Following up: Immortality
I’m grateful to Mark Young for sending detailed comments on my two posts concerning immortality and memory. Emails from readers reassure me that my writing isn’t just going into the void.
In my posts, I argued that for you to live forever, given what physics predicts about the distant future, you must be able to survive without a body. Once unembodied, you won’t have the spatiotemporal continuity that you currently depend on when you claim to be the same person as the toddler shown in old family photos. You’ll have only psychological continuity, in particular continuity of memories, to preserve you.
In his comments, Mark described a way in which you could retain memories from your earthly existence indefinitely far into the future. The proposed way requires the regular enough occurrence of events that reinforce those old memories. Even so, I can’t see how retaining just one or two earthly memories could preserve your personal identity, i.e., make the unembodied you the same person as the person now reading this post. Instead, the unembodied you must retain sufficiently many earthly memories (however many that is).
And here endless existence will take its toll. Eons into the future, as you continue to add memories to your limited storage, something has to give. Your memories ‒ earthly, recent, in-between, or all of those ‒ must become ever more sparse. Such thinning out of your memories is inevitable when unceasing supply meets limited capacity.
This thinning out will put the squeeze on your earthly memories. You’ll retain enough of them to remain immortal only if you lose other memories. I’m inclined to think that this thinning out will eventually spell the end of your identity, but even if it doesn’t you’ll become increasingly disintegrated, as a person, without limit. Such disintegration strikes me as undesirable. So I conclude that the immortality that many people say they desire isn’t desirable even if it’s possible.
