Way back, I read a science fiction story about digitalized memory. It might have been early on in the cyberpunk era. Anyway, the supposition was that memory could be downloaded, which meant, of course that it could be sold.
This particular story went straight for the obvious: porn and death. The specific story offered a scenario where condemned criminals could, before their execution, sell the rights to their death experience.
I lost interest at that point, though I’m sure many readers found the descriptions of the criminals’ last moments and the moral dilemmas riveting.
Extremes are too easy for me to imagine. I wanted the story to explore all kinds of memory, and the effects. If I were cruising E-Memories dot com, I’d go for what it felt like to perform a perfect ice skating routine, or sing Madama Butterfly before an audience. What it felt like to climb a high mountain, and stand on the summit to look out over the world. Sky-diving. Deep sea diving. Piloting a jet. Things I will never do, but would love to see if the experience on the pod matched my imagination after so much reading.
I’d download a smart student’s intake of the lecture of a brilliant physicist to experience what it’s like to actually understand the beauties of math, instead of being lost in a mental tangle of dyslexic distortions that never add up to sense.
That makes me wonder if the experience would be as genuine as, say, a memory in which a strong person bench presses 400 lbs. Wouldn’t the e-memory have to have programming that would engage the part of the brain that cuts off motor movement when you sleep so you don’t get violent in your dreams? I wouldn’t want to get the equivalent of a full-body hernia.
I wonder if people would want shared experience rather than direct. That is, assuming that there are two kinds of shared experience, the inside and the outside. The inside being you are there, either causing or with immediate sensory experience. Outside would be witnessing from a relative distance. That can be involving enough! Say that inside is the people on the grassy knoll when Kennedy was shot. Their experience is going to be fragmentary, or we’d have the complete picture. Outside would be those of us who were hearing the news as it happened—as I was, age twelve. I was in junior high, but I can still see my desk, the classroom, and my teacher with tears on his face. The students looking at one another in fear, because we’d been lectured so much about “When the Russians would come to attack.” Were they on their way? Were they throwing A-bombs at us?
Here’s another kind of shared experience: the perceived piece of art. I suppose students would start making money the way they do now writing papers by downloading their experience of reading as assigned book. Download your experience of Moby Dick in half an hour! War and Peace in 37 minutes! Would such an experience drop into longterm memory, or fade out in short term?
I wouldn’t have any interest in those, anyway–I’d rather read the book–but I might be tempted by a specific person’s experience. Like Greer Gilman reading Shakespeare. A poet’s experience of a great piece of art. What would all those do to my own memory, would they overlay it? Change it? How would my perceptions change, if my brain is full of other people’s thoughts?
My, what an idea factory you’ve started in my head. To make the downloaded reading experience valuable as a school short cut, they’d probably need to offer not just any memory of a person reading the book, but that of someone who read it carefully and who studied with the same professor, so that you’d also get the memories of how the professor discussed the book. Guaranteed A, without even going to class or reading.
And that’s just one thought. Tons of material here for short stories or background for a longer work.
Oh, yes. This professor could require his own reading experience to make certain the students saw the book the way he did. So . . . the student would still have to read the book if she wanted her own viewpoint . . .
The effect of the Olympics. I’d like to relive the experiences of those with such wonderful physical prowess. Ah to fly like a vaulter!
Oh, YES! Or a gymnast . . .
Imagine what downloaded memories could mean to people who were unable to get out, to perform ANY kind of activities on their own.
Can’t you see downloaded memories, though, as becoming an addiction, or a crutch, for some people if they got such a “high” off those memories that they didn’t want to live their own mundane lives?
We’re heading in that direction already, aren’t we? (The upside is that people can play at war without actually doing it, whether it’s re-enactments or computer games.)
You know, I hadn’t thought of it that way, but, yes, I think you’re right. There are actions and feelings we can experience by pretending we’re someone living in another world
One question is, how isolated are memories? I mean, if I were to download the experience of Usain Bolt winning the 100m race last week, would I get only the race, or would I also get the whole gestalt of being Usain Bolt, thinking and feeling as he does, for that short period?
And if the latter is true, would people be willing to make their memories public? Would you be willing to sell the experience of writing a book, if it also meant that people got to “be” Sherwood Smith for the duration of that memory?
And what about private sharing of memories? Not “porn and death”, but a way to become closer to each other and improve your skills. Imagine getting to be inside your lover’s head, to get to feel exactly how s/he experiences what you did together last night. Especially for hetero lovers, I’d think experiencing touch from the point of view of the other sex would be enormously educational. (I’m not sure about that; it may be that the variation between individuals outweighs the variation between sexes anyway.)
These are all excellent questions–food for thought. (And imagination.)
Love these questions–interesting how it makes one’s idea of the concept veer away from memory as a method for experiencing something and toward memory as the essence of a person.
Memory tourism- yes, the skydiving, and also “two weeks in Melbourne, fifty bucks”- I’d *rather* go places myself and choose what I went to see instead of getting the Top Ten Tourist Trap Experience from someone else’s memory, but there are a lot of places I’ll never get to at all!
Actually you could do some fairly specialist stuff and still turn a profit; pay someone at an archive to pull out a manuscript you’re interested in and record the experience- as long as it’s less than the cost of scanning it, they’ll do it, and then they can sell it to other people as wll. In fact a lot of museums and libraries would probably put stuff up online free, come to think of it; get a conservator’s memory of touching the Mona Lisa… (talk about having to scan downloads for viruses, though! Memetic malware, ugh.)
(Mind you it would never happen because the MPAA can’t stop you taking your eyes into a film, so they’d buy legislation to make the tech illegal.)
Yes–figuring out how the law would come to deal with this thing is another interesting aspect.
Since we are our memories, could you e-memory enough to become a different person?
I wonder about that. It might end up being one of those nature-or-nuture arguments. I can see someone meaning to inject wholesome memories into criminals, say, or would such things change a sociopath who was born without a conscience?
Under current copyright law, if you sold your memory of reading a particular book or seeing a movie or play, would that be considered fair use or copyright violation?
I suspect that copyright laws are going to go through some contortions before tech ever develops in that direction (if it ever does), but that in turn opens up another interesting line of “what ifs”