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.
These ones expect to be “reborn” indefinitely, with memory. These ones expect some bad existences but probably on the whole existence is good.
…IF it is just your body coming back and nothing or your mind that it isn’t me coming back.
There are already way too many humans on this planet now. That would just mean that this planet would have 120 Billion people on it.
Not everyone. Just you.
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Reminds me of the end of the game SOMA.
what if you have a genetic disease that is just going to come back over and over again
Sure, might as well
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?
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.
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.
nah humanity is one of the most disgusting things ever. Im actuslly very eager to see the end of my life cause then I wont have to deal with all this genocidal , selfish, illogical bullshit from people.
Also whu would I do this without keeping my memories? Absolutely not.
I see your point. We are a very short sighted species.
Edit: Just the physical you, genetic and presumably epigenetic, no memory.
Without the memories, that simply wouldn’t be me though. After all, twins that share the entirety of their genetic material aren’t the same person either.
I also just wouldn’t do it, my genetics aren’t anything special that’s worth preserving.
I would be like the Avatar and wondering what my previous versions of me did. Would be so weird but would be interesting.
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
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.
They might be overestimating how many of us wanted to be born the first time.
