If you could push a button and simply restart your life from day one, would you press it?

do you remember stuff from this life?

i don't know, i haven't pushed it yet

would you remember that you pushed the button?

xp: lol

let's say there's a 50/50 chance that you remember or forget

i feel like the question boils down to: am i happy with how i've lived my life, or would i like a do-over?

what if your answer is "I'm happy with how I lived my life but I'm super curious about a do-over?"

like, I'm the dude who put in a paper clip at every junction point in a Choose Your Own Adventure book so that I could make sure I could go back and read/experience the entire thing, and how baller would it be to be able to do that to your LIFE

The question seems very different depending on whether you're able to apply what you've learned from this life.

well, it's not even clear to me that i'm able to apply what i've learned from this life to the current one!

for me this is a much more difficult question to answer than the "ceasing to exist" one (would never in a million years push that button)

but at the same time it seems like the "healthy" answer is totally obvious: answer no, and struggle mightily against the part of the brain that says yes

i'm super-curious about a do-over too, though!

I would consider pushing the button but still being able to remember this life as a cheat code.

On the other hand, if I would push the button, and start all over again without any knowledge I have gathered now, the real question would be: would I do things differently at all?

let's assume it's not as simple as "i get to go back and CHOOSE CORRECTLY" for all of our past choices - there's no guarantee, even if you had this life's wisdom, that you'd end up in the same situations. and you'd still have to be a little kid again so no, you don't get to be a baby w/ all the collective wisdom of ILX under your belt

i hit yes without even really thinking. i have this everpresent sense of regret i can't shake, even though it is hard for me to locate specific regrets about my life. i mean, basic things: i wish i got better grades, got out of a bad relationship sooner, etc. but i don't know... nothing is fucked, really, but it feels that way. anyone else experience this?

^^ That is how I perceived the question.

But it still makes me wonder: would I do things differently at all, or would I just relive life up until this point?

xp

Treeship: Yes. Fully experience it the same way.

i think on some level that feeling is universal. i think kierkegaard discussed something like that in "the concept of anxiety"... this sense that there is always dread because we know we have made a series of choices which, even if they were the "right" choices" closed off other avenues our lives could have taken, and we are forced to live with the knowledge of those closed doors. i think he frames this idea at one point as "marry the girl or not; either way you will regret it."

you don't get to be a baby w/ all the collective wisdom of ILX under your belt

And you'd just be randomly born somewhere in the world? Then it's an easy no. When someone brings up the thought experiment of getting extra lives, I always assume that half of those lives would be really miserable and/or impoverished.

jesus i need to stop writing "i think." i know that kierkegaard wrote about this in the concept of anxiety.

if this means I get to cheat death yeah probably

otherwise nah not really

Treeship, you are right. It's from Either/Or:

“Marry, and you will regret it; don’t marry, you will also regret it; marry or don’t marry, you will regret it either way. Laugh at the world’s foolishness, you will regret it; weep over it, you will regret that too; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret it either way; laugh at the world’s foolishness or weep over it, you will regret both. Believe a woman, you will regret it; believe her not, you will also regret it; believe a woman or believe her not, you will regret it either way; believing a woman or not believing her, you will regret it both ways. Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will regret that too; hang yourself or don’t hang yourself, you’ll regret it either way; whether you hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the essence of all philosophy.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life

It perfectly describes the dread of internalized, ever present regret I too feel.

Kierkegaard was an insightful dude.

not that down with philosophy of eternal regret there, I must say. regret is mostly a useless state of mind

Some of this is getting into the territory of better Star Trek episodes.

Also, the problem I'd have with doing it all over again is that I'd be terribly bored.

could not click yes fast enough.
unfortunately, it did not work.

Shakey, philosophically I disagree that regret is "useless". In every day living though, it's uselessness can be quite the hindrance.

xp well, K. is mostly useful as a describer of our condition; his conclusions oh what to think and how to live are pretty much always terrible. however, i think there is something liberating in recognizing that there are some kinds of emotional pain you can't avoid. it helps you recognize that they aren't your fault, and makes it easier to accept and ultimately let go of things like regret.

