-or more precisely, a kind of person extension-that does not rely on biological continuity. We discuss relevant accounts of consciousness and personal identity and argue that digital doppelgängers may at least help us achieve some of the aims or ostensible goods of person-span extension, even if they may not count as literal extensions of our personhood on dominant philosophical accounts. We also consider relational accounts of personhood and discuss how digital doppelgängers may be able to extend personhood in a relational sense, or at least secure some of the goods associated with relevant relationships. We conclude by suggesting that a research program to investigate such issues is relevant to ongoing debates about the ethics of extending the human lifespan.

中文翻译：

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数字分身和寿命延长：什么很重要？


关于延长寿命研究的伦理问题一直存在争论：大致上，利用医疗技术将生物人类的寿命延长到目前大约 120 年的“自然”极限之外。与此同时，人们对使用人工智能 （AI） 创建人员的“数字孪生”的兴趣呈爆炸式增长，例如，通过根据特定于特定个体的数据微调大型语言模型。在本文中，我们考虑了数字孪生（或我们所说的数字分身）是否可以成为一条不依赖于生物连续性的生命延伸之路，或者更准确地说，一种人延伸。我们讨论了意识和个人身份的相关解释，并认为数字分身至少可以帮助我们实现个人跨度扩展的一些目标或表面上的好处，即使它们在主流哲学解释中可能不算作我们人格的字面延伸。我们还考虑了人格的关系叙述，并讨论了数字分身如何能够在关系意义上扩展人格，或者至少获得与相关关系相关的一些商品。我们最后建议，调查此类问题的研究计划与正在进行的关于延长人类寿命的伦理辩论相关。