The scenario is that by magical technology a scientist is willing to pay you to wipe your memory, but his device has enough fidelity to wipe one day at a time counting backwards (so you can’t wipe all memories at age 15 for example).
The scientist is capable of doing what he says he can do, he has no malign motives apart from his odd interest in studying human memory and there are no other unwanted side effects or dangers to the process, the lost memory also cannot be recovered by any means, its gone permanently.
He is willing to pay you at a rate of $250 per day, so wiping 30 days of memory you get $7500 in your hand, five years and its $465’000 and so on. He is a very rich man so there is no concern that you won’t get paid.
So how far back would you let him wipe your memory? Or would you let him do it at all?
Are skills and knowledge memory? If so, then nothing more than a few weeks. If only trivial day to day nonsense then I’d probably be willing to give up five years.
I’m not giving up a single memory, no way, no how. They’re an integral part of who I am.
And even if I was somewhat tempted, I’d need a life-changing payoff to make it worthwhile, and I have memories from this past spring and summer that are worth more to me than any amount of money.
Yeah, I’m in no dire need of money for any particular reason, and I have teenage kids, so to tempt me it’d have to be a life changing figure without extending more than a few months at most.
I’d say $1,000 a day is a starting point to even be interesting; probably $2,500 a day for me to sign up for, say, exchanging my last 2 weeks of memories for a new car or something. And even then it’s only because my last 2 weeks weren’t all that interesting, and if I could schedule this procedure for (say) this Friday, even better, I could take the next few days off from work just watching YouTube videos and reading novels and stuff.
I’m not sure. Maybe about the last 6 years. I’d miss the birth of my nephews, but with the extra money I could spend way more time with them for the rest of their lives. I could buy a cheap condo near where they lived, work part time and live off the interest, being able to visit my brother and his kids as much as I want (as opposed to maybe seeing them 2 week a year like I do now).
It’s not enough money to get me to wipe my memory. Even this week important things have happened that would be awkward to forget. In a slightly more normal time in my life I’d probably be willing to lose 3 months or so of recent memories but I’d need a massive improvement to my life if not retire immediately money for a year I’d need to never have to work again.
To work backwards I’d need $3 mil for a year so that works out to $8.5K/day. That seems a bit steep the lose the summer which in my head I pegged around $150K so I guess I need a sliding scale from $1,000/day to $10K depending on how far back I went.
They could have my last 10 years worth of memories. Sure there were some good and wonderful things that happened, but the bad outweighs them. The results of the good and wonderful things would still be here in the present so it’s not like the good things never happened. Just the memories would be lost and I’d be willing to get rid of them along with the horrible, heartbreaking ones. (Although the results of the horrible ones would still be around too!) And I could use the money to help with some of those awful things that happened.
Days. You go weeks and I’ll forget the loss of a couple dear friends and I don’t want that; the bad memory brought back a ton of good ones at all. There are big parts of the mid-70s that are fuzzy but I believe that was alcohol and drugs more than any cash benefit to myself.