Treeship clearly the more eloquent regret-expert here. I might push the button and re-live my life as his :)

aw thanks La Bateau Ivre. If I were to push the button I don't necessarily think I'd want to come back as a "regret-expert" lol.

if it's a simple do-over then i want my vote back because it is totally pointless

well, it would technically be "more time" but if you don't retain your memories, would that even matter?

without memories it isn't more time, the same/only time as far as you know

if it's a simple do-over then i want my vote back because it is totally pointless

Not only is it pointless but the odds are good that my second time through would not be as an able-bodied person in the developed world, which I would expect to be a harder life than my current one.

if i instantly erase everything i remember i'm not sure the new baby is technically me

Thinking about the question some more: I would not push the button.

I like the notion - well, more than 'like', it is part of my most fundamental ideas about this existence - that we only live once. This is it, and I find comfort in that idea too. I realise I would dread "having" to live again after death. It would render this life pretty much meaningless, too, "for there will be a next life".
The regret ties in with that. It's not a "nice" feeling, I'd rather not have it as much as I do, but it does, every single time, make me realize, the value of this one life.

Or, to paraphrase the great Dutch poet J.C. Bloem:

And between then and now: the confusing
Existence, that drove out his virtue.
The sharp days, of which shards
Of the wounded heart, stuck to.

Irreconcilable is this life.
In the end perhaps it mostly is:
To be able to say: it has briefly,
between two silences, been loud.

(own translation)

Yeah, that's a fundamental conceptual difficulty I have with at least the Hindu conception of reincarnation.
xpost

i had envisioned the scenario as being born to the same parents in similar conditions, with no memory of this life, and everything else proceeding randomly from there

aw thanks La Bateau Ivre. If I were to push the button I don't necessarily think I'd want to come back as a "regret-expert" lol.

― rock 'em sock 'em (Treeship), donderdag 2 mei 2013 0:42 (13 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hehe, yeah I can see that. You could write a selfhelp book about it though and get rich :)

i've always assumed that philosophies of repeated reincarnation have an "out of the game" phase, some point inbetween each incarnation where you are truly "you" and oversee the events of the lives before

^^ would live

hm, i don't think that's true of buddhism, at least not (in mahayanan strains) before you become enlightened. bodhisattvas choose to be here, but the rest of us are trying to break an endless cycle of suffering. i'm not an expert though.

i had envisioned the scenario as being born to the same parents in similar conditions, with no memory of this life, and everything else proceeding randomly from there

― the late great, donderdag 2 mei 2013 0:58 (50 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I love that your brought forth this question/poll, but in that instance I think it will be ultimately a repeat of my life right now. Who says I am not already in the exact same repeat, having already pushed that button? If it doesn't change anything, if we don't know if we have already pushed that button once (theoretically), there is no point in pushing the button.

To clarify: even if I would remember having pushed the button, remember this life, I sure as hell would not push the button. Too much of a burden, too much 'ok but I have to life live better this time around', 'I have to listen to that godawful record on the radio again for what wtf'

Nope. The years when I was too young to have any real control my life ranged from stressful to dire but I think I bounced back admirably and don't want to risk going through it again, unless I could be guaranteed to take my adult perspective on events back with me. Even then, a bird in the hand and all that.

I'm really not much of a gambler. Also I'm generally pretty happy right now.

you get deja vu (jamais vu?) each time through the loop which you can use for lotto numbers etc...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuWHE5p9Pek

i've always assumed that philosophies of repeated reincarnation have an "out of the game" phase, some point inbetween each incarnation where you are truly "you" and oversee the events of the lives before

Never heard of that before wrt Hinduism. And even if it were the case, it wouldn't seem to matter to you when you're 'in' one of your incarnations.

If this means that I go back in time to 1979 and become born to the same parents again, then this does just seem pointless, yeah, not exactly a losing bet.

http://www.rigpawiki.org/images/7/7e/Centre_of_wheel_of_life.jpg

Never heard of that before wrt Hinduism.

(which doesn't make it necessarily wrong btw: I wouldn't call myself an expert.)

