One of my philosophies of life is:
Live like you are going to die tomorrow and Learn like you will live forever
It has served me well… In the past few years I have sincerely tried to learn as much as I can; no matter what the field, if I had the opportunity to learn something new I took it. The idea I always had was that somewhere down the line I will find the knowledge useful. Over time this idea transformed me into to this irritating guy who could pull up facts about random subjects.
This has earned me a lot of nick names over time, one which I will never forget was given to me by my sister’s friend; she called me the “jack of all trades and master of none”. Not very flattering but half way there according to me :D
Very recently a friend of mine threw a factoid at me and she asked if I was the one that had told her about it… It was then that I realized that maybe this whole concept got out of hand at some point. Maybe I somewhere down the line went from being that irritating guy to become that really irritating guy :D
No actually I am too self serving to admit to such a mistake, what I really wondered about was if there was a point to learning all this stuff. Then the question struck me what if I would “live” forever?
Im not talking about the elixir of life or mystical idea of not aging or becoming immortal. What if there is a time in the near future(25-50 years) when we can download our entire brain to say a computer and continue to keep our minds working. I know it might sound too Sci-fi but in current times seeing the way technology is moving, that much amount of hard disk space would not be impossible.
Lets say hypothetically that its possible to download a person to a computer, the question will be what actually makes a person. The memory is a huge chunk but about the body or the speech. I am a very lean guy and know for a fact that if I had a bigger build I would have behaved in a different way. If I had a different voice maybe it would have affected the way I speak to people, coz their response would be different. My point being that if my mind was say was placed in a wrong robot body, I would be technically a different person.
But the big questions that puzzled me was “What is it that makes me?”
That I know is a very tough question to answer. I have heard we can define people by thier choices, then if someone made the exact same choices as me would that make them, me. I have always believed that its our beliefs that define who we are, but would it be alone enough?
I probably wont mind if most of those questions go unanswered. I guess its in a way beyond perfect explanation either way, but that bring me back to the start…
Live like you are going to die tomorrow and Learn like you will live forever
Doesn’t seem like a bad philosophy to live life with now, doesn’t it?