bitcrafter

I don't know, I think it offer the incredibly valuable life lesson that the secret to being happy is to convince a publisher to give you a $200,000 advance to spend on "spiritual and personal exploration" so that you don't have to get a real job.

The worst part was that there were references to cool things that he'd find in the tower once he got there, such as music that was enjoyed by people on a particular floor, and then

I dragged myself through the last couple of books to find out what was in that stupid tower and was so incredibly disappointed...

(I will say, though, that, the city of people who used their psychic powers to destroy the Universe because someone was going to destroy it anyway so it might as well be them because the job paid really well was pretty apt, though!)

Yes, while I do not agree, I do appreciate you taking the time to explain your position. 🙂

Ok, my “entropy machine” statement was very vague and only moderately clearer in my head. For the sake of the argument, could we assume there is no physical issue with our brains over long periods of time? Say it feels like a healthy 20-30 year old mind forever.

Yes and no. I am fine with assuming that there is no physical issue with our brains, but in a sense that only addresses the hardware end and not the software end. It is not a given that our minds, when viewed as information processing systems, have the ability to remain stable indefinitely, a bit like how AIs in science fiction stories often go insane because instabilities build up. In fact, in a way some of the problems you are describing with what it would be like to be immortal could be viewed as examples of how the mind could break down over time.

So given this, there is a good chance we will need to apply a software patch to the mind, or some other form of engineering, to make the experience of being an immortal livable in practice. One possibility is that the information system simply cannot inherently hold an arbitrarily large number of memories so we need to engineer it to forget over time--though again, this might not actually be that invasive since our minds already forget most of what happens to them. However, maybe there are other possibilities as well, and when you get the procedure to become immortal you get to choose which one you want. (I actually really liked the The Golden Oecumene series about a post-singularity society because a major part of the setting was that there were lots of different ways that people wired their brains.)

(All of this is pure speculation, of course! I find it unlikely that any of this will come about any time soon, if civilization ever figures it out before destroying itself in one of many various ways.)

What would be the point of trying to do everything apart from filing the time that you have? Maybe things would have meaning for N years with N very large? Doesn’t matter how large, it’s still nothing. And then you need to keep at it even though it’s lost meaning to you, or try something else, again, with the knowledge this is an inescapable cycle.

I think that it is important to distinguish having the freedom to do anything from the attempt to do everything.

It reminds me a bit of Groundhog Day: what made Bill Murray happy in the end was finding meaning and contentment in his repeating life, rather than fighting against it.

I wouldn’t call reincarnation “immortality” in the context of this argument because we have been talking about subjective experience, and subjectively, even assuming reincarnation, you only ever experience one incarnation with no knowledge of prior ones.

Oh, yeah, to be clear, I totally do not consider it to be immortality either. It's just that, completely as an aside, if reincarnation is a thing, then it is technically an alternate solution to the "novelty" problem, and it is often sold as such in Eastern religions. (I thought of this just because another commenter brought it up.)

Yes but it was more of an additional remark. I was just arguing death made for a meaningful experience. But it’s not the only meaningful experience one can have, so it does not reinforce my initial point.

If the conclusion is that death provides a significant element of meaning to your life, then fair enough!

For me, it just is what it is, and my life would not be any less meaningful if it were taken away. Having said that, if someone walked up to me and offered me immortality then I would be very hesitant because if things go bad then you might end up suffering from all eternity.

From my finite point of view, each of my choice lasts for my whole life, there is no subjective difference.

Fair enough, but either way we arrive at the same conclusion that being immortal does not make choices less weighty.

There is a whole spectrum between “misguidedly trying to be one and only one thing” and being an entropy machine.

Hmm, I think our disagreement here depends what exactly would happen to the human mind over arbitrarily large time scales, because I don't think that constantly changing is the same thing as inevitably converging towards being nothing at all in particular as you do.

Of course, this is in part an engineering issue because the human brain is not designed to last for more than ~ 120 years anyway, so one solution might be to just not take away our natural tendency for memories to get fuzzier the further they are in the past. This also would have the advantage that it would let us re-experience things as if it were for the first time, so that life never completely loses its novelty.

(Honestly, you could argue that this is essentially what reincarnation would do anyway, but reincarnation kind of scares me because most human and animal bodies have short and horrifying lives, so I would rather not take my chances if I do not have to.)

You mean like the sentences after that?

Hmm, I reread your comment to try and figure out what you are trying to get at with this but could not figure it out. Could you explain?

Because, for instance, choices carry more weight when you can make finitely many of them.

Ah, but on the other hand, they can only have finite impact. If one were immortal, then the consequence of each choice would last forever, giving it more weight rather than less.

Knowing you only have a limited time forces you to try and realise what’s meaningful to you and what’s not, and to actual act upon it.

Perhaps, but plenty of people get so absorbed in their lives that they don't do this anyway, even with only finite time available to them.

If you live forever, have time to learn everything, experience everything… Then do you really? At which point does the amount of different experiences you run after stop painting a coherent picture of one’s life, values and identity, and start looking like noise in a random checklist? Finding meaning in an eternal life would be a sisyphean task.

Our identity already changes significantly over time; for example, I am a very different person in many ways than I was a decade ago. Thus, change is an inevitable feature of existence that we already need to embrace even for a finite lifetime.

Put another way, if one is seeking meaning through a lifelong stable identity, then one is looking in the wrong place because there is no such thing.

And also, ageing and dying are part of the human experience. Accepting your own mortality, your own limit in time, when you subjectively feel like you’ve always existed, is a meaningful journey. Becoming immortal robs you of that chance.

This is circular reasoning. If it were possible to be immortal--which is the hypothetical being considered--ageing and dying would no longer be a necessary part of the human experience, so there would need to be a better reason to choose them than "ageing and dying are part of the human experience".

I am agnostic as to whether reincarnation/rebirth is a thing, but if it is then I follow the Eastern view that the best thing to do about it is to become one with Brahman/attain nirvana so that this is the last life as a separate being. I have had ambitions to spend more time and energy on spiritual practices towards this end, but unfortunately I have had numerous health problems that have drained my energy and made it hard to focus. (I also used to be in pretty good physical shape and lost most of it over the last year or two.) It would be really nice if I at least had enough time and energy to make it to stream entry in this life.

Fair enough, but that sounds more like "enjoyable" than "meaningful".

Meh, if immortality means that a copy of me is being uploaded into a computer, then at least I guess that is technically someone else spending eternity in the Torment Nexus?

I've gone to a lot of trouble to learn a lot and gain a lot of wisdom (though starting like a fool helps a lot with the latter!), and yet there is still so much more room to learn and grow, so the prospect of cutting that process short makes me sad, even if it is inevitable.

Mortality is a state of mind!

I have no plans to live forever as a separate being, but I am hoping to attain nirvana so that I end the ending the suffering involved with death.