If you could take the entire life experience (no picking and choosing the best parts!) of a person, living or dead, and experience and remember everything that person felt, who would you choose and why? When I people watch sometimes, I like to think of how a person’s entire life choices brought them to that point at that moment (people do that right?). Sometimes its mundane, sometimes its fantastic. It would be cool if someday, science can allow us to download and replay back our experiences directly in our brains and even more awesome if we could do it with other people’s so you can truly walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.
Here are the rules: If its a living person, you get their entire experience up until now, nothing from the future that hasn’t happened yet. Also, if you pick someone who had a mental illness, you get to experience what that illness would be like from your (presumably healthy) mind. So you’d know how a schizophrenic person sees life, but you can put aside the debilitating distractions that probably occurs on a daily basis with them. On the other hand, you also don’t get to experience the memories of people when they were infants, before they are really capable of having memories (so no birth canal trauma, eww).
For me, as far as dead people goes, I wouldn’t want to go back too far. The past was a fucked up place and I don’t want to live somewhere without indoor plumbing. I’d pick someone like Einstein or Tesla. It must be incredible to be in the mind of someone that smart and that accomplished. Another choice would be Wilt Chamberlain. Big, strong, sports star, great life, had sex with 20000 women, what’s not to like?
For living people, probably a movie star or sexy pop star. I think I would like to experience things as a woman though, not someone like Clooney or Brad Pitt. I think that would be really interesting if I could see what someone like Katy Perry or Jessica Biel sees in the mirror everyday, though I’d have to put up with Russell Brand for a while. Maybe someone younger who hasn’t dated around a lot.
And while you’re experiencing years and years of the other person’s life, what’s happening in your own life? Or are you expected to experience both simultaneously?
As long as it is only temporary, I think it would be fascinating to see myself through my significant other’s eyes, and what it was I did to make her fall in love with me so I can keep doing it.
I was thinking about a VERY attractive woman, who is, umm, “experienced”, but without too much crazy attached. So Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, etc. are out. Angelina Jolie would be interesting. Maybe Anne Hathaway. Jennifer Lawrence? Scarlett Johansson? Penelope Cruz? Sofia Vergara?
Stephen Hawking. I can’t imagine having that mind in that body and not being filled with murderous rage. Being there knowing it’s happening and being unable to stop it.
And, for me, knowing I get to leave it. The perspective would probably very incredibly enlightening.
It seems to me you’re just getting the memories, you don’t actually experience their life. Not the same thing at all.
If it’s memories, I probably would just pick someone historically significant in the remote past in order to bring informations historians lack. Maybe even some random neanderthal guy, so that we would know how they lived (assuming scientists would have a reason to believe me).
If it’s experiencing their life, forget about famous people. I’ll take the guy who had the most hot sex and other pleasurable experiences.
Well, it would probably be my maternal grandmother. She lived an incredibly long life, just short of 108 years.
A lot of joy, a lot of sadness(the death of a child at birth)
But what I’d like to experience was the feeling of her religious conversion. See, she was unchurched until she started dating the man who became my grandfather. After they were married she was baptized and confirmed, and was a faithful member of her church for eighty years.
I was raised in church, I never knew anything outside of it. And I’ve always wondered about the feelings an adult convert experiences.
