Identity, Immortality, Happiness
Journal of Ethics and Emerging Technologies February 1, 2018 Shimon Edelman 1 citation
For agents that learn from the past to predict the future, seeking novelty is an intrinsic motivation that helps them adapt to changing environments. An agent's identity is built from its accumulated life experience, which it constantly strives to expand. This drive for novelty conflicts with limited memory capacity: novelty seekers become unhappy when bored, so happiness requires an open-ended pursuit of new experiences rather than reliving past ones. However, finite memory means that continued novelty over a long life eventually causes loss of stored content, disrupting the constructed identity. This essay examines the biobehavioral and cognitive-computational circumstances behind this problem and explores its implications for the human condition.