The Immortality Paradox

Bulletin: Scientists at the Ajax Medical Research Institute have discovered a drug whereby if taken cells will not age, cell division is always perfect, brain cells will not die.  The researchers predict anyone can live forever.  Immortality - at last!!  Of course, death is still possible through physical trauma (you're hit by a speeding train) or chemically (you take a massive overdose of something), etc.

Want to sign up and get this ?  Are you ready for immortality?

Of course, the bulletin is ficticious, but here we'll just suppose it is so and consider what this means for you to be living 200, 500, 1000, 10,000 years and more.  Herein lies the nifty little paradox. 

First of all, you are designed, whether you believe it by evolution, by intelligent design, or even by stork delivery. Doesn't  matter.  This means you have specifications, and therefore you have capacities and limits.  For a simple example, if you tried to lift 2500 pounds (= 1134kg), even with years of training and countless protein shakes, you couldn't do it.  The weight would shatter your bones, tear your ligaments, and  ruin your muscles.  You just can't do it.  It's the design!

The main example we consider here is about your marvelous brain.  It also has capacities.  In particular your memory most assuredly does.  There is only so much stuff you can remember, not just facts but everything about you.  As you go through life, you take things in and you forget other things.  How many can remember April 15 of ten years ago like they can remember yesterday?   I cannot.  By the time you finish life, you are in many ways a different person than the kid that graduated high school so many years ago. Childhood memorys have substantially faded.

Now you take this new elixir.  Immortality has arrived.

Look again at the memory of that marvelous brain.  Suppose you have a memory capacity of the equivalent of 10,000 extra difficult books - like 400 encyclopedias.  This amount of information is quantifiable.  Let's suppose that is your former maximum of a long life of 100 years.  At this point, if you continue on you and put more information in, you must loose other information.  So, what happens in the second hundred years.  You grow in ways, you learn more, and then you forget more. Nonetheless by year 200, you have replaced much of what you had at year 100.  You are now a different person in some respects.

Fast-forward to 1000 years.  You have gone through these learning and forgetting cycles 9 times.  There is now even less of the original you.  Fast-forward to 10,000 years.  Just how much of the original you remains?  The point is that your body may be immortal, but those attributes of the original you have long vanished.  You are a different person completely.  You probably cannot  remember your childhood, your children, your first bicycle, your first job, and much more.    You, my friend, are no longer you.

This is the Immortality Paradox

P.S.  You could make lots of exceptions to the argument.  Suppose to handle all the information, increasing by 400 encyclopedias every hundred years, this researchers devised their elixir to allow the brain to expand. More capacity = more information.  Suppose your brain increases in size only 5% per century. The by the time you are 1000 your brain will be half again larger.  At 10,000 your brain will be five times larger.  Now you won't even look like you. :)