Why? Are you planning on becoming an immortal but otherwise normal person sometime in the near future? Is this an opportunity that’s open to everybody?
Yeah, the ‘refresh time’ of things varies wildy between different things and persons. (I’m betting if you ate a pie every five minutes continuously, you’d get bored if you didn’t get sick first.) There are some books I could read every year, and some that I can only read every six or ten. Still though, most things that you don’t actually dislike have some amount of time after which they become enjoyable, so all you have to do is accumulate enough things to do that by the time you’re bored with some of it, some other thing becomes fun again.
I agree - I could probably only eat five or six at a sitting. But seriously, the point is that after the ‘refresh time’ has passed, the pleasure of the experience isn’t the slightest bit attentuated by repetition - I’m betting it’s that way for quite a lot of experiences.
I’m surprised at the level of consensus. I felt sure it was right here that I’d heard the ‘eternity couldn’t possibly be anything other than terribly boring’ argument.
Well, if you’d said “Eternity in heaven”, I’d immidiately respond that I doubt that God (as usually portrayed) would allow a sufficient range and scope of entertaining activities to allow a person to let everything wait out its ‘refresh time’ before trying it again or running out of things to do. I mean, religious folk are better known for banning entertaining activities than encouraging them in any variety.
But the scenario presented did not include any unusual restrictions on activities, so under that scenario avoiding boredom remains an option, assuming you have sufficient resources and options to find enough things to do.
Sorry–I missed the “immune to death, disease, and injury” part of the OP. In that case, I think we’d see some radical departures from traditional human behavior.
No activity would be too dangerous. I think every immortal would jump off a cliff, or a skyscraper, at least once. Why not? They can’t be injured.
You’d be an actual superhero. You could walk into burning buildings without hope of being harmed, take bullets square in the chest, walk in front of trains, and so on. You could be overwhelmed and restrained in a fight, but never hurt.
Likewise, you’d see new realms of exploration. Marianas-trench diving—without a submarine or even a SCUBA rig. How about Volcano diving and Magma swimming? And you just know a few people are going to want to walk on the moon—without a spacesuit.
I had assumed that the immortals we were talking about could be killed, but wouldn’t die of old age or sickness. Kind of like Tolkien’s elves. Un-injurable people … that’s something else. I think you can be damn sure that at least a few of them will try to conquer the world (and may likely succeed).
Well, I guess that would depend on the notion of heaven under discussion, with which I didn’t really want to bog things down - because whenever I’ve seen the argument, I think it was presented as a problem with the fundamental notion of living forever, rather than doing so within any particular framework.
To be honest, I only said that as an aside - I was trying to define as bland an eternity as possible - that is, one where you can just carry on being you, rather than being transformed into an ethereal creature with robes and harps.
Well if you don’t take away my toys, don’t overly limit what comsumables I can partake of, don’t limit my activities, and generally stay out of my hair, I could probably find things to do in your heaven or any other.
I think that most of the time the statements about the boringness of eternity are probably taking place in discussions where the existence of God and his rules are being at least temporarily entertained for the sake of argument, and so the effect of God and his rules would color any discussion.
Alternatively, you might have just been talking to people who hadn’t found a routine in life that did a decent job of keeping them entertained, or who recognized that their entertainments wouldn’t be indefinitely repeatable. I know that if I was eternal and my collection of entertaining artifacts wasn’t, I would go insane with boredom a short while after the last of my toys broke, if I couldn’t replace them.
I think (based on your use of the word “eventually” among other things) that you’re making a false assumption.
“Eternal life” (at least according to some conceptions of it) doesn’t mean life that goes on for an infinitely long time; it means life that is somehow outside of (or beyond) ordinary time.
I’d say eternal, indestructible people would get pretty bored once the sun went nova. Floating around in space collecting rocks would only be entertaining for so long.
Well, that’s certainly one view - but I didn’t really want to get in to the whys and wherefores of that, because as I say, I’ve seen the argument stated as baldly as “if you lived forever, ennui would be inevitable”. The question can be framed outside of theology, if you like - if we posit some kind of technology that would allow us to live indefinitely (even if it’s not truly forever, I think it’s the same thing - if you don’t get bored after, say, one billion years of life, then I think it could be argued that you have hit upon a method of not ever getting bored).
This would be my basic position in this debate as well. I expect that the wonders which God can offer in Heaven excede anything that our mortal minds can imagine. Consequently it’s impossible to even grasp how we’ll react to those wonders.
For a metaphor, consider that a person who’s been deaf their entire life probably couldn’t imagine how great the variety of musical experiences are. Likewise, the set of experiences that we have in this mortal life can’t prepare us for the life to come.
I, personally would not agree with this at all. When I was ten years old, I was quite content to play Super Mario Brothers 3 in my spare time, hour after hour, day after day, month after month. Now that would seem to be unbearably monotonous. I insist on a wider variety of leisure activities. Of course I don’t claim that’s true for everyone. There may be many who do fit your description as they age.
I don’t know if this falls under ennui exactly, but how about how one would live with oneself after the first couple of thousand years? That short story by Stephen King (“Jaunt” or something like that) speculates that one would go insane, and C.S. Lewis thought that we would descend into a hell of our own making as our accumulated bad habits and nastiness of character just got exponentially worse with no end in sight.
In King’s case, he postulated an eternity of sensory deprivation, which would drive you insane; it takes far less time than that in the real world. In CS Lewis’s case, I expect it was part of his anti-human, anti-life Christian belief system that us flesh and blood creatures are all vile scum who inevitably wallow in our own evil without God’s help.
But century after century of the same thing over and over might amount to a form of sensory deprivation, don’t you think?
Your hate duly noted, but might not CS Lewis have a point here? I’ve seen other atheists (even on this board, I think) acknowledge that in spite of his beliefs, the man had a keen eye for human nature (e.g., the Screwtape Letters).
Lets face it, modern human life is bloody repetative anyway.
Who hasn’t felt like they’re stuck in groundhog day sometimes ?
We wake up, we goto work, we go home and go to bed. Certainly not everyone but many of us have lives that are routine based.
I heard our routines described as “Always the same from Day to Day but never the same from Decade to Decade”
And despite all of this most of us manage to find some sence of satisfaction and enjoyment in our lives. Doesn’t matter if it’s sex, success or Steak and Kidney Pie.
And yet depression is on the rise atleast in the Western World, (I’m ignorant of the trend in other areas).
So I think whatever is seperating the folks that enjoy life out, from those that don’t, would continue to do so regardless of immortality.
Frankly, if I was immortal, I’d be more afraid that there could be only one.
Well, I guess I could kill some time watching old Highlander repeats.
What about the other idea, brought up by Niven about intelligent computers? They eventually and mysteriously shut down. You probably can’t learn everything, but would too much knowledge be worse than boredom?