No we could not raise the dead. If we could create a mind for a human body then we could create 2 minds for 2 human bodies. Since we would be able to create initially identical humans that then start to deviate, it is the same question as if we cloned someone. Cloning does not raise the dead.
*Science continues to eliminate possible material causes for free will as it also continues to discover free will is less and less likely to be true.
I know I'm going off on an off-topic tangent here, so I apologize for that....
Raising the dead -- is an interesting point. You say, we can't but within certain limits we can. It is common in medical practice to bring back people who die in an accident or during surgery. I believe the time limit is roughly 30 minutes after the heart stops for this to be possible -- the sooner the better of course. The limit is mostly due to brain cells dying due to lack of oxygen. There have been experiments on dogs in the Soviet Union in the 1940s, where they have been able to bring back dead dogs after much longer periods of death if they kept the brain supplied with oxygen via a mechanical instrument. They even got severed heads of dogs re-animated without the body of the dog.
Coming back to the question of free will in machines: some "futurists" (e.g. Ray Kurzweil) predict that within a few decades we will be able to reach the level of hardware performance to emulate the full functionality of a human brain in a computer. He proposes, that we will be able to "upload" our brain:
http://www.kurzweilai.net/live-forever-uploading-the-human-braincloser-than-you-thinkIF his predictions are correct (of course its a rather important if), that will certainly have some strong impact on many philosophical questions including the question of free will -- would such a computer "inherit" the free will of the person uploaded ?
