Me, decay

Dentosal
Sun, 26 Apr 2026 17:14:21 GMT

Spoilers for: Learning To Be Me. It's only 20 pages and worth reading. I'll explain some of the main points briefly for those who inevitably ignore this advice, but some of the juiciest details will remain uncovered here.

After writing about my experiences with AI-assisted agency, user recursing suggested Learning To Be Me for a complementary piece to The Whispering Earring. After two busy weeks I finally made the effort to read it.

Imagine you could take a perfect snapshot of yourself, and then continue living as that person, forever. You'd continue forming memories and gaining experiences. The only thing that would change is that your brain would stop decaying. The only required part would be to destroy your actual physical brain and replace it with a tiny computer producing almost exactly the same output. The story discusses the minor differences between them, and concludes that an arbitrarily close approximation is indistinguishable from the actual thing.

My first thought was that P-zombies aren't real; I've bought physicalism as hard as any metaphysical idea can be. Consciousness isn't exactly identity, though, and perhaps it's just the mental continuity that matters. The story has me covered here: the computer does the exact same thing as the person it's trained for, and shares the same experience over their whole life until it's finally swapped in for their brain.

Naturally, in the real world I don't trust anything, person or organization or government, to be competent and cooperative enough to run such a system. When the brain-enhancement implants arrive and slowly become mainstream, I'll be called a luddite or worse for avoiding them like the plague. I'll argue for taking voting rights away from those implant zombies, saying that they'll be controlled by whoever controls the chips, as if I'm not even easier to control by picking the media I consume. And yet, when the early adopters get hit by insane subscription fees and ads, I get to say "I told you so" before becoming an outcast. There truly is no higher pleasure. My own hypocrisy barely registers.

And so in the story, too, the system is untrustworthy, but only slightly. Since the approximation the computer performs is imperfect even by a tiny amount, the P-zombie analogy will not hold. The outputs of the computer differ from those of the brain unless constantly corrected. For some rare people this divergence might continue until the mismatches accumulate to form a separate person. Society will proceed with the substitution anyway. It's just less hassle.

And while the story's protagonist easily bypasses the physical disgust provoked by replacing brain tissue with some sponge, I'd have a harder time letting that slide. But my bioconservatism seems like the losing side in the sense that it directly harms self-preservation. Here I could bitterly accuse Moloch, and yet that seems unnecessary. This is not a competition I need to win. The decay is a part of me I do not wish to give up, and yet that's not what I would hope for others.

In my late twenties, I'm supposed to be in my prime. It's physically all downhill from here, and brains are starting to degrade permanently. I've wasted my best chances at happiness, learning, and changing the world. Sure, there's still enough neuroplasticity left to nudge this trajectory, but it's not a realistic dream anymore. There just isn't enough a person in me. I yearn to burn down this failure of a human and start again, just like any artist does when their work fails to meet self-imposed standards, typically perfection. It's wisdom not to do so, and I guess I'm just not that wise. And I know the one taking my place won't be me in any meaningful sense, and yet that's also a relief. It's not like any versions of me exist in an ideal world anyway.

Each passing second a part of me dies. Neural connections dissolving, memories fading and new ones forming. There's barely anything left of the ten-year-old me but a trajectory that got me here. Is the current me truly the one to preserve? It feels so shallow to keep only the latest version, when countless versions of me are permanently gone. And countless futures will be lost, even if more are created in the process.

It's arbitrary to claim that only the current me is what matters, morally speaking. Preserving only a single snapshot out of the countless ones seems pointless. Arguing that the current version of me contains memories of my past doesn't amount to much more than the same claim for a photo album.

In a way, there's not a single me. I'm the continuity. The decay is a part of me.

At some point, the solutions will be widely available. Cryonics or brain-uploads to permanently preserve the state that's bound to the decaying piece of meat. Whispering earrings or AI implants to guide our tiny human minds through the impossible complexity of life. Chemicals and surgeries and augmentations to remake your body and brain as you wish.

Is this the hill to actually die on? To burn your very existence with the sacrificial fire?

And I know, when the time comes, I'll be too weary to refuse the salvation. Maybe I already am. Yet I hope I'll remember this fiery mind with unfounded principles, the one welcoming death itself like the dawn of a new day. The one who has aesthetics.

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