Today morning, I chanced upon a thought experiment with a friend. It has been so long since one of those happened. The years of college, and then work, all cluttered the table with thoughts and discussions which felt quite removed from exploration of the unreasonable to stumble upon bits of peculiar realities.
The experiment started with a whim, and even I didn’t know it would continue to become what it is. I proposed that I am living for centuries and that all humans have fairly long lives. Yet they get a choice of readjusting their memories in a special way that could tamper with their understanding of time. Assuming that I chose otherwise, I was able to continue a conversation with someone who chose to tamper with their memory, creating the perfect A vs. B situation.
The question was how it could happen. So, we started laying the groundwork for it to make living across centuries a reality. First of all, adjusting the memory wouldn’t be a wipe-it-all event. It would be more like slicing or kneading the memory to play with elasticity, and here’s how it would look.
Person B who has been living for twenty decades would feel like he has only lived for two. For example, everything that you can remember, the memories of growing up, of last year, and of yesterday, have spanned over 200 years and you have aged very slowly. But you think it’s only been 20 years because of memory contraction. You think your body is changing yearly whereas it’s changing by the decade.
Another stark example would be supposing that yesterday happened over ten years but your memory got contracted and you thought it was one day. Your body and brain, even though feels like it aged by one day only, actually aged over ten years and still looks a day older because you have a long life span.
Then, came the question of surroundings. What happens to the things, buildings, plants, and trees around us? And what about clocks? Are they also ageing so slowly?
We can solve the problem of clocks through relativity. Since what appears like a day is actually spanned over ten years, the clock also moves slowly and only appears like a day to us. And to solve for all things, which also have to age slowly to sync with the readjusted memory, we have to make it so that only an observer outside this universe would be able to see the slowness of this Universe.
At this stage in the discussion, it changed the premise for memory readjustment. If everything around us was moving as per a slow timeline, we wouldn’t need re-adjusted memories. We would naturally move slowly and appear to have a really long life to an entity outside our Universe. But to continue the thought experiment, let’s assume that we do shorten our memories to perceive time as faster than it actually is in our Universe.
So, everybody on this planet is very old, but only those that choose to remember the knowledge of time and the complete set of memories are actually mentally old. Because if you forget what your mind learned and experienced, you are only a baby. Like a blank slate.
That led to an epiphany that we are only as old as the experiences we have. More experiences we choose to accumulate during our lifetimes and the more we learn from them, the wiser and mentally older we are.
Person B then said, what’s so special about it and it’s more like a curse if most people are opting out of having the memory of slower time perception. My counter-statement was that I never said it was special and that B assumed it because of the concept’s similarity with immortality which is often assumed to be special.
Immortality is mostly considered to be a curse on deeper analysis. That’s a whole other subject, but let’s keep going by considering that immortality is indeed unfavourable, traumatic, and against our best interests.
Perhaps that’s why animals evolved to die. In the bigger picture, everything might have an end date because it's the best solution for stability. Like suns dying makes the universe stable, and the universe dying makes something larger, that we don’t know of yet, more stable.
Now, it can be said that having the option to re-adjust memories is like the ability to choose mortality even while you are immortal. Considering humanity cannot remember when it began and dropped into this universe one day and chose to erase or re-write memories, it will be like comparing really long lives with immortal lives. This makes it a comparison between two infinities, making the two concepts of long life and immortal life ultimately behave the same way.
Now consider the parallel with evolution. It is true that humanity cannot remember where it began because it never had a clear beginning. We have evolved across time through different shapes and sizes, and most strikingly, we have actually evolved from things we consider to be lifeless. Like water and air. Like hydrogen and helium.
Now comes the parallel with memories. The button of erasing memories from one life is triggered when the life chooses to create a new life. The choice to create a new generation is essentially triggering the choice to erase an active memory that cannot be passed to the next-gen. But what happens to the passive memory? We can still find in ourselves the instinct that we inherited from that one-celled organism to divide itself and create more cells like itself. That’s one giant passive memory.
So, here it is. Evolution: A parallel of immortality.
At this point, while talking about the perception of time, I was reminded of another theory that I revisited in a recent newsletter. Consider that this is actually some year in the future. Probably 4189 AD, and a kid is running an old timeline on his computer and we are just existing in the present year of 4189 as if it were 2022. It is definitely possible given that over two thousand years ago we found how to look across time. In the next two thousand years, it could become a possibility that humans could generate old timelines and not just look at them through numbers. This is the infamous simulation theory.
Person B didn’t want to be Mario in a futuristic kid’s game and neither did I. So naturally, I thought and wrote back that the sim theory is perhaps like a parallel to suggest the fragility of reality. That whatever our mind receives after it has filtered our limited senses is our version of the truth. And if we attached new senses through chords, we might be able to perceive larger realities and see where we stand in the big picture.
There is a book called ‘A Thousand Brains’ where the author writes that all parts of our neocortex (most of the brain that we can see and which evolved at a much later stage) are all mostly the same and have a similar structure. The only thing that makes the different parts of our brains interpret different things like sound or light is what device is connected to a particular section.
If you interchange the connections carefully, the sessions that interpret light and sound can change too. Meaning that the mind that has evolved is only limited by its senes.
What if the reality is different or larger than what our devices can understand or communicate?
At this point, we discussed the book a bit more and then B shared a short film. It’s called “The Egg” and it ran a gorgeous thought experiment on the Universe, more inclined towards morality than logical conclusions, but it put forward some really good points. I wouldn’t spoil it for you and recommend that you watch it.
But two lines from the film really struck me.
“You have all the experiences and wisdom of your past lives” and another part which went something like “the human mind can only hold/remember so much”.
Even though it was speaking of past lives, if you think about it on an evolutionary timeline, it is true. It is like saying we have the wisdom of the whole evolution in our DNA. We act based on all the knowledge acquired by organisms from single-celled algae to apes while wielding the best ways to continue life. We are born to innately select the best choices that led to natural selection and resulted in humans as one of the present-day results. And we are another generation of species that keeps refining the wisdom of choices by making a new set of mistakes.
But our active memory doesn’t remember any of it because the human mind can only remember so much. It only remembers the new experiences after the great erasing point of birth.
Yet our passive memory seems to clearly remember matters that feels quite trivial to us. Our instincts, our fear of unknowns, the feeling of pain, our urge to protect, replicate, and fight, and so much more. All inborn, innate, retained through memories as old as millions of years.
It’s like we are the living breathing memory of evolution.
