“I Don’t Care”

One of the things I worry about most is not being able to recall the great
experiences that have happened to me over time. It’s not about forgetting
that I went to the beach in Israel that one time, or any other highlight
event. Those types of events should be captured as well, of course, but I am
speaking of the more subtle, and ultimately more valuable, types of positive
experiences.

Leading this field in my mind is falling asleep with my girl. Cuddle (which
we call “wuddle” for some silly reason) is definitely among my favorite
experiences, and a very real problem presents itself to me quite often
regarding this activity:

The feeling of falling asleep with your girl, in a comfortable bed, while
warming each other against the cold outside the covers and telling each
other how much you love one another…is simply magical. I quite often simply
want to capture the moment, and I cannot.

And that’s really the issue. I cannot capture it. And because I cannot
capture it, I cannot replay it.

There are so many things that could be captured. The feel of the bed. How
tired you are. How achy your body is. How good it will feel to sleep. How
she feels.

These all change. You have different states of your own body when going to
sleep. You have better and worse beds. You have different thoughts on the
mind when entering that state. Sometimes you feel triumphant, and laying
with her is a prize. Other times you feel defeated, and laying with her
serves as rebuilding and reassurance.

These are all subtle flavors in the single best concoction we as humans
consume: experience. I’ve been with my girl for over 20 years, and we speak
often about appreciating our time together. When it rains we remember our
time in hotels when I would come visit her while living 7 hours apart for
years at a time.

The rain is one of the flavors. The longing is another. Finally being with
her after thinking of it for weeks at a time beforehand — all these things
change and magnify other notes in the experience, and the result is always
uniquely incandescent.

But they’re gone.

When we are 80 we will remember very little of these experiences. We will
have a faint, amorphous glow where individual images used to be. A trace of
a smell where a pleasant taste used to be. They will be no more. Instead of
remembering, we will remember remembering.

This deeply depresses me. I want to remember each of those times. Not
constantly, of course, but to have them available to experience again.

Extraordinary, Inevitable

So the idea is simple, and there is no question in my being whether or not
this will happen:

As we master the decoding of memory and experience, we will gain the ability
to store — on demand — the current experience being felt.

It will be a snapshot — very short at first, and likely limited in many
ways. But as time goes on we’ll be able to simply invoke a mental command to
“save”, or “capture”, and that moment of bliss or triumph or ecstasy will be
stored forever as an experience clip.

We have archaic, proxied versions of this now: photographs, audio
recordings, and video. They are weak because they are stimuli that cause
experiences, not experiences themselves. The experience is what happened in
the brain at that moment as a result of the stimuli, and that depends
on the exact conditions, thoughts, perspectives, and feelings of the
subject.

We will still store the raw inputs as well, of course, as that gives you the
chance to have a different experience, and for others to have one that is
similar, but different, from your own. It’s valuable for a different reason,
but in no way identical to storing the finished product.

I mentioned the act of storing these experiences manually, i.e. invoking a
command to store. This itself will be a rudimentary implementation of the
technology, as more advanced versions will simply monitor the brain and
create snapshots according to rules that you’ve defined. This spawns a
myriad of interesting questions, such as whether or not discrete thoughts
will be stored, or only feelings — since storing thoughts that can later be
retrieved presents an entirely new set of challenges1.

So, imagine if you can, instead of having photo albums, or video recordings,
what if you had 40,000 experience snapshots that you could replay through
your life.

Imagine a display technology that projects in three dimensions throughout
your living space — where you can see a timeline of your life, marked by
things like diapers, first time eating ice cream, breakups, seeing your
child walk for the first time, every time you’ve cuddled with your soulmate,
etc. — and upon selecting a specific moment in time you can go to all of the
stored experiences there.

You will then enter some sort of special, calmed state where you will
overlay or inject that experience into yourself. You will again feel the
covers on your skin. You’ll feel your girl’s body on yours, you’ll hear the
words about love, and feel how they made you feel.

You’ll be there.

When I’m 117, that sounds like a great way to spend a vacation. People will
call them reflection periods. You take a vacation and reflect, through
direct experience, on the highs (and lows perhaps)2 of your life.

Get a weekly breakdown of what’s happening in security and tech—and why it matters.

I really want this right now. Others don’t want it only because they haven’t
thought about it yet. Once it becomes possible it will become necessary. Our
time in this world is nothing if it isn’t experienced, and this is nothing
less than the chance to live multiple times in one lifetime.

Applications

So I’ve covered above the basic idea, and now I’ll explore briefly a few
ways it could manifest. I mentioned a few of the experiences that could be
stored, but let’s compile a quick list — from childhood to death:

• looking at your mother as a toddler

• eating your first ice cream

• nursing (stay with me)

• pooping (think about the fixations)

• eating an orange for the first time

• confusing a jalapeño with a piece of candy at age 2.5

• hearing “I love you” for the first time while in secondary school

• catching a touchdown pass

• driving your first car

• getting your first paycheck

• seeing your baby on ultrasound

• holding your baby for the first time

• watching your baby walk

• watching your parents pass away, after recently replaying seeing them
  for the first time

• watching your children do the things above

Think of anything that is a joy in this life — things that perhaps you don’t
even get to do:

• a pop star can export his experience of performing live in front of
  10,000 people

• an astronaut can export the feeling of looking down at the earth for the
  first time

• women can export the experience of child birth

• both genders can export their orgasms (see porn10)

And that brings us to the next, rather obvious and collosal point:

These experiences can be shared.

This isn’t just a way for people to re-experience (see remember)
their own experiences, but also a way for the whole world to share them.

Getting away from the positive for just a moment, it’s quite predictable
that charities and humanitarian groups will deploy this technology to
suffering peoples and then export their experiences in order to prod the
capable but apathetic into offering assistance.

The applications are staggering. It’s a way to articulate the promise of a
truly shared human experience. That seems far more grand than simply having
an archive of one’s own experiences, but I look to that first.

Not only will the experience archiving for personal benefit come first due
to necessity (see market drive), but it’ll likely be easier as well, and
thus will be possible first.

I desperately await this development. I find it almost cruel that the
elderly are not just robbed of the ability to make new memories of these
types, but that they are also abstracted by the limitations of the mind from
the experiences they’ve already had.

We are nothing but the summation of what we’ve experienced, and this
technology will serve as a way to recapture and restore tangible form to our
withering identities. It’s a way to remember ourselves. ::

Notes

1 Thought police.2 The experience replay interface will be color or shape
coded to indicate positive, negative, ecstasy, love, power, etc.