Only Christians get to do that, huh?
I’m a Jewish atheist, I’m good times two.
Nah, you’d still be just like the human you were on Earth, just with the parts of your brain that make things boring or tiring turned off. Everything else works exactly the same, because that’s how God wants it to work.
I’m not saying that’s how it really works (obviously not, because I’m an atheist) or that it’s an interesting concept/narrative. But it’s really easy to imagine, which is the point I was responding to.
Yes, this is the refusal to acknowledge I mentioned. This particular version takes the form of a True Scotsman—i.e., nothing you could possibly transform into could possibly be you, despite the fact that life itself is a process of continuous transformation. Therefore there can be only an unendurable eternity, since that’s the only True Scotsman.
Randy Alcorn wrote a great book titled Heaven that comprehensively explains what Heaven (the current one and the future New Earth) is like according to the Bible and addresses all the various questions and misconceptions people have about it including the issue of boredom and the modern pop culture idea of Heaven as just sitting on clouds and playing harps forever. As I said before in a different thread it would be absolutely trivial for an all powerful God that created reality including the afterlife from nothing in addition to eternal souls to make it so that people in Heaven (or whatever you want to call it) never got bored and retained their personalities and what makes them “them” even as their minds and bodies are improved and time went on. If people got bored (for long at least) and miserable or became different people completely divorced from who they were on Earth it wouldn’t be perfect and naturally wouldn’t be Heaven. Mental continuity and individual identity are essential parts of personhood so I don’t see why they wouldn’t be retained indefinitely.
Some may consider this a “cop out” but we shouldn’t expect a supernatural realm to be governed by the same rules that dictate our physical universe as long as it’s logically possible. It’s like saying a hypothetical wizard’s magic powers aren’t possible given our understanding of science. It’s magic so by definition it isn’t explainable using conventional means. Imagine an insect expressing incredulity at the idea of skyscrapers, algebra, quantum physics and supercomputers or someone asking if there would be enough room for everyone in Heaven. The answer to the usual questions is within the very premise itself even if we as mortal beings living in the real world can’t fully comprehend it.
Sure, and life expectancy was such that getting cut down in your prime was commonplace, so the idea that more life is better would also be commonplace, and certainly not many people were really thinking about what ‘forever’ really meant.
But what we seem to be seeing in this thread is the argument that, if you say you have thought about it, and you disagree, then you’re obviously either lying, or you haven’t actually thought about it as much as you believe you have.
Such an argument is unassailable by logic or reason, because it summarily dismisses disagreement.
Looking back, I remember things I did and thought when I was 4 years old (well, a few of them); I remember more of the things I did and thought when I was 20 years old, and still more from 30 and so on. Also looking back, I don’t feel like I am the exact same person I was back then - not specifically because of improvement (sure, perpetual increase of a value either has to hit a limit, or else it gets really weird), but rather, largely just because of change.
If, without becoming actually immortal, my life was extended to (say) 500 years, I fully expect that the person at age 500 would not have a lot in common with the person age 20, except for the legal name and stuff and a perhaps vague sense of continuity, plus wilful retention of some favourites and such things that are retained by practice.
And that’s OK - absence of any abrupt changes means there is a sense of continuity from one day or year to the next, and so it’s possible for there to be an identity, it’s just that the identity is not a static or monolithic thing.
Philosophically, it’s arguable whether that would mean that the individual really is living forever, or if it’s more like a series of different people inhabiting the shell of an identity. I don’t think it really matters - if you zoom out and take a couple of snapshots, sure, the old ship of Theseus is an entirely different ship from the new ship of Theseus, so you could say that the old one has been lost or destroyed and replaced by the new one, except that notion is only sustained by ignoring the continuum of change between the two snapshots.
