Personal Relativity and Time

Abstract

Will the immortal human be the same over time? Will the person you were 10.000 years ago be the same as the one you are 10.000 years later? Will the memory of an individual become even more of a rolling archive than it is now? Will little of what happened 10.000 years ago be remembered, while that of yesterday will? If so, over time the anchors of our births and youths will fade away almost completely. Our personality fabric will be stretched over time, and ultimately the original fabric will be little in evidence. But perhaps we will be able to expand memory to allow it to contain more and more, or we will learn to remember differently, will gain meta-memory. The more likely scenario is, however, that as humans get older they become more and more cantankerous, more and more annoyed at seeing the same thing again and again. The arc of development and decay that now characterizes human life might largely stop or become so emasculated that the interest with which we observe our own progress and regress might almost vanish. If there is an overflow point in every human being’s capacity to absorb would we really want to prolong the lifetime to eternity with the result that we would be sitting around essentially watching the paint dry?