/lit/ - Literature

>>10136873
Adding your memories to someone else's body IS NOT IMMORTALITY. That's immortalising your memories, you're just giving someone else an exact imprint of your brain while they walk away with what you are, while you experience the same lifespan as someone else and just die. A clone isn't the same person as you and has a high likelihood of not even looking like you (which is where shows like Rick and Morty take creative liberties and many books as well) because although the genes are the same, your expression of them and the environment in which you grew up with is different.

The idea that you can implant memories (and with no funky cloning) but the resulting person isn't the same as the base person is explored in James Blish's "A Work of Art" (download the short story collection here: https://www.sendspace.com/file/lxj9xp0)) where Strauss is recapitulated and in Hyperion with the Keats cybrids which "are" Keats in a technical sense taking on his history, but they aren't even the same as each other..

The concept of immortalising the memory of you through clones but not memories is explored in Cyteen where Ariane Emory II is reared by her successor in the same environment as the original in the hopes of recapitulating the original but even then she has a different personality to the orig.

At the very least, immortality is brain transplant - eg in "The Extra" by Greg Egan where it all goes horribly wrong.

Preferably, immortality isn't a brain transplant but something that constitutes the essence of a being, being transferred. So for example in Lord of Light where the atman ("soul") is transferred via mind transfer and it's funny how there's a montage in Rick and Morty in which there is a high focus on the mind being transferred and not just a simple lateral memory transfer, because who the fuck wants to actually die in the process, unless you're the madman Satō from Ajin? (Ajin can regen from any wound post death, but growing a new head means (you) effectively die.)

A bad concept of "immortality" is in Altered Carbon with the meths and all the fucking double sleeving shit. To me, owning a copy of your mind repeatedly in cold storage clones is a terrible idea especially if they can be hijacked.

And the worst, most horrifying true immortality concept in existence has to be in Hyperion The Bikura and the cruciforms. Although in subsequent books post perfection cruciform isn't that bad, I'd rather have one than Aenea's blood.

But let's get real here, immortality would be fucking complicated. There's telomeres, you need to fix all of this: https://i.imgur.com/zwKqO9G.png and we're not even sure what causes aging https://i.imgur.com/UqGZr1i.png.. Cancer cells are immortal and grow uncontrollably - you need cells to die normally! A lot of cell culture lines for experimentation use immortal cancer cells.