To be honest, looking back at that from three months on I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking. I do still think there’s a lot of interest and story potential in a magical item that allows you to edit your own mind to some extent: if pulling out memories also removes your associations with them, you don’t just have external storage, you have something very close to a general personality editor.
I’d actually be a little surprised if it doesn’t come up down the road—but the specific application that 20110929!Gest suggested up there looks far-fetched to me now. You’d have to have a very good idea of what’s linked to what in your head, and you’d probably have to make some pretty extensive changes to change your answer to a Newcomblike problem. Enough to make the whole operation uncertain and rather dangerous. I don’t think I’d try it, anyway.
To be honest, looking back at that from three months on I’m not sure exactly what I was thinking. I do still think there’s a lot of interest and story potential in a magical item that allows you to edit your own mind to some extent: if pulling out memories also removes your associations with them, you don’t just have external storage, you have something very close to a general personality editor.
I’d actually be a little surprised if it doesn’t come up down the road—but the specific application that 20110929!Gest suggested up there looks far-fetched to me now. You’d have to have a very good idea of what’s linked to what in your head, and you’d probably have to make some pretty extensive changes to change your answer to a Newcomblike problem. Enough to make the whole operation uncertain and rather dangerous. I don’t think I’d try it, anyway.
Yeah, I agree with this.