Originally this was meant to be a bit of a longer post, but I have procrastinated yet again. To give a bit of background, I’m asking the question if we wanted to know everything about a certain human, what would we have to know? This post is just a short list where I talk at a high level about some things we could want to know. I’ll be doing this to some level of abstraction, and not asking things like where every atom in someone’s body is for example.

Being more concrete, I guess I’m asking what you’d need to create a digital twin of someone. We sort of implicitly do this as humans to other humans, when we think, what would someone do, given what I know about them. We (or at least I do), automaticaly construct a mental model of this person, and how they would behave. In essence, their state.

Starting with the basics: the legal/demographic stuff, like what shows up on your drivers license, ID and birth certificate. Birthdate, name, sex, age, race, weight. Place of birth, SSN too. Easy concrete stuff, stored in a legal database somewhere.

Moving onto some still easy to quantify stuff, the state of our bank accounts, $ amount, where our money is invested, etc. If we want to extend this out, we can also measure our stuff. So I guess a mega inventory of our stuff, from big ticket items like owning a home, to smaller ticket things like a toothbrush or the items in our fridge. Everything we own can be considered. And also the things we don’t own, like the fact that we pay a monthly rent, or have a spotify/netflix/amazon subscription that obligates us to pay some monthly expense. Would be really annoying to catalog all of these.

Health information is a little bit more complicated, but there are still some low hanging fruit (e.g what we can measure from a smartwatch), like heart rate, body temperature, hours of sleep we got today. Other sensors like GPS can also point out our location in space, I guess that’s also pretty important. Other health related things, would be a bit harder to measure but is available, like medical history, blood composition, blood type. Approximate muscle fat and weights of different parts of the body are also things that can be measured. I guess this last one is also available, like your genetic sequence.

Relationships is another fuzzy one. We have our immediate family, our loved ones, our friends. And for each person, each group, we can think about when the last time we interacted with them was, what our interactions with them have been, how we know them, what’s our typical role and interaction with them.

And lastly, what we know. This is some of the stuff that’s hardest to catalog. In an academic sense, this could be a list of courses, education history, the textbooks that you’ve read. But it also includes other things, like our preferences, such as what type of food we like, our personality, etc. I guess this is basically modeling our brain. All of our lived experience contributes to this state, and most people would say that this is the most human part about us.

I guess that’s it for today. please let me know what im missing haha, definitely missing a lot here.