Then even seemingly un-repeatable pleasures (meeting someone for the first time) become repeatable. Now you might say, wait, when I was thinking about immortality I wasn't thinking about forgetting everything and doing it again like a stupid goldfish. To this I answer: Weren't you?And there's only so much memory you can fit into eighty billion neurons. So of course you're going to forget things, at some point almost everything, and things sufficiently well forgotten could presumably be experienced as fresh again. This is always what is going on with us anyway, to some extent. And this forgetting needn't involve any loss of personal identity, it seems: one's personality and some core memories could always stay the same. Immortality as an angel or transhuman super-intellect raises the same issues, as long as one's memory is finite. A new question arises perhaps more vividly now:The answer to that question isn't, I think, entirely clear (and maybe even faces metaphysical problems concerning the identity of indiscernibles ). My guess, though, is that if you stopped one of the goldfish and said, "Do you want to keep going?", the fish would say, "Yes, this is totally cool, I wonder what's around the corner? Oh, hi, glad to meet you!" Maybe that's a consideration in favor.What would that be like? Would one become overwhelmed like Funes the Memorious ? Would there be a workable search algorithm? Would there be some tagging system to distinguish each memory from infinitely many qualitatively identical other memories? Or maybe you were imagining? I find that even harder to conceive. To evaluate such possibilities, we need a better sense of the cognitive architecture of the immortal mind. Supposing goldfish-pool immortality would be desirable,-- a wide diversity of experiences before forgetting --, perhaps one peak experience, repeated infinitely? Would it be better to have small, unremembered variations each time, or would detail-by-detail qualitative identity be just as good? I've started to lose my grip on what might ground such judgments. However, it's possible that technology will someday make this a matter of practical urgency.What should be the size and shape of our pool?

[image source] [Cross-posted at The Splintered Mind.]