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Monday, 2022 October 24, 22:32 — fantasies

upload/resurrection fantasy, again

Previous version.

If your thousands of instances are linked in a line, the youngest and eldest are affected only very slowly by blending (if the middle is not to be hugely overrepresented); that is why I came up with daily sex-switching. The deletion of one avatar each night is also implied by the merging.

But if you start with two copies of the chain, linked at matching ends to make a loop, then no deletion is necessary and the degree of blending can be the same all around; each-you imports yesterday’s memory from your clockwise and counterclockwise neighbors alternately, with a weight of 1/3 or less. A permanent body has social advantages, so I drop the automatic switching.

If a body dies, voluntarily or otherwise, an irregularity in the blending flows out, becoming smaller at each step. Why would you kill one of your bodies voluntarily? For one thing, I mean to keep the idea of alternating sexes around the loop, and you might find living as the wrong sex, even half the (subjective) time, intolerable. (I believe I am otherwise; else would I have the idea?)

If the friendly(?) aliens’ goal is to merge all of humanity into one meta-mind (think Childhood’s End), your two strands are joined only at the elder end; your baby ends are linked instead to other strands, typically of very distant cultures.

What if your private worldlet has no adults because you died as a minor? Some of everyone’s instances – would every third be enough? – ought to live in a shared world, each in a different town (though all near each other).

2022 Nov 04: I made a more stable page collecting my thoughts from this thread.

Thursday, 2021 December 30, 16:14 — fantasies

utopia, population one in many

So here is the current version of my upload/resurrection fantasy, as if anyone cares. ( . . more . . )

Saturday, 2016 August 20, 19:45 — fantasies

To Your Scattered Memories Go

Philip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld series (which I’ve mentioned before, upon rereading the first volume) begins with every human who ever died waking up on an artificial planet, resurrected as young adults (unless they died younger). Fashions in scientifictional resurrection have changed since 1971, so here’s how I might do it, given a boundless supply of handwavium. ( . . more . . )