In that sense, you could say that Groundhog Day supports the argument for eternal life; At the start of the movie, Phil is a self-obsessed, uncreative, jaundiced, antisocial asshole of limited talent; at the end of the movie, he’s amongst other things, a musician, a charming entertainer and conversationalist, a philanthropist, a social figurehead and a sensitive lover; he is transformed - but he’s still Phil.
“Time loop” stories such as Groundhog Day, Palm Springs, and Edge of Tomorrow present some interesting philosophical questions on achieving happiness in life. Why are characters typically miserable in the time loop story? Typically because what they thought was a temporary visit to someplace they may not have wanted to go to in the first place has now become their entire life and they are now trapped in it. In the character’s mind, there is something else the character would rather be doing somewhere else and the time loop reset is a constant reminder of its impossibility.
That’s not really different from real life IMHO. As much as we like to think we have the capability to do anything or go anywhere, most people are trapped in their day to day circumstances. If you spend all your time preparing and working for some future that may not even happen, you can become disconnected from your actual life that’s right in front of you.
Phil didn’t spend millennia reliving Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney, PA before he became depressed and suicidal. He spent some time using the time loop to amuse himself with some high risk or hedonistic activities that he would never face consequences for. But that got boring pretty quickly. Mostly it was about Phil’s frustration about not being able to get back to his “real life” (such as it was as a cynical news reporter with no real relationships to speak of). It wasn’t until Phil embraced his situation and started getting to know the people and town around him on a real level that he started to achieve happiness.
So in a way, it’s more about mindset. Planting an acorn and not knowing what will happen to it the next day. But also not waiting around to see if it grows before you decide to take up furniture making and whatnot.
Often it is achieving that higher purpose that makes the time loop bearable, even advantageous. It becomes an opportunity to create a better version of yourself so you can win someone’s heart or stop an alien invasion.
Now, infinity is a long time. So at some point you are going to have explored every possible scenario and million times. So I don’t really know what you do at that point.
Hugin and Munin fly each day
over the spacious earth.
I fear for Hugin, that he come not back,
yet more anxious am I for Munin.
Losing memories would be a great concern for immortals. No physical structure could contain an infinite amount of memories, so every immortal would need to lose data. Eventually you would be meeting old friends, or your relatives, as if you had never known them. Immortal amnesia.
I don’t see why it need be a concern if it’s just the norm. If you see the relatives often or even once a decade, the memories are reinforced and supplemented with fresh ones. If you only see them once every 6 centuries, you probably forget the people, and that seems appropriate anyway.
If they’re nice people, you get to experience the joy of meeting them afresh. If they are not nice people, it was well that you forgot them.
There are plenty of ways immortality could suck. If you are immortal amongst mortals, that’s going to get lonely. If you are immortal with perfect and infinite recall, that could get boring. If you’re immortal in a universe that isn’t, that might get uncomfortable.
Assuming you’re immortal in the real world (not Heaven or any kind of supernatural realm) you would eventually end up trapped in a situation you couldn’t get out of assuming you have no other powers or once the Earth was destroyed floating in space. Neither are situations I’d want to be victim to. I’d rather live a normal life and hope there’s a positive afterlife when I die. The latter is the only kind of immortality I hope for.
If we were talking about heaven instead of Punxsutawney PA then one of the features should be a lack of boredom. OTOH one can easily become bored in Punxsutawney in one non-repeating afternoon.
Bored people are boring. Phil figured out how not to be bored in Punxsutawney. I think that was the point of the film.
Go around again. The interval between doing everything once, and doing everything the next time is never going to be so quick that you’d need to be all "uhhhhh. We only just did this "
People who think they won’t get bored existing in an eternity have cited that they aren’t bored yet on this planet.
You may imagine how ridiculous that sounds to me.
As Martin McDonagh put it:
Maybe that’s what hell is, the entire rest of eternity spent in fucking Bruges.
That’s an extremely reductive take on the counter-arguments you’ve received.
You’re calling those counter-arguments? Ok.
In that they largely refute your OP, yes.