Do i still get the same parents

never

I have very few regrets that really tear at my heart when I review them. I've had a great many lucky advantages. I'd say it would be pointless for me. Being young again simply would not be worth it; the sense of vigor and health would be more than offset by the sadness and confusion.

hell no my life is awesome

Still dont get what the q is, but imo 'would u push a button that....' is a loaded question hilxtorically

I'm not unhappy with my life, but I don't think I could say no to the chance if presented, just because. If my life turns out shittier, I won't remember (presumably) that I had it better.
Even if I didn't have the foreknowledge to tell myself to work harder in high school or w/e, I feel like enough of life is governed by random chance that the outcome is radically different.

I can't let myself think about this too much or I go down a rabbit hole of things I could have done differently (like people who obsessively dream about what they'll do when they hit the Powerball) - if there's useful self-help out there it probably deals with not letting yourself create more situations of regret and missed opportunity.

I was going to go for 'yes' straight away, in the hope that I'd turn out to be someone better, or happier. But then I realised 'yes' means I'd have to live a whole life over again, which is rubbish.

for me this is a much more difficult question to answer than the "ceasing to exist" one (would never in a million years push that button)

Basically this, except the bit in brackets would read 'would push that button in a heartbeat'.

if you hit reset, it's the same as ceasing to exist, unless you can transmit information to the next cycle.

Can i just get some guarantee this hasnt already happened

if the initials on your zipper read YKK that means YOU KLONE, KID

if you hit reset, it's the same as ceasing to exist, unless you can transmit information to the next cycle.

― Philip Nunez, Thursday, May 2, 2013 1:07 AM (4 minutes ago)

Yeah, but I'd still be forcing another life form to exist and endure that existence. Which doesn't seem very nice to me.

If I could go back 10 or 15 years and restart from there, even it meant I couldn't take anything since that time with me, I'd definitely do it. But becoming a newborn baby again and starting from scratch, beginning life in 2013? Probably not; I love who I am and am afraid different friends/family/circumstances - even those that sucked at the time - wouldn't have shaped who I became. Plus I just didn't find being a kid enjoyable. Life for me started when I was a teenager, having to wait 13 years for that and going through grade school again would be excruciating.

I was born unable to push buttons :(

depends

if i forget myself and start over w/ a clean slate, that essentially means that "i" die and somebody else (a different i) gets to live my life for me. fuck that. i have no interest in dying.

if i do not forget myself, then sure. i'm approaching the bottom of the bottle as it is, and would love a fresh body and another 40-80 years.

which i guess has been said by many others, so yeah (next time, read thread first).

= to lose knowledge of the self as the self is to die

so you're saying if i gave you a choice between being executed and having your memory wiped it would make no difference to you?

that makes no sense to me

so you're saying if i gave you a choice between being executed and having your memory wiped it would make no difference to you?

that makes no sense to me

― the late great, Wednesday, May 1, 2013 5:38 PM (24 seconds ago)

i'd be more afraid of being excuted. the fear of death-death is profound, probably biological, reinforced everywhere in society. the fear of this other thing, of being erased, that's much more abstract. but my sense is that there's no real difference between the two as far as my interior narrating self is concerned.

^ that's only true if "memory wipe" wipes ALL awareness of not only experience, but also language, understanding of the body & abstract concepts, and even the ghostlike traces that inform our sense that we exist. if my brain were reduced to baby-state, not even newborn, but like first trimester, then yeah, what i call "i" has been entirely eradicated. i might as well be dead.

my sense is that my self - the i inside me - is not something intrinsic to my body or even the spirit (whatever that might be). it is, instead, the result of a process of accretion. it was built over time as life-experience was gathered. so the i that i call "myself" could not possibly exist in an unbuilt state. if stripped of the experiential building blocks that make me, i would be like a building with all the physical materials removed: a not thing.

even if those bricks were painstakingly reassembled in precisely the same way elsewhere, they would constitute "the same building". it would be a different building composed of recycled materials. this is far more true of identity, i imagine, than material objects. if a new body were created with the same blip of awareness in it that existed when i was a zygote, it would not be me. it would not be me even if it lived exactly the same life and built up exactly the same personality, thoughts, feelings, memories, etc. it would merely resemble me.

this argument can be extended to "any break in the continuity of awareness = death". when consciousness is terminated, the self has vanished. when consciousness is restored, the new self that arises out the gathered experience still stored in the brain perceives a continuity of selfhood with the being that existed before the consciousness gap, but this may simply be a figment of memory. it is possible that the instance of self that lost consciousness ceases to exist forever.

