One of the recent TED talks I’ve enjoyed… In it Daniel Kahneman discusses the ‘remembering self’ an the ‘experiencing self’ and poses an interesting thought experiment:
Imagine that your next vacation you know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed, and you’ll get an amnesic drug so that you won’t remember anything. Now, would you choose the same vacation? And if you would choose a different vacation, there is a conflict between your two selves, and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict, and it’s actually not at all obvious because, if you think in terms of time, then you get one answer. And if you think in terms of memories, you might get another answer. Why do we pick the vacations we do, is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves.
It reminded me of this photo (which I know I’ve told lots of people about, but I don’t think I’ve posted yet)…
Leave a Reply