Immortality and memory ‒ Part 2
My last post concluded that in any desirable immortal life new memories eventually displace all older ones. As an immortal, you’ll eventually have no memory of earthly life or even your first trillion years. I submit that any such future person can’t be the same person as you, the person now reading this post. You will have been replaced by someone else. So you weren’t immortal after all.
You might object: “I don’t remember being a toddler. But as a child I remembered being a toddler, and I now remember being a child. This linkage makes me the same person as the toddler, and the linkage can continue beyond my earthly existence.” But wait. You’re confident the linkage holds even though you don’t remember all the links: you don’t remember being a child who remembers being a toddler. You’re confident only because of evidence left by your body (stories about you from elders) or other bodies (other children who apparently remember being toddlers). But no bodily basis for confidence will exist once your immortal life becomes unembodied, as I’ve argued it must. You’ll have only apparent memories to go on.
As an immortal, you can keep memories of your earthly life only by suffering some other loss. You might add new memories to your finite stock ever more slowly over the eons: eventually a billion years between any two new memories, then a trillion, and so on. Talk about boring! The events in your life are so dull that they almost never leave a lasting impression. Or you’re just increasingly unable to form new memories, like someone with permanent and worsening anterograde amnesia.
Alternatively, the memories in between earthly and new will get ever more widely spaced, on average: billions of years apart, then trillions, and so on. Your linkage to the past will become infinitely tenuous. At some point, an infinitely tenuous linkage will lack the power to bind you together, and you’ll cease to be the person who’s reading this post.
So I conclude that the only alternatives are unbearable boredom, endless dementia, or death. Given those alternatives, I’ll take death.
