Inspired by this article about a jellyfish that doesn’t die of old age, injury or poor conditions, it just reverts back to a juvenile state and is reborn genetically identical. If you could be reborn, as you, would you want to?
Edit: Just the physical you, genetic and presumably epigenetic, no memory.
Being reborn without memory is pretty much the same as dying as you are not your body, you are your memories
Really? My memories in someone else’s body isn’t me either. There is the biological me at birth, then the conscious me of experience and memory. I think they both play a part of the older you, but being reborn as baby you is still literally the original “you” at this point.
If tomorrow I wake up in a different body, I’d still be me, I’d just look different, and I’m sure the world would feel different, but its still me
If my body would wake up with a different mind, I’m gone
If tomorrow I wake up in a different body, I’d still be me
I think you are making an artificial distinction that doesn’t exist. Bodies are not cpus that are identical and can run the same program on different hardware. Everyone’s hardware is unique, and shaped by experiences and memories.
If we could load your memories and experiences onto someone else’s hardware, you most definitely would not still be you. You would be something completely new.
This pulls in the philosophy of what makes someone “themselves” - is it memory, body, or “soul”. Technically, twins look the same so body could be ruled out that way but I do understand what you mean. I also tend to think of body as a vehicle in this life and not me, just like a car I got given in life. I didn’t choose my body, it’s just what I got given. My personality though - my morals, my believes, etc… that I do consider myself and who “I” am. An argument could be made that as you “craft” your personality or you - it is similar to working out and crafting your body into “you” but some people can’t do that with the cards they were dealt - so I’ll digress.
I just dig the philosophical conversation to be had here.
Hell no.
I dont even want to continue with this miserable life, why the fuck would I want to keep doing it over and over again.
People keep saying that. :(
If you dont keep your memory its no different than a new human being born, so I guess the only question is if I want my exact genetics to keep existing and get more chances to pass them on. I dont really care about that so its whatever for me.
I came to the same conclusion after a while. Then I thought how some people view progeny as a form of immortality. This is maybe a tad more direct.
Sure, might as well
Its all fun and games until you grow up and realize that the last “you” from before that you don’t remember and have no affiliation with now was a serial killer or something. Two consecutive life sentences just got a whole other meaning.
Also, I guess after decades and decades of this you’d have to start doing DNA testing before having sex because - you wouldn’t remember all the offspring you have had or the cousins or whatever (this is assuming your family and everyone else is doing this same rebirth cycle thing)
And how would that work? Are you stuck with the same family forever? Count me out I don’t want to go through childhood again like that.
Imagine if you were someone like Donald Trump or Jeffery Epstein and then come back as a normal person like you are now with the same morals and belief system and then have to come to terms with that. I don’t know if I could.
Even if you don’t remember or feel that way now it was still you
I’m not perfect by any measure of the word but I do feel good about having a lot of the beliefs that I do. I know people who grew up just like I did except they drank the koolaid and turned out with some shitty beliefs.
What if you ended up like that the second time? What if you turned into a Nazi or something that would be horrible.
I agree with what one of the other commenters said though, it would be so cool to see just how much our personality and behavior is affected by external factors.
And especially interesting to see how much of it is not.
In a way that is temporally continuous? No way. As long as I’m always dead by around 2012? Yeah, sure.
This is the correct answer. Except for the 9/11 part and well… lots of other bad things but ideally I’d be able to stop some of that from happening somehow.
no
Probably not, but it’s interesting to think about the implications here. If the new you is the same except for the memories and experiences, then what you become is a function of your environment, and if enough experiments are run on this over successive generations then an accurate and comprehensive model of your behavior and thinking could be obtained.
So I don’t know if this has been done before but I have this idea for a fictional setting where there’s people like this, who have made themselves this kind of immortal, and tried to set up automated systems to ensure they have some kind of continuity, raising themselves with robots, biometric access, keeping a journal and such. But then maybe the people excluded from these systems will have figured out over long periods of time that the immortals are predictable, since they are the same people repeated, and developed ritualistic cargo-cult-esque ways of interacting with them designed to produce the results they want, maybe even speaking words in a language they don’t understand and just knowing that those particular words will be interpreted the right way because the person being spoken to has been a known quantity for centuries or millennia.
If my memories are kept, I can only imagine how terrifying it would be to fall asleep and die one night, only to wake up to having zero bodily control and everything is just blury just a foot away, low resolution, and seeing in grayscale. That would be terrifying, so no unless I don’t remember a thing. Then it wouldn’t matter what my answer is now because I wouldn’t remember it.
Oh hell naw.
Reminds me of the end of the game SOMA.
People are getting caught up on the “no memory” part but there is no reason you couldn’t communicate with yourself between lives. Sort of preserving your memories that way.
That really interesting to consider.
Would the new you even care?
I would be like the Avatar and wondering what my previous versions of me did. Would be so weird but would be interesting.
These ones expect to be “reborn” indefinitely, with memory. These ones expect some bad existences but probably on the whole existence is good.
The article didn’t specify memories, just a reversion to a juvenile form and rebirth. For the sake of my OP, let’s assume no memory transference. Just the biological rebirth of you.
As to the good and bad in life, there have never been guarentees in life. You play the cards you have and get what you get. Sometimes terrible and unfair and cruel, and sometimes great and easy. Usually somewhere in between with a mix of both.
I already do that. And like the jelly fish I just don’t remember.
Cool man.
I can suggest Alan Watts “out of your mind.” Also mind over mind.
I can’t tell you his main points but I’ll try to give a couple. I can only tell you how I take it.
Every living thing thinks itself a person. Every living thing has/is/will be a manifestation of the universe and all these things go together and just like I have a foot I have a son or sun and these things are inseparable.
Just like a universe makes galaxies and galaxies make solar systems and solar systems make planets and planets make trees and those trees make apples those planets also make people.
