This idea, which may not be too-far-off in the future, of having a person’s memories downloaded as commodities for others to experience, brings up a number of questions regarding what is humanity. The first thing that I thought of when I read Damien’s question was the film Vanilla Sky, and I then noticed that Damien briefly mentioned it during his most recent blog. This may have already talked about in class on Thursday, unfortunately I was unable to make it. The movie deals with the issue of using technology to put humans into a world inside of their own head. For an exuberant price, a consumer can forever live in a lucid dream made up of memories of joy and love from their previous life. Looking at this idea while trying to define humanity, I had come to the tentative conclusion that though a person may be alive and experiencing emotions in their own world, they are not experiencing life in its true sense. There is nothing challenging about never growing old, seeing yourself as you want see yourself, and only experiencing one side of the human experience. Taking the harsh side of life with the beautiful is what defines a person experiencing the real world.

Now if the idea is that eventually I would be able to sell/give my memories and past experiences to another person to view/experience for themselves and how it would affect my humanity, you can make a case for this being negative and positive. This could be a negative because it slightly devalues the human experience of life. What would the difference be between hitting a game winning shot in an important basketball game in high school and truly living the exciting moment versus just downloading someone else’s memory of a similar situation and adopting it as your own? When looking back into the past, there would be very little differences. But the immediate emotions and feelings of living in that moment would be lost because every persons own memory begins to fade eventually. This new technology could also be a good thing for helping somebody get past a traumatic moment that they had to live through by giving them kinder memories. But then again, this also takes away from the genuine human experience.