Identity, Immortality, Happiness

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

To the extent that the performance of embodied and situated cognitive agents is predicated on fore- thought, such agents must remember, and learn from, the past to predict the future. In complex, non-stationary environments, such learning is facilitated by an intrinsic motivation to seek novelty. A significant part of an agent’s identity is thus constituted by its remembered distilled cumulative life experience, which the agent is driven to constantly expand. The combination of the drive to novelty with practical limits on memory capacity posits a problem. On the one hand, because novelty seekers are unhappy when bored, merely reliving past positive experiences soon loses its appeal: happiness can only be attained sporadically, via an open-ended pursuit of new experience. On the other hand, because the experiencer’s memory is finite, longevity and continued novelty, taken together, imply eventual loss of at least some of the stored content, and with it a disruption of the constructed identity. In this essay, I examine the biobehavioral and cognitive-computational circumstances that give rise to this problem and explore its implications for the human condition.