This was really good and definitely made me think about how I might live in such a scenario. I would probably go all in on frequent redaction and just lean hard on external memory storage to make up the difference. I already barely remember anything from even ten years ago and rely mostly on external memory for everything, I have a strong ability to acausally coordinate with myself across time, so I’m not worried about different iterations of me going off course in ways I wouldn’t endorse. If you have a strong enough exomemory system you can effectively just freeze your age groundhog-day style and rely on the work you did before each redaction to keep carrying you forward. This does require a strong ability to log and rely information but it seems very manageable, and once I’ve lived long enough for direct mind-computer interfacing I can just back up my memories, redact, and then download them again.
That is an interesting approach. I would be worried that transmitting the relevant facts down from you to you but without the lived experience might do strange things to your personality. As an extreme example , you wake up one morning and your beloved partner is gone, but your past self has provided a convenient dossier on how she was a complete monster and breaking up with her was totally correct. It reminds me a little of the relay-solving study someone shared a while ago (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DWgWbXRfXLGHPgZJM/solving-math-problems-by-relay), although for life, not problem solving. I suppose once your memory uploader/downloader system works then you are sorted, although at that point maybe you can run your mind in software, so your body becomes more like a piece of hardware you sometimes use.
Yeah, intertemporal trust and coordination become hugely important. Lots of ‘scalable alignment’ strategies are relevant, recursively delegating yourself tasks or summarizing your progress so far. An inhuman level of flexibility would also help, instantly grieving your old circumstances then adapting to the new ones.
Can you be confident that your past self knew what they were doing when they dropped you in this situation? Or that your future selves will develop things the way you expect them to? You could choose to deliberately and repeatedly lie to yourself. Picture Susan writing a note, “exciting new job tomorrow!”—each night realizing the truth, but deciding to enjoy her fantasy just one more day. This doesn’t have to be completely destructive though. Susan might have either internal or external thresholds, so she’ll let herself wallow in escapism for a month (or a century) but no longer than that.
Also, exomemory isn’t the only way to break the symmetry of repetition. Susan could have started each morning by flipping to a random sentence in a book, or rolling a few high-emotional-variance activity dice, etc.
Things get especially scary if you’re unsure whether your exomemory has been tampered with by somebody else. The domestic abuse here was relatively mild—Jane could have tried a hundred different times to manipulate Susan into a specific outcome. Anyone on a staggered timescale from you can attempt those kind of brute-force attacks.
Alternatively, reliable social supports who have different memory windows than you would make everything so much easier. If Susan and Jane had a better relationship with one another, they could have had a conversation like “you seem to be stuck in a rut, let’s talk this through and change something.”
However...‘reliable’ leaves a ton of messy wiggle room. Which versions of yourself are they cooperating with, which of your layered ongoing commitments do they respect? What if you ask them to keep secrets from your future iterations? Your full life is vast and ancient, your locally-available context each day is tiny and carefully curated. Part of what makes a friend different from a private notebook is that they can make independent judgements about which pieces of your past you need to be aware of today.
You can have super strong deference towards your local past selves, while still doing your own (random?) global spot-checks. Verify that page 18 of the daily dossier is factually true. Check that sub-sub-plan 5j still makes sense. Semi-regularly re-evaluate old habits, old preferences, old relationships, so that you aren’t just coasting on momentum. Project management on thousand year scales despite constantly resetting.
All of this is much, much easier to do if you prepare ahead of time, which Jane didn’t. But I agree with slimepriestess that we already kinda do this stuff in ordinary life. Decade by decade, day by day, or shorter—“redaction frequency” rhymes with “attention span” and “working memory size.”
My trick for ensuring atemporal coordination between selves is to run a recursive-extrapolative process on my sense of self out into the furthest extreme i can push it, constructing the happiest most idealized version of self that exists in the best possible future, and then use that model to step backwards into the current situation. What would the future god version of me want me to do here? Thus all instances of me are planning based on that furthest future instance of me, the timeless god version that took the best outcomes and already won, we all coordinate off the same template, the “do what God says template” and that seems to do a good job of keeping all my various timeslices oriented in the same direction.
