Is it possible, or more precisley probable under normal evolutionary logic, that super-advanced beings, having lived millions of years and who were the first uploads on their planet, to eventually lose ALL memory of every having been anything but a cosmic immortal?
For example, we easily see that our conscious brains at least have no memory of being anything other than a human. The only thing immortal in us is our evolving DNA informational structure. Nearly everything else has been shredded over the entropic aeons. We have no memory of being hominids, of apes, shrews, reptiles, fungus, bacteria. If we do, that information seems to be hidden from our conscious minds. We have progeny recapitulating ontogeny, so there is some "memory" of our evolutionary past, but not much.
Could this same "shredding" occur as we travel the cosmos, absorbing zettabytes of data, but coming to a point, perhaps as often as every 10,000 years or so, where the amount of novelty is so great that we can't absorb it all within the limits of our computronium memory banks? So the slightest sacrifices are made in memory somewhere else, including memory of once being a pre-singularity mortal.
If this was the case, we would have the same process as DNA replicating itself all over again, except this time the DNA is the sum-collection of all the zettabytes of data that makes the entity what it is, and like DNA mutating with time, so would this zettabyte entities information-sum. It's storage capacity continues to increase, but not as fast as the amount of novelty it is processing, with the result of "death" for the older parts of it, like a snake shredding its skin.
If this is how it turns out to be, then we could say that we, the people we are today, will at some point die. Some have argued that this dying occurs now anyway. A little bit each day, we loose a little of our old selves, and gain a slightly new self upon waking. And this happens because of our memory loss, and limits to what we can keep conscious in our minds. Although the limits of these cosmic immortals would could be trillions of zettabytes, it might still not be enough after a millions years of living.
I think the answer will depend entirely on the entity. I think it's always possible to generate more novelty than their storage capacity to hold it. We can do that now, if we really wanted, although these days more and more people are NOT deleting stuff from their computers because storage is increasing faster than we can fill them up. Could this change, or even reverse in the far future?
If it is, then we have this scenario. Those SI collectives who chose novelty over memory evolve quicker, but loose a bit of wisdom from ages past. We can call this group the progessives. The other SI-group gives storage of older bits priority over aquiring new ones. We can call this group the conservatives. If our post-singularity selves follow a diaspora scenario, then over time the universe would have two extremes on a spectrum - progressives on one end and conservatives on the other, with all other SI collectives in between. Then again, their could be a libertarian upwinger SI-collective which has managed to simultaenously maximize their novelty absorbtion AND keep all their memories!! [lol]
Edited by planetp, 28 February 2004 - 09:50 AM.
