Hi in the past I imagined a future that included virtual reality and no ageing… the only problem I found was that after an eternity you’d be completely bored… I thought that it would be good it you could turn off some memories… including the memory that you were kind of like a god (being able to create whatever virtual reality scenario you could imagine)… then after a few years or when you “died” you could re-learn that you are god-like… or just become more powerful but not yet become aware of the full extent of your power.
Are there any sci-fi/fantasy novels like that? Or religions/philosophies? I think in Kabbalah Center it said that part of us is God and eventually we fit the pieces together like a jig-saw puzzle…
You’ve got something like that in Jonathan Lethem’s Gun, with Occasional Music, though the forgetfulness drug is more a method of social control than anything else.
I recall a short story that David Brin wrote that postulated that this reality was a simulation, that the reader was such an amnesiac transhuman, and that this was why we see no aliens. They reach a level of advancement & enhancement where they have exhausted all possible experiences in less than a single lifetime and to avoid going mad from boredom turn inward upon themselves in amnesiac virtual realities.
By book four of Frederick Pohl’s Heechee series (which begins with the book Gateway), humans have started to upload their consciousnesses into computer memory. It’s been a while, but I seem to remember that the system is set up for virtual amusements and experiences, with the uploaded people’s memories of those experiences set to degrade and eventually disappear so they can “do things again for the first time.”
so basically, in a world where you can make copies of yourself, reloading an old saved copy? incidentally you might as well create a new, separate you rather than giving up your current state.
What would that solve? You’d still be just as bored, but there’d be new clone of you from the past.
And, no, you’re not reloading a saved copy. You’re removing some files from your hard drive. You’d never be in the same state you were before. It would feel like you’d just forgotten something, not like you were a completely different person.
(Or, if you really want to think about it, you’d die, since there’s no continuity of consciousness between the two entities. The newer you would just cease to be. Kinda like that old transporter story where you get transported, and then realize that you’re the one still on the platform about to be killed, and not the one that got beamed to the other location.)
“They” They (Heinlein) - Wikipedia is the most direct example. There’s a hint of this idea in “Beyond this Horizon” and “Stranger in a Strange Land” as well.
Keith Laumer uses this idea as well in “Night of Delusions”
The stored intelligences retain continuity of personality, and can retain whatever memories they want to hang onto. So they don’t forget their children, but they can forget having gone hang-gliding or seeing Twilight.