I would be happier if I could tailor those ten people’s memories a bit, so I could have my parents happily married, and my best friend never married the shrew that kept me from seeing him.
I don’t think you understand the OP. There isn’t any conscious download of you going on. It’s basically you, living inside a magic box. All characters are simulated. YOU have full knowledge of this. There is no question of who is real and who is NOT real.
And no, holodecks can’t make you immortal.
Wait. How do I know I’m not just one of someone else’s ten?
How are biological functions like food and water - and waste - handled? Or are we going to be in a mini-Matrix?
I’m pretty sure all of you are just part of the simulation.
You have complete control over programming.
I prefer reality; my imagination can be a little darker than I would like to live in.
Positives: freedom from morality in my interactions with other “people,” no need to go to work if I don’t want to, never worrying about money issues, unlimited time for reading.
Negatives: never being able to escape the knowledge that my wife and friends aren’t really my wife and friends. Better than operating solely off of my memories of them, but worse in the knowledge that they aren’t genuine. I’m guessing I’d eventually end up avoiding them and trying to make new “friends” of the lesser simulations.
Overall, I voted “Meh.”
I suppose I’d be better off that Tom Hanks talking to a volleyball or Will Smith hanging out with mannequins at a video store, but that’s not setting the bar very high.
I was told, isolation, no outside contact. You may never get any new kindle downloads.
Sounds like hell. I’d be separated from my wife and kids. Having simulacra of them wouldn’t make it better; it would make it worse, as it would highlight the fact that i was missing out on the real thing.
The movie “Star Trek: Generations” addresses the question of whether you would rather live for eternity in a paradise provided for you by someone or something verssus dying a final death in the service of making a difference to your fellow living beings. Both Piccard and Kirk chose to leave the paradise because it was fake and meaningless and go back to life and make a difference assuming death would be final.
I would choose to fight the tough battles if I could get the chance to fulfill my potential. But life for me at 60 is frittering away and no one seems interested in teaming up. So, wtf. I’d like to spend my days in a place where my fantasies could be realized. Sex, sex, and more sex.
Sure, but that assumes I’ve come anywhere near reading all of the literature in existence today, which I haven’t. I’m guessing everything up to the moment I go in would be available in the holodeck.
The holodeck could also provide replicator technology that would create actual food and water and recycle your waste.
I picked fight the hypothetical …
I would have to say it depends. I think the only way I would be happy living in the holodeck would be if it was using my husband as one of the preprogrammed, capturing his data just prior to his death - otherwise I really would not like to survive past his death.
I don’t assume that. I just think it’s a huge, depressing notion that you’d be put into this box, with no possibility of anything you do ever mattering to anyone again, and nothing that happens, or anyone else does, ever mattering to you.
It’s like the (apparent) fate of some of the AI characters in Greg Egan’s Permutation City. They tended to be, or go, insane.
A curious and relevant (I think) observation. Logically, the universe being really big and all and surely stuffed with sentience, the actions of an individual have a vanishingly small chance of affecting much more than a small circle of friends. And even the ripples of those effects are quickly overwhelmed by everyone else’s ripples as they plod through their own lives. And if that matters to you, life in or out of the box is so very nearly congruously meaningless to a meaningful portion of the universe (even the planet) as to be identical. At least in the box there is an opportunity to feel the illusion of meaning.
When I die, will my body be removed from the holodeck and my remaining relatives notified? I’d want a proper funeral.
:
When cares how small the ripples are? What matters to me most are my wife and kids. I would never choose to replace them with holographic fakes, no matter what level of luxury I’d get in return.
This describes life outside the box pretty well.
Just so we’re clear, the hypothetical isn’t a choice. It’s a situation that has been thrust upon you. The question now is: Can you ever be happy again?