this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2025
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I think the biggest problem with immortality is memory. How long until you have literally forgotten the person you have been before. Is that person then truly you, or have you died somewhere along the way?
Hum... Probably some 5 to 10 years. Maybe less.
All those philosophical questions about personhood permanence (like the transporter one too) are a joke when compared to how impermanent people actually are.
Your personality changes over time, but there are formative memories that stay with people until they die. You can see it in phobias and other mental disorders very explicitly, but also in favorite foods or cultural preferences or adherence to certain dogmatic beliefs.
Like, imagine if people who came of age in the 1950s were to just live forever ruling over the rest of us and imposing their standards and beliefs generation after generation, with new members only added to the gerontocracy by demonstrating a nostalgia for an era they never even grew up in. Imagine what kind of place that would be like to live in.
I really recommend you look at history because most of those people did not have the values you associate with them back then in the 1960s and 1970s.
The problem with the gerontocracy is not really the inter-generational differences.
Oh yeah. Nobody was suggesting we round up all the immigrants, criminalize homosexuality, segregate people by race, and deny women rights over their own bodies in the 1960s and 70s. And we definitely weren't cooking up a Cold War with an Eastern Power, or picking fights with left-leaning democracies in Latin America, the Middle East, and Sub-Saharan Africa, during this time.
It's actually totally different now!
Old people were. There was entire movement around it.
Those people weren't the old ones at the time.
They were. Donald Trump was as much of a racist, sexist, xenophobic shitbag when he demanded the execution of the Central Park Five as he is today. Joe Biden was as committed to the Zionist project under Ben-Gurion as Netanyahu from Philly. Dianne Feinstein was fighting to put the Confederate Flag up over San Fransisco over forty years ago. Mitch McConnell has been fronting for fossil fuel companies all the way back to his days as legislative assistant to Marlow Cook and and campaign aid for Tom Emberton. My man was an aid to Robert fucking Bork ffs. Hillary Clinton was a Goldwater Girl.
These people all sucked back then. They have always sucked. They were the teenagers screaming at the first black students to cross the segregation line after Brown v Board. They were the Vietnamese veterans doing war crimes at My Lai and flying bombing runs over Cambodia on behalf of Kissinger. They were taking money from Walmart and DOW Chemical and Raytheon and Salomon Smith Barney as soon as they were old enough to cash a paycheck. They were at the forefront of the Red Scare and the first in line to bend the knee to Ronald Reagan.
These people have been awful for eons.
I think it depends on the individual. I get gobsmacked at peoples limited memory of history. I find its like 5 but if you one standard deviation over its like 10 and then like 5% its 20 and some small number is likely 40 and then not sure how its like for those folks that seem to be able to remember every detail of their lives. Granted even then its like a feel for who you were and memories of how you handled things or did for particular things you can bring up. Then you have to add in though all that evidence that every time we remember something we have a chance of changing it.
Theres is a rpg gamebook called โthousand years old vampireโ that covers this.
Over time you literally forget parts of your life.
Itโs a great way to spend a night with a single friend.
An immortal character from Doctor Who also covered this. She chronicles her life in a library of diaries but also destroyed some of them when the memories were too painful (her own children dying of old age).
Is this from one of the newer seasons? Iโm struggling to place that character.
I could play chrono trigger again for the first time! Hell yeah
You can do it now. It's a rich enough game that I only vaguely remembered the high notes and was delightfully surprised at a bunch of lower key plot beats I'd forgotten.
Also, the mobile adaptation is pretty good.
I played it again about 5 years ago? Really holds up but being able to completely forget the story would be awesome
We all forget what it really was to be 6, yet we're still us. To never change yourself isn't a virtue and change doesn't mean "losing yourself", that's a fallacy made up by the fearful. Friendship is also a temporary thing, you always lose some and gain some no matter how close (we as humans just hate to think about it that way).
All these supposed problems with immortality really are just made up, or an attempt to romanticise the painfully inevitable.
In Iain M Banks' Culture novels people get several hundred years old. Death is pretty much optional, they just usually choose to die at some point. The way they deal with the problem of memory seems to be that they just take longer to do things; working somewhere for 30 years is a stint. You might follow a hobby for 20 years, or take a 10 year vacation.
But there was one character who chose to not die. He was over a thousand years old and an important witness to something that happened during the Idiran wars (iirc). He did have that problem, and he had outsourced large parts of his memeories. Electronically, and in the form of an explorable virtual world.
edit: I'm now not 100% sure about the 2nd paragraph. Maybe it was in a Culture novel, but differently, maybe somewhere else, maybe I'm mixing up two stories..
Ah, yes. Sherlock Holmes's Mind Palace. I really hated that arc.
As someone with aphantaisha I sort of hate that, but the annoying part is that it still works. YMMV
I thought he kept dna memories in different parts of his body?
Why should one care? Live in the moment.