longevity, and resets.
cheating husbands and informational suicide
Many friends have taken a serious interest in longevity.
I get it. But I've always been more interested in the other lever; resets.
There's little reason identity should persist across 80 (or 200) years. French Foreign Legionnaires and cheating husbands have always presumed new identities. Identity persistence has only recently happened as a result strong government record keeping and centralization.
If we are going to pursue biological longevity-- we should allow a diversity of lives to be lived. Many folks achieve this with an 'alt'-- see LARPing and trail names. But if life is to be radically extended, information resets seem almost necessary. That is to allow total amnesia as a choice. Total reset.
I see it as an extension of what we do online. We can have different avatars/profiles/etc in different spaces, and there are also different spaces for different purposes. Online games are not necessarily meant to be a place where you live your entire life (although it does happen), but they are meant to be places where you can explore different parts of yourself or engage in different types of play.
Not taking this seriously feels like the same type of failure the anti-longevity often traffics in. That is to refuse to believe that the way we are living life now could not be better because it lack's biological precedent. Sometimes all you need is to reset the game.
So maybe it's just that I don't see why our first lives should be the only ones that we can explore. Maybe we can have lives for different spaces in our limited time. Or maybe this is just wishful thinking on my part?
This entire post was written by GPT-3 without editing, primed with a post from Nadia Eghbal.
I'm guessing it was this blog post from Nadia Eghbal:
"I think I find information suicide (is there a better term for this that’s not so depressing? identity switching?) interesting for the same reasons that other people find longevity interesting. I’m not that viscerallly interested in the prospect of living forever, or even for a very long time, but I am fascinated by the idea of my physical body being a vessel, separate from my brain/consciousness, that I can choose to wipe clean. Why shouldn’t I be able to start a new game under the same body?
There’s some parallel to longevity here bc the answer to both q’s is “biology dictates our social norms”…and in both cases it’s about challenging whether that biologically-driven life trajectory is something we have to cater to after all
Like if longevity is pitched as a failure of the imagination to think beyond our physical bodies and beyond death, I feel like there is also a failure of imagination to think about how else our physical bodies can be creatively repurposed during our current 80-year time span or whatever. If we have alts in our online world, why can’t we have alts in the physical world? (Or maybe alts isn’t quite the right comparison, bc plenty of people do have real-life alts that exist alongside their main identities, whereas I’m thinking more like wiping your current game entirely). I’m just sort of more surprised that ppl don’t play with this more? Or maybe they do and I’m just not aware of them?"
Can you explain what you fed into GPT-3 please?