journalling for immortality
[This is day #16 of my 30-day microblogging challenge. You can and should still join!] (Note: keep in mind when reading ahead that this is meant to be a rough draft!)
I’ve been journaling and self-tracking consistently for the past 3.5 years (I have +900 daily logs). I started because I wanted to answer specific questions about what affected my sleep quality, energy, and mood, and continued with the hope that I’d eventually have enough data to spot bigger patterns over time.
At the beginning I’d put in the effort to make my updates structured, straightforward and concise, to make them easier for me to process them in the future. But after the LLM boom, I started giving myself complete freedom to brain-dump without structure (including through video or voice journals), knowing that one day I could process everything with AI. It felt extremely liberating to be able to capture my stream-of-consciousness and trust that one day I will be able to make something out of it (for myself).
Through this process, I became increasingly obsessed with capturing as much of what was happening in my life, and of my psyche more broadly. I realized that taking consistent snapshots was the closest I could get to immortalizing my essence in a substrate that will hopefully outlive me.
As time goes by, I notice many memories disappearing into oblivion, and it becomes harder to maintain an objective view of how my perspectives and personality have changed over time.
I find this loss of information deeply saddening. I’m aware that the ephemerality of our existence is, up to a certain extent, inevitable. But, because I am human, I am incapable of bearing witness to such a tragedy without putting up a fight.
I find it deeply tragic that so many memories, stories, and experiences vanish daily, as a fraction of us die. One could argue that these experiences don’t have extrinsic value, but to me they do feel profoundly valuable, because, in the same way that my own records form a museum of what it was like to be me – to exist in this place and at this point in time – the sum of human memories form a museum of what it’s like to be alive. Of the fullness of the human experience. Of us.
Right now, we don’t have the technologies to preserve this information fully (i.e. high-fidelity body or brain scans that capture the morphology alongside the chemical and electrical state of the brain, or more speculative methods like capturing mental images through BCI, cryopreserving our bodies, or creating physical or digital duplicates of our brains and minds).
I hope that many more of you choose to pursue such R&D projects, and that we see rapid advancements thanks to the accelerating pace of development in automation and AI. But, until then, the closest we can come to “immortality” is to capture, through different types of media, as much of ourselves as we can.
** Some people fear the potential catastrophic consequences of misaligned AI. My (possibly naïve) hope is that the collection of such “human records” could one day either 1) help with alignment, or 2) in the case of an actual catastrophe, leave a trace of what humanity was like.*
*** Cryopreservation does exist (Alcor in USA, Tomorrow Biostasis in EU), but we haven’t figured out how to bring cryopreserved bodies back to life.*