From: hal@finney.org, Sat, 10 Jun 2000
> One of the philosophical objections sometimes raised here against
> immortality is that you would change so much over a long lifespan as to
> have little relation to the being you were originally. In that case,
> the original person is really gone, just as surely as if he had died.
> All that is left is someone who was influenced, perhaps only marginally,
> by the person who began the process.
...
>This wouldn't mean that you could never change, only that as you do
>change, you would remember the person you used to be. Even as your
>tastes, desires and beliefs change, you would continue to at least
>occasionally do things the way your old self would have wanted. You
>would cultivate a sense of connectedness to your past and future,
>put down roots into your own timeline.
Hal,
Perhaps this is a prosaic suggestion to something more imaginative
that you might have been holding in your mind, but
How about recording ourselves using the suggestion I said some
weeks back? (Answering "What does it feel like to be ME?" at
regular intervals.) It conects backwards, but one can always
make committments to future selves at the same time.
It's a way to see our own tracks through our own life-forest.
Looking at one's life-tracks can be enlightening. It also
shows how the sum of every experience makes us who we are today.
(I don't agree with the "influenced, perhaps only marginally part",
that you wrote. Yes, we can change ourselves in large ways over
long lifetimes, but we are still the sum of or experiences, what
we have learned.)
Amara
"If this is today, I must be where I am." --Ashleigh Brilliant
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