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Comment by tyler | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I'm not particularly picky about my forms of immortality.

Seems like immortality without memory is useless, so really that's the question.

Depends on whether or not you can selectively preserve memory. If could be useful if it acted sort of like amnesia where you retain things like muscle memory and factual memory, but not personal memory. Though I wouldn't necessarily look forward to the prospect of losing my life experiences.

Makes you wonder if immortality without memory is even immortality at all.

It still is immortality. In a world with a large population we might think more about what makes us individuals as what we wish to preserve, but from a survival-of-the-species point of view, it is immortality.

Write stuff down! BAM, problem solved. (Seriously speaking, consider the sci-fi short story possibilities of an individual who had to reboot every 80 years or so, but who had had access to a computer and competent legal/investment advice for roughly the same timescale as the present-day Catholic Church has been in operation. Age 0 through 24 is essentially one long data dump, but he's gotten pretty good at constructing his curricula, given a few millenia to practice it. They call him Jerome the Eldest, he is richer than most nations, and he lives life depressed and alone, until one day...)

Until one day, there is a fire and all his computers with memories are burned beyond repair. And that too on the day of a reboot...

Luckily, he was storing everything in "the cloud!", so it's all ok.

Gives a whole new meaning to "you have your head in the clouds"...

Keeping a journal probably wouldn't help. Take the case of Clive Wearing, who developed anterograde amnesia after a bout of encephalitis. He can conduct an orchestra, but he can't remember what he did 10 minutes before.

He keeps a journal. It's a timestamped log of him saying that he's "finally awake" over and over.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Wearing

In addition to robbing you of your past, amnesia makes the future unknowable. Amnesia traps you perpetually in the present with no way of improving it.

But unless I missed something, amnesia doesn't have anything to do with the subject. In this case you don't forget what you did 10 minutes ago; you forget what you did 80 years ago (which I suppose most people do anyway).

Yes, I agree this has gone off-topic. This was a rebuttal to patio11's remark that immortality without memory could be compensated for by writing everything down.

Basically, once we can clone humans, which we're pretty close to having the tech for now, this would be possible.

Such is the case for the leaders in the Æon Flux movie.

"The City and the Stars" by Arthur C. Clarke includes that concept—humans edit their memories before their death and recover them after being born again. I recommend reading it, just for the extreme transhumanism within the story.

I wonder if this kind of immortality would be that great. Most of my motivations to do things now come from the time limit factor. If I were immortal with unlimited memory, I think I'd just procrastinate and continue to postpone all the tasks I have to accomplish just because I can.

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