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.
I don’t know. I would want to die entirely so I can be reborn as something or someone else.
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.
Sure, might as well
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.
Reminds me of the end of the game SOMA.
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.
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.
No memory = no point in doing it.
If you don’t remember something, it might as well have never happened.
Besides, I’m already sick of this time around, and my genetics were fucked to begin with. Give me a redo with my memories and a new body, and then we might have something.
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.
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?
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.
True.
Not without keeping my memory, no. I definitely wish for immortality, just from a curiosity perspective. I don’t think I necessarily deserve it, I am just so interested in seeing how things turn out in the future.
I would be like the Avatar and wondering what my previous versions of me did. Would be so weird but would be interesting.
If my memories are kept, I can only imagine how terrifying it would be to fall asleep and die one night, only to wake up to having zero bodily control and everything is just blury just a foot away, low resolution, and seeing in grayscale. That would be terrifying, so no unless I don’t remember a thing. Then it wouldn’t matter what my answer is now because I wouldn’t remember it.
Oh hell naw.
Depends on if you keep your memories or not each rebirth.
How would this change your answer? I fear the thought of carrying trauma forever.
It’s the difference between reliving the exact same life repeatedly with no knowledge of any previous lives. This could actually be happening for you right now, but you’d never know. So, what’s the point? Retaining memories lets you differentiate between the iterations with accumulated trauma, joy, loss, sense of renewal.
If this topic interests you, I recommend Replay by Ken Grimwood.
Replay is one of the best books ever written, fight me!
I think I’d fight with you on this point.
Ever read This Perfect Day by Levin? It gave me similar vibes, although the story is very different.
Thanks for the recommendation! Will check out.
Thanks for the reco!
All that time to work on your trauma? Sign me up!
Would be very bizarre to be like 15yo though, would you like get born in a new family every time? Weird af.
Yeah. You die, become a baby and get adopted (hopefully) by whoever finds you.
If you die in a remote area, do you just revert to baby…then no one finds you, you die in a remote area, revert to baby, then no one finds you, you die in a remote area, revert to baby ad infinitum?
Don’t drown…
I think so.
I don’t want to make the same mistakes for infinity, at least this way I could make new mistakes for infinity!
Like groundhog day or any of the other time loop movies. If you had the ability to accumulate knowledge over lifetimes, you could progress to incredible levels of understanding and ability.
Imagine spending a lifetime to learn an instrument, then repeat until you are a one person master band.
It has the benefit of immortality to accomplish things, without the issues of being going crazy from being 52 for a thousand years. You’ll be young again, and experience the joys of youth, the pain of heartbreak again as a teebs, your first child, etc. Or spend one life being reckless, then another being a parent, another a space explorer, etc.
All true. Every life would be lived anew but times change, so you would see the futures beyond a single human life.
Even if the new body and I are genetically identical, if it doesn’t have my memories, it is not “me”.
I wonder. You hear about twins seperated at birth that end up doing similar things.
That is a real fear. But part of trauma are the neural pathways it forms. So, that creates a problem whereas remembering a thing as having happened doesn’t have that same effect.
I had not considered the distinction. Interesting.
Why would it matter if you don’t remember?
