Alexey Turchin develops his “respawn” hypothesis: memory determines whether a new experience continues a previous life

Alexey Turchin develops his “respawn” hypothesis: memory determines whether a new experience continues a previous life

On October 24, Alexey Turchin published an essay on “respawn”, his hypothesis about new subjective experience after the loss of autobiographical memory. It draws on Markus Müller’s theory of observer states, in which fundamental memory erasure, the loss of the ability to reconstruct one’s past history, remains a subject for future rigorous formalization.

In his essay, Turchin proposes assessing any attempt to preserve personal identity by a single criterion: whether a future experience would allow the reconstruction of a particular person’s history, including memories, relationships, habits, and understanding of their own life. In his interpretation, experience that retains this memory continues the same life story, while experience after its loss begins another.

His starting point is physicist Markus Müller’s 2020 paper. For Müller, an observer state consists of all the information available at a given moment: observations and memory, including information of which the person is not consciously aware at that moment. In the simplified version published in the paper, each successive state adds information to the preceding one, allowing earlier states to be reconstructed from the new state.

With fundamental memory erasure, the new state no longer allows earlier states to be reconstructed. Müller writes of this case: “if the observer loses most of their memory, the process essentially starts anew”.

Turchin uses this still unfinished part of the theory to examine personal identity. He uses “respawn” to describe a possible transition to a state that no longer retains the previous life story, and explicitly identifies this idea as his own extrapolation.

In his reasoning, cryonics, detailed digital records of a person’s life, and personality reconstruction could serve as “checkpoints”: they preserve more material from which a future reconstruction might piece together that person’s history. For Turchin, a posthumous copy continues a particular person’s life when it retains their memories and connection to their life story.