This was really good and definitely made me think about how I might live in such a scenario. I would probably go all in on frequent redaction and just lean hard on external memory storage to make up the difference. I already barely remember anything from even ten years ago and rely mostly on external memory for everything, I have a strong ability to acausally coordinate with myself across time, so I’m not worried about different iterations of me going off course in ways I wouldn’t endorse. If you have a strong enough exomemory system you can effectively just freeze your age groundhog-day style and rely on the work you did before each redaction to keep carrying you forward. This does require a strong ability to log and rely information but it seems very manageable, and once I’ve lived long enough for direct mind-computer interfacing I can just back up my memories, redact, and then download them again.
That is an interesting approach. I would be worried that transmitting the relevant facts down from you to you but without the lived experience might do strange things to your personality. As an extreme example , you wake up one morning and your beloved partner is gone, but your past self has provided a convenient dossier on how she was a complete monster and breaking up with her was totally correct. It reminds me a little of the relay-solving study someone shared a while ago (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DWgWbXRfXLGHPgZJM/solving-math-problems-by-relay), although for life, not problem solving. I suppose once your memory uploader/downloader system works then you are sorted, although at that point maybe you can run your mind in software, so your body becomes more like a piece of hardware you sometimes use.
Yeah, intertemporal trust and coordination become hugely important. Lots of ‘scalable alignment’ strategies are relevant, recursively delegating yourself tasks or summarizing your progress so far. An inhuman level of flexibility would also help, instantly grieving your old circumstances then adapting to the new ones.
Can you be confident that your past self knew what they were doing when they dropped you in this situation? Or that your future selves will develop things the way you expect them to? You could choose to deliberately and repeatedly lie to yourself. Picture Susan writing a note, “exciting new job tomorrow!”—each night realizing the truth, but deciding to enjoy her fantasy just one more day. This doesn’t have to be completely destructive though. Susan might have either internal or external thresholds, so she’ll let herself wallow in escapism for a month (or a century) but no longer than that.
Also, exomemory isn’t the only way to break the symmetry of repetition. Susan could have started each morning by flipping to a random sentence in a book, or rolling a few high-emotional-variance activity dice, etc.
Things get especially scary if you’re unsure whether your exomemory has been tampered with by somebody else. The domestic abuse here was relatively mild—Jane could have tried a hundred different times to manipulate Susan into a specific outcome. Anyone on a staggered timescale from you can attempt those kind of brute-force attacks.
Alternatively, reliable social supports who have different memory windows than you would make everything so much easier. If Susan and Jane had a better relationship with one another, they could have had a conversation like “you seem to be stuck in a rut, let’s talk this through and change something.”
However...‘reliable’ leaves a ton of messy wiggle room. Which versions of yourself are they cooperating with, which of your layered ongoing commitments do they respect? What if you ask them to keep secrets from your future iterations? Your full life is vast and ancient, your locally-available context each day is tiny and carefully curated. Part of what makes a friend different from a private notebook is that they can make independent judgements about which pieces of your past you need to be aware of today.
You can have super strong deference towards your local past selves, while still doing your own (random?) global spot-checks. Verify that page 18 of the daily dossier is factually true. Check that sub-sub-plan 5j still makes sense. Semi-regularly re-evaluate old habits, old preferences, old relationships, so that you aren’t just coasting on momentum. Project management on thousand year scales despite constantly resetting.
All of this is much, much easier to do if you prepare ahead of time, which Jane didn’t. But I agree with slimepriestess that we already kinda do this stuff in ordinary life. Decade by decade, day by day, or shorter—“redaction frequency” rhymes with “attention span” and “working memory size.”
...uhh anyways, cool story thanks lol
My trick for ensuring atemporal coordination between selves is to run a recursive-extrapolative process on my sense of self out into the furthest extreme i can push it, constructing the happiest most idealized version of self that exists in the best possible future, and then use that model to step backwards into the current situation. What would the future god version of me want me to do here? Thus all instances of me are planning based on that furthest future instance of me, the timeless god version that took the best outcomes and already won, we all coordinate off the same template, the “do what God says template” and that seems to do a good job of keeping all my various timeslices oriented in the same direction.