Be yourself
One day, wistfully daydreaming about the idyllic summers of your youth, you come across a genie in a magic lamp. Though he offers you three wishes, you can only think of one. You wish that you could go back in time and relive your childhood. You don’t really care about changing the past; you just want to experience the joys of youth once more. The genie grants you this wish—the same wish he has granted to countless people before you—and you find yourself waking up in your childhood bedroom.
At first, you are ecstatic. This time around, you’ll make sure to savor the experiences you didn’t even really pay attention to the first time. With no responsibilities, you can spend all day playing outside and taking in the simple pleasures of a carefree life. And you do, for a little while. But then, little things begin to bug you.
You find your friends intolerable now, since all their interests are, appropriately, the interests of children. They can’t hold your attention, and you find it difficult to pretend to care. You find it profoundly creepy when a classmate develops a crush on you. Not even the simple joys of discovery are available to you; it was fun learning new facts the first time around, but now that you already know them it’s not the same. Any innocence of youth or freshness of discovery is impossible for you to relive. You still have to pretend you’re innocent anyway, though, or people will look at you funny.
That’s another thing; you have to keep your wish a secret from your friends and family, or else the whole façade comes crashing down. You know something they don’t; you are not reliving your youth, but playing at reliving it. You could wish that the people around you didn’t notice the incongruities when you slip up, but that would make the simulation too artificial for your tastes. You don’t want to play a game, you wanted to actually relive your childhood!
The problem, you realize, is your memory. As long as that’s around — as long as you are not a child, but merely an adult pretending to be a child — you can’t satisfactorily relive the experience. But if you got rid of those memories, would you even be you anymore? If you were guaranteed that your new, younger self would be very happy and make better choices than you did, would you even care if you couldn’t be around to experience it? You use your second wish to reverse the first one, and your third to buy happiness through more direct means.
In Greg Egan’s Permutation City, one character spends his immortality pretending to be other people with randomly-generated interests. But his memories haunt him and eventually he decides to go all the way and delete them, to better to enjoy his current life as an entomologist.
He was dressed for a role—so why not complete the illusion? He’d tinkered with false memories before. Why not construct a virtual past which “explained” his situation, and his enthusiasm for the task ahead, in terms which befitted the environment? Why not create a person with no memory of Peer, who could truly lose himself in the delights of being unleashed on this priceless collection? (Egan, 272)
He is eventually reset back to his previous condition, but he has no memory of what happened in the intervening time. His mind never participated in the life of this entomologist, as that was a truly different person. Narrative experience must be an unbroken chain; it seems, at least to me, that breaking the narrative necessarily involves a kind of death.
You can’t know what it is like to be someone else. If you saw the world from their perspective, it would be with your own mind that you interpret their senses. If you listen to their thoughts, you would be like a homunculus, listening to them without actually being them. The only way to truly experience their life would be to completely replace your mind with theirs. But then, you won’t be the one experiencing their life — it will just be a copy of them doing the experiencing! When the experience is over, how do you access those memories? You could have them copied and implanted into your own brain, perhaps, but is that the same thing as experiencing those events firsthand?
The general problem appears to be that, once you exist, you cannot switch narratives midstream in a satisfying way. This has implications for immortal beings, assuming they ever get bored with their own narrative. Changing your memories wholesale and living as someone else seems to be unsatisfying. One solution I’ve considered is putting in a hard limit on how far back your memories extend. That way, you can slowly traverse mind-space without worrying that nothing will be new to you. Humans already lose memories of their early childhood and don’t seem to have a problem with it. Of course, if your life never begins to bore you, the only limit you’d need to worry about would be storage space.
Another possible method comes from dreams. Very often when people dream they will go along with the narrative, forget their real life, and still come out the other side claiming they subjectively experienced that new narrative while it was happening. This may mean it is possible to at least partially replace or repress someone’s memories and still have them subjectively feel like their identity was not violated. Of course, people are also detached and stupid in their dreams, and this may be required for them to accept the new narrative, or at least to not notice something is wrong.
Even if you have multiple lives, you probably only have one narrative. Use it well.
