Personal incredulity noted.
I am not going to cite and catalog all the varieties of ‘Nuh uh!’ I have received here so we can go our separate ways secure in the knowledge neither of us have convinced the other. I’ll leave you to crow on whatever it is you’re calling that thing you’re standing on.
That’s cool, I’m happy to do the work.
The highest level error you made was in setting the discussion in terms of one work of fiction disproving a different work of fiction. There’s no such thing as an “immortal human,” and so there can’t be a way that immortality “really” works. As such, any depiction of immortality is as valid as any other depiction of immortality. The only meaningful distinction between them is one of personal aesthetic taste.
The second error in your OP was citing Groundhog Day as “proof” that a particular concept of immortality couldn’t work, despite the fact that the film explicitly shows that immortality does work, provided the immortal spends his time invested in the lives and well being of other people. At the end of the film, Phil Connors is at peace with being stuck perpetually in the time loop, and no longer sees it as a source of personal trauma that he did in the film’s second act. The film’s explicit point is that immortality is survivable through compassion for other people, which, far from “disproving” traditional concepts of heaven, is entirely complemental with that concept.
“The Jaunt”, while not explicitly cited in your OP, is also a conceptual misfire for the argument you want to make, because the story involves a character spending eternity in existential torment. A story about a character spending eternity in Hell isn’t really a rebuttal to what happens if you spend eternity in heaven.
Finally, taking the (generally Christian) concept of heaven on its own terms, you’re discounting the existence of God, the omnipotent actor who created heaven and who can have it function entirely according to his whims, without regard for the restrictions of physical matter. Whatever biological limitations in the human brain you imagine to make your assumption work can be trivially overcome by God to get the effect that He wants. If he wants humans who can withstand an eternal existence without losing their humanity or their pre-heaven identity, then he can absolutely do that.
Your objection to traditional conceptions of heaven appears to be largely an aesthetic objection - you don’t think “God just making it so heaven works” is an interesting story choice. Which is fine, and something I largely agree with you on. But it’s an untestable concept in a work of fiction. It can no more be “disproved”: by citing another work of fiction, anymore than you can “disprove” The Force by citing Star Trek.
I grew up in a religious tradition without the standard heaven. God was up there, and angels, and a few selected prophets, but not the souls of the dead anyone. So my view of the traditional heaven comes from a very fuzzy Christian version, including Dante, popular culture, and Shaw.
What I’m trying to do is figure out a non-contradictory Christian view that makes any kind of sense. The contradiction lies in the three legs of the heaven stool. 1) we are still us. If we are zombies who never get bored by definition then there is no problem. 2) You can’t be bored in heaven, since heaven is perfect and being bored is less than perfect. 3) Nothing changes in heaven, in it being perfect.
There is an independent contradiction in that I as a person will be sad viewing pain my friends and descendants go through after I die, but I can’t do anything about it. If I don’t care I’m not me. If I’m not allowed to see the earth, it would be a frustration that makes heaven less than perfect.
I suspect I’m just scratching the surface.
Sure. I find little there to argue with. My own approach to this was that, given the cited material is the movie Groundhog Day, which does not take place in the Christian heaven, we must be discussing the broader topic of whether there is any conceivable way that eternal existence could remain eternally tolerable.
I think there are ways that it could. I don’t think they necessarily correspond with any particular religious text.
In his book A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters Julian Barnes wrote about an eternal heaven. It’s an interesting read, I think the full text is here:
I am no theologian, but I do not think that “biology” comes into it—you are dead, after all. Nor is Christian heaven about day-to-day human experience or existence, as opposed to proximity to God and universal harmony, whereas Groundhog Day is saying something about human life via symbolism, as many fictional works do.
Great book. He makes pretty much the same argument: eventually everything will have been done, therefore boredom is inevitable because repetition is inevitable and nothing can ever get better than perfect. It’s a solid argument in the scenario where the eternal beings have unlimited, perfect memory capacity, but finite patience and appetites.
Of course it could be argued that, in order to be perfected heavenly beings, they would have to have unlimited, perfect memory, and that works if the definition of perfected means ‘upgraded with every conceivable additional feature in the fullest possible measure’, but that’s just one way to look at it. Perfected could also just mean ‘works perfectly’; a theoretical perfect clock doesn’t have an infinite number of hands, it just has the regular number, and they work properly without fail.
I thought it was a movie that proves rodents are good at weather forecasting.
I hope that is not the core of his argument. Just like the Latin alphabet has 20-some letters yet it is possible to write infinitely many different books, repetition is not inevitable in infinite time, all the less so when one has “unlimited, perfect memory capacity”. But I still think that once you start talking about a metaphysical, infinite world, divinity, transcendence, samadhi, etc., mundane analogies may fail you. I mean, forget all that: in this world, in real life any semi-competent yogi can overcome finite patience and appetites.
If you mean the book, I wouldn’t say he really makes any arguments - it’s a collection of loosely, but quite cleverly related little tales (or retellings in some cases), mostly about human failings, even though the themes are generally bits and pieces of religion.
The chapter about eternal life has (from memory) the protagonist wake up in heaven and be amazed to be served the perfect breakfast; over a period of time he plays golf until such point