if you turn off a computer and restart it, it's still the same computer, but a process that was interrupted when the machine shut down can't be called "the same instance of that process" even if it picks up seamlessly where the old one left off. it's a new instance of the process that continues the work of the old one.

anyway, if that kind of death does occur whenever we lose consciousness, then it's not such a big deal. we die all the time without knowing or fearing it, and the new beings that wake up in our beds every morning thinking they're us don't know any different.

edit

...a process that was interrupted when the machine shut down can't be called "the same instance of that process" even if it picks up seamlessly where the old one left off. it's a new instance of the process...

to

...a process that seamlessly picks up the work of one that was interrupted when the machine shut down cannot be called "the same instance" of that process (in a certain sense, it's not even the same process). it's a new instance...

goddam it

even if those bricks were painstakingly reassembled in precisely the same way elsewhere, they would NOT constitute "the same building".

i'm gonna quit now

^ that's only true if "memory wipe" wipes ALL awareness of not only experience, but also language, understanding of the body & abstract concepts, and even the ghostlike traces that inform our sense that we exist. if my brain were reduced to baby-state, not even newborn, but like first trimester, then yeah, what i call "i" has been entirely eradicated.

This actually sounds more scary to me than a quick, painless execution.

people here are such pessimists!

people here are such pessimists!

― the late great, Wednesday, May 1, 2013 6:29 PM (6 minutes ago)

lol, we've bumped heads over this before, on other terms. i'm willing the allow for the possible continuance of spirit/soul/"life energy"/whatev, but in order to allow that possibility, i have to separate that seemingly supernatural ghost-thing from self, my identity, the interior "i".

i mean, i'm not afraid of my soul dying. i don't even know that i have one. but i am afraid of my self dying. the idea that my ineffable spirit might carry on in some other form after my consciousness dissolved is no more reassuring to me than the knowledge that new life forms will construct themselves from my mortal remains. the deer that eats my fingers? that's not me. the baby that gets a shot of my soul jizz? not me neither.

I like this timeline. All my friends are here.

i push all the buttons

I'm hella privileged so no

xp so the possibility that your consciousness is not a discrete entity, but part of some larger, spiritual life force that will persist after your death is not comforting to you at all?

i don't think i believe in any kind of afterlife, but i can totally see the appeal of even the faintest, most abstract notions of an afterlife... anything that hints that my consciousness isn't bound to my material/temporal self.

If I were starting over from the beginning, no. If I could pick the point to go back to, and have this 49-year-old's memories as a guide -- hell yes.

it's an appealing idea, no doubt. i just don't believe. i view consciousness as categorically finite, the metaphysical avatar of biological processes, thus prone to tru death. like i said before, there may well be some empyrean thing within us that does endure beyond death, but it seems hella unlikely that self-aware consciousness is part of it. still, anything's possible, right?

what wmc said. that would be the shit.

there's a James tiptree jr story where a wealthy industrialist implants his brain in his infant son. It was the shit for a while, but then there were consequences. Filthy consequences

thinking abt jt jr always makes me sad ;_;

This was a great book, suggest by Elvis Telecom and some others on ILX:

soul jizz

whoa book sounds good

xp so the possibility that your consciousness is not a discrete entity, but part of some larger, spiritual life force that will persist after your death is not comforting to you at all?

Not especially.

only survival of the ego can really console the ego, the thought of some bit of me that i don't recognise as me rejoining the universe is no comfort at all - from the perspective i have now

there's days when i can't wait for the moment when some bit of me that i don't recognise as me rejoins the universe

The original question makes me think of Nietzsche and eternal return.

The greatest weight.-- What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence - even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!"
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

Kind of the opposite of the restart button, in that here it's here a test of how well you love your life.

Yeah, that Replay book is v. v. good.

for the chance to have a better childhood and parents : yes

for the fact that i had 20 years of a wonderful marriage and 2 great kids making everything shitty in this groove worthwhile : no

easy choice really : no

maybe yes for the fact of having chronic illness - i've tried hard not to let it affect my life but it still does on a day to day basis even just for obvious physical reasons.

but then in second life maybe i get hit by a bus.

Riplay

Momus addressed this very question some 20 years ago:
Platinum

Got fired 90 minutes ago from a dead-end IT job so I vote yes.

y'know I wondered about this once I heard that theory that the universe essentially was bound to expand and collapse and infinite number of times and that maybe, just maybe, Nietchzekz's devil story may be true. I guess I'd try to not get SB'd as much. Peace

xpost sorry about that wolves lacan. i got fired from a dead end barista job at a tea house a month ago and it sucked. i would have pushed the button that day. i'm sure you'll find somehting better though. xxpost Timelord is good stuff.

I wonder if it would be possible to "start over" but remember everything, if I could have prevented the 9/11 attacks. I was 15 at the time. I've thought about this a lot...obviously nobody would take me seriously but maybe I could call in a bomb threat to the WTC that morning and hopefully convince people to evacuate?

The button is useless if you can't remember anything and guide your reborn self to have a more satisfying life - plus you wouldn't even be aware that you're living your life over again so what's the point?

But it's creepy and weird if you maintain your past life consciousness and are some kind of "being john malcovich" puppeteer of your own second-run at life. and sure - parts of that could be fun - but remember you'd have to sit through decades of fucking school, even more aware of how useless most of it is.

But then if the alternative is just death and the end of all consciousness, bring on the fucking button.

wow, frogbs is making me feel like a horrible person - I've played out this re-lining your life scenario a thousand times and not once has it been about changing history or saving lives

re-living, not re-lining

you'd have to sit through decades of fucking school

This would be one of the best parts imo.

^^^

guess it all depends on your own experience but the idea of going through grade school again - especially if you already know everything they're going to teach you - feels pretty claustrophobic to me

which I guess is the fundemental flaw with it all - if you're an experienced adult consciousness inside a kid, you wouldn't get to enjoy any of the great things of being a kid - experiencing things for the first time, being innocent and uncynical

Unless you were Stuart Hall

aw man

If you could go back in time & kill all the 70s sex pests one by one

brb writing novel

Maybe child prodigies who skip grades are actually button pushers. Thanks for the headsup on 9/11, you jerks!

Haha!

if only Frogbs had gotten the button instead of that Zuckerberg twerp!

Going thru gradeschool sounds like death;

Starting university again in 1994 with full 21st-C knowledge and the phrase "Internet start-up" wasn't really known and eBay didn't exist, etc, well, I'd try to become as powerful as a Bond villain.

Pretty much just build LexCorp, only under the direction of a drunk socialist with an occasionally sophomoric sense of humor. Buy up as many politicians as need be to start charging the rules and make things really interesting.

I'm kind of with contenderizer above in that, if you don't get to keep your memories, I don't really see how pushing this button is that different than offing yourself.

hmm sort of disappointed with the turn this thread has taken into phenomenology seminar

i feel like what i was trying to ask from the get-go was "are you happy with your life or do you want a do-over" not "what is the nature of consciousness"

it's not really meant to be a realistic scenario

the problem is that I am absolutely happy with my life AND I want a do-over; it's a false binary

as an essential saddo that's a viewpoint i hadn't considered

In general, though, I have lived most of my life being haunted by neverending regrets and so the idea of such a button is attractive to me. But recently I've begun to look at things a bit more placidly -- like sure I can regret all this stuff, but it all ended up making me me, and, in the end, I'm actually pretty happy that I'm me, so what the fuck

winning attitude imo

i've been dwelling a lot on missed opportunities + current cul-de-sac of dead gurl problems and wondering what i'd have done differently, so i think i'm in the "push the button" camp

whoops that should have read "dead end gurl problems"

was worried you'd murdered your girlfriend there for a second

i swear, she'll be the death of us both

Hell, no. If there is any chance that I don't meet my wife or that we don't have our daughter, hell to the fuck no. Additionally, the fact that I am an early 21st century white American male means that I am a member of the most privileged class in all of human history, so despite some sort of self-loathing, I ain't giving that shit up.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

optimists

Really? Being a kid again would be such butt pain

This thread sucks for me, since I am the girlfriend mentioned above.

he also emailed most of us nude pictures of u taken with a bathroom scam just a heads up

spycam autocorrect

Hah no no no no no no way.

Really kind sad i missed out on this poll & discussion.