Half a dozen or so years back, we had an interesting discussion on the now-defunct Amazon forums for Astlan.
The thread spanned over a thousand pages, and naturally wandered all over the heavens and hells.
One of the topics we touched was immortality, and the practicalities of living forever.
When we tell stories about human interactions, they have their foundations in certain unspoken assumptions about what it means to have a personality, how to express one, what the natural stages of human development are, the archetypes representing those, and finally, how great a reality TV show one can produce by exploiting people suffering of personality abnormalities.
At the border of human personalities, and what looks human but isn't, folklore tells us about immortal gods, vampires and zombies. Some contemporary authors have explored what long-lived vampires might think and say, but still on a human yardstick of a generation or a handful of generations.
Hard science fiction from the 60s to the 80s was hopeful, and attempted to consider what kinds of social changes might result from advances in the medical science. When microprocessors came out, and the uploading of human personalities into computers and AIs became a topic, we were in full blown cold war mode, and science fiction spent most of its energy on projecting cold war themes onto the canvas of futurism.
Iain M. Banks was an exception with his optimism and imagining of interstellar utopia, but in his universe, Minds were explicitly not human, and his stories were more about adventure than what-ifs.
What is it like to be human, but to live for millions or billions of years?
Can you be considered to be one person across this span? How widely will your personality vary?
Can you have long-term friends? Can you have long-term enemies?
In that Amazon thread, we discussed how the long-lived have to reset their personalities occasionally in the Astlan universe. Perhaps the concept has still evolved after that?
The key question for the formulation of the Astlan universe is whether the long-lived keep evolving their personalities, as well as their strategic and tactical objectives.
Imagine knowing that one day you will totally reverse your beliefs of what you sincerely believe to be in your best interests today.
In our everyday human lives, most of us have the core belief that the person we can ultimately count on, is ourselves. It's usually not even mentioned, as it's so obvious.
We don't live with the absolute certainty that our worst enemy, who is certain to undo our most sacred pursuits with complete access and perfect insider information, is ourselves after so many new life experiences and personality changes.
What would you do against such an adversary?
Would you stop considering long-term pursuits as something worth a serious investment?
Would you force yourself into a personality statis? Stop new experiences, or stop learning from them?
Would you create a secret service inside your own organization, to protect the interests of now-you against future-you? Even if that meant forcing someone else into a personality stasis? Or would a bureaucracy do the job impersonally?
Edited by user Tuesday, May 29, 2018 8:02:51 PM(UTC)
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