You seem to overestimate the capacity of human memory. I’ve been bored with life every day since I was 5. Maybe longer than that but I don’t have a clear memory of it before then. I still haven’t offed myself though. Still hoping I’m not in some bizarre version of Groundhog’s Day and if I do kill myself I won’t wake up still on this weird planet of the humans. I’m pretty sure enough drugs and alcohol will make it better. I finally have time for that in life and I think I’ll find out soon.
Drugs and alcohol can help make our world palatable and it’s finite. I am not sure why some dementia adjacent existence is cool with you, but even if it was nothing will make the infinite acceptable to anything approaching a human mind.
In much the same sense that the square root of –1 isn’t real? It’s not a part of the real world, but it is a part of the complex world, which is richer and more complete and contains the real world as a lower-dimensional subset?
I don’t feel a need to address those specifics since I wasn’t arguing anyone’s particular favourite version of heaven. I was talking about whether living forever must inevitably become boring.
Besides, I think it’s possible to logically debunk the assertion that, given unlimited time, everything would eventually have been done once and therefore repetition would be inevitable:
For the first thousand years, contemplate the number 1
For the next thousand years, contemplate the number 2
Continue until you run out of numbers.
Although I will concede this plan doesn’t seem especially stimulating to me, it undeniably provides endless variety, of a sort. NB I think Greg Egan came up with this before me.
Nonsense. What it shows that maybe some trickster deity or one with a sense of humor, decided to give him his own personal purgatory, in the hopes he would reform… and also the entertainment value.
The film only “proves” that Bill is a superb actor, and the the writer is a genius.
More of less that is how it is supposed to happen.
You have not thought it through. Not completely. I used Groundhog Day to talk about an event in collective knowledge we could talk about, but it’s just a placeholder for the concept that the human mind has many limits. It can only handle a certain amount of noise. It can only handle a certain amount of light. It can handle a certain amount of pain.
The human mind can only handle a certain amount of time. There is no limit to time in eternity.
I think Phil attempts to kill himself in Groundhog Day not out of boredom but because of loneliness.
For a long time I was never bored. As I’ve gotten older human connection has become more important.
Now in the environment of Groundhog Day Phil eventually finds ways to communicate his situation to others in town, and they believe him and have empathy for him. Now it still all resets, but it’s at least temporary relief. But it’s not enough, so he continues to work on his state of connectedness until he gets out.
So the lesson there seems to be that we are to seek out a level of connectedness to God, others, the universe, something like that. And not having that but living forever would be the hell. Having enough books to read or even enough women to screw isn’t enough.
I’m not sure why repetition is supposedly some sort of gotcha.
Every time I eat a good steak and kidney pie, I enjoy it. When I finish eating one, I am often already wishing there was another. Whilst the duration of my life of enjoying steak and kidney pies this far is a mere moment in comparison to forever, I tend to think that repetition of this enjoyment, if it was going to get boring, would already have done so even by now.
“yes, but if it was forever, it would get boring” is an assertion. My own assertion, which I hold no less valid is “no, it wouldn’t”.
Repetition marks time. Even if a particular mortal being doesn’t feel ‘time’ in a place because of sky magic unless they become some sort of polaroid representation of themselves they still experience things and there are only so many things you can experience before you tire of them.
You don’t think you will ever get bored. But EVER is an impossibly long time. An amount people do not seem to understand.
It’s too simple. Given eternity I might be able to learn how to play chess. An eternity is more than enough time to watch the last 6 minutes of a basketball game.
If, along with eternal existence, perfect and unlimited eidetic recall is taken as given, then I could accept that eventually there would be fewer and fewer novel experiences to collect, and there would be no point in repeating existing ones because just remembering them perfectly would be the same experience.
Except who is to say that state of being is the pinnacle of human potential? Maybe our memories fade by design, just like a database that requires maintenance and archival and housekeeping in order to function properly.
If “I’d forgotten how good this is” is a pleasure that one can only experience in mortal life, then perfection of the human memory would make the human being less perfect.
As an atheist, this take doesn’t make sense coming or going.
Can I imagine an eternity that isn’t hell? Yes. Heaven has God in it, God is omnipotent, so if God wants you to spend eternity genuinely happy, you’ll spend eternity genuinely happy. You won’t ever get sick of it because God doesn’t want you to get sick of it. That’s an easy enough concept to understand, even if I don’t believe in it.
On the other side, if I were a Christian, the “eternity” of “The Jaunt” is still completely comprehensible. It’s eternity without the presence of god to make it bearable. I mean, this part isn’t ever really theoretical or hypothetical. You lock a human being in a room with no sensory input, and no social contact, and leave them there for long enough, their mind will absolutely disintegrate.
Anyway, kind of surprised this thread has gone as long as it has without mentioning The Good Place, because it explicitly tackles this whole concept in it’s final season.
This sounds like a personally reasonable conclusion for a person to draw if they have not yet completed a full human life span. Now lets talk about Geologic time spans. Astronomical time spans. Let’s talk about mathematical infinity.