How do I back-up myself?
Reading a Reddit thread about the experiences of people who woke up after a long coma, got me thinking. If something similar happens to me, I might wake up with a significant portion of my memories gone (not to mention changes of personality). The question is, how do I make sure that the amnesiac future-me will continue to pursue the goals of present-me?
This can be divided into 3 sub-questions:
How to determine what goals are worth transmitting to my future-self?
How to actually transmit those goals?
How to persuade future-self that the goals are worth pursuing?
Any suggestions?
PS. You may ask, why am I focusing on goals? I’ll just let agent Smith speak for me.
I think you should also consider whether this is a worthwhile use of your time and mental energy. Falling into and then waking up from a long-term coma is exceedingly rare, but making sure your goals are transmitted may be a relatively time-consuming and difficult endeavor. And, as others noted, those goals may end up being irrelevant to future-you and the future-world. Couldn’t those hours be better used working towards your goals now, or (for example) becoming a safer driver so that you don’t fall into a coma in the first place?
Think about what kind of influences from a past-you with quite different goals from present-you would cause you to follow their goals instead of your own.
This is a great comment. I actually have no idea, as I don’t keep a diary of goals or something similar. Maybe I should start.
I felt this was related to a similar process that happened to me, and may be helpful for this question here: Rewriting My Source Code Didn`t Work
Consider reading the Luminosity sequence, specifically this post.
You make a GIANT Beeminder.
...you probably think I’m kidding, but i’m really not. This is just a weird case of the general problem: “how do I get other agents to do what I want”. Assuming you can’t reprogram them (and in real life, you kinda can), the answer is always “create incentives”.
Simplest way to do this is trade, or the evil counterpart to trade: blackmail. Money usually works if you’re dealing with a human. Beeminder is one existing tool for engaging in trade/blackmail with your future self.
(Just to make sure, this is a game and you aren’t actually doing this, right?)
I personally went through 5 days of artificial coma once. The memories of a few hours before the start of the coman where gone with it.
The fact that the last thing I remembered wasn’t the last thing I consciously experience was hard to digest.
In such a situation I think social relations are very important. I was weak and therefore dependend on other people. If I truely lost memories talking with another person about my life goals would probably be the easiest way to recover them.
I think people in this thread are coming at the problem from the wrong standpoint.
Once I was trapped on an airplane and had to watch the movie The Vow—sadly, they only had the 2012 romantic drama rather than the beautiful cinematic celebration of the strength of the Soviet people.
Basically, the plot of this movie is that a couple is in love, and then one of them forgets the other. The viewer is made to sympathize with the lover whose partner is now effectively dead, and the story ends with the couple re-uniting (this should not be a spoiler because it should be entirely predictable to anyone who can predict the sun rising). This is meant to be seen as good.
If commenters in this thread were watching that movie, would they think “Man, it’s so dumb of them to want their past self to influence their future self. How do convince someone totally different from you to do things that you want them to do?”
The reason why this is actually a much easier problem is that if I suddenly lost two years of my memory, I would share N-2 years of memory with the person who I had been a day before losing those memories. I do not share N-2 years of memory with anyone else.
If life is a search process, then a backup is just a list of visited nodes that resulted in a “hit”, possibly with a blacklist of nodes that lead us down a garden path. For example, if I were to write a letter to myself to be delivered if I lost one year’s worth of memory, it would contain:
A list of all relevant computer passwords I currently have
The decision process I eventually used to come to a decision I liked about where to go to grad school
Narrative stories about several experiences I had which caused me to believe certain things
The distilled morals of the stories in #3
Of course, this would be highly compressed. Since I don’t know when I’m going to lose memory, it would probably be best to just do #3 on a daily basis, for the delta of experiences since the last day (people call this a “journal”). I think I can generally trust this record to move myself from a single day to the single next day, so by induction this works for an arbitrary number of days, though if I lost ten years it would be almost intractable to get them back.
After reading that, I came up with what something that seems like either a fourth sub question, or something that relates back to the first sub question.
4: What if, in the future when you wake up, some or all of your current goals actually are either irrelevant, or impossible? Do you have enough goals of enough different types that you can cope with this?
This allows a type of something that you might call goal insurance, to avoid problems of anything from “My goals all require working limbs and none of my limbs work, my goals all involved traveling to famous landmarks which have been demolished, my goals all involved seeing these people, all of whom are now dead, my goals all involved solving these societal problems, which are now solved.”
On the other hand, if you have all four of those types of goals, it seems much less likely for you to wake up and find:
1: You have no working limbs AND
2: The landmarks had been demolished AND
3: The people are all dead AND
4: All of the societal problems are solved.
This is why it seems to relate back to subquestion 1. In my mind, you would want to try to transmit ALL your goals to your future self, and you would also want to include some kind of priorities with them so you know approximately what order to do them in, since there might be goals you would want to be reminded of every day, and other goals that you would just want to do whenever you could get around to them.
Edit: Typo Fix
How do you convince a person you’ve never met with memory loss and personality changes you can’t predict, to do things that you want? That sounds hard.
You might have more leverage taking over existing people; then at least you can do it in real time with feedback.
You might try writing things down in a journal as a general mnemonic strategy. You future self will then be able to understand you, though perhaps they won’t care.
Surround yourself with influences you approve of.
If you’ve got a lot of chess books, chess sets, and chess-playing friends and family, then if you lost your memory you still might take up chess since it’s all around you.
That is basically the same approach by which we continue to live within our children. We surround them with usness.
You are imagining a worst case scenario. I think in most cases the future-me will still have significant similarity to present-me, which should make things easier.
There is a practical problem here. Assuming future-me forgot about the journal, how do I remind him? A tattoo, maybe? :-)
Give that task to a friend that you trust.
The goals of current-you are the result of your current situation and your current cognitive state. I’m not sure it makes sense to make a backup of those goals (except maybe to use the process of writing them down as a tool to determine what’s important to you and why). Your future-self amnesiac is not likely to identify with them anymore than a random person on the street.
I believe the central mistake here is to assume that goals in of themselves have more value than the thought processes that went into deriving them.
That said, if you want to convince your future self of something, it’s probably a good idea to go about it in exactly the same way you would as if you were going to convince other random people. Write a book, record videos—basically make your case by illustrating the rationale for your proposals.
All in all, the amnesiac version of yourself—if this can even be called “you” anymore—is pretty unlikely to be a good receptacle for your goals. It would have to share a lot with your current self in order to provide a fertile ground for your current ideas, and if it did you probably wouldn’t have to backup your goals explicitly anyway.
Chances are that after a coma, you’ll either be sufficiently yourself eventually or you’ll have some form of brain trauma that results in permanent impairment. In both cases, a condensed goal import is neither feasible nor needed.
Fully functional, permanent amnesiacs with the ability to understand new information are very rare.
Why do you believe the goals the amnesiac future-you will select will be inferior to the goals of the present-you?
Ends always justify means. Means, however, can achieve goals. ‘My goal is the end of murder’ can be achieved through killing everyone but yourself (your death won’t be murder, whatever it might be). ‘I will not kill to achieve any goal’ moves the world slightly toward a no-murder contition.
That having been said, keeping a diary and having children are some field tested near substitutes.
Considering the goals you’ve held in the past, does now-you value what past-you did? You’ll run into numerous identity related issues if you think of yourself as a point in time rather than a pathway through it, so the question is important. The generalized problem here is utility function imprinting, and human utilities tend to be biologically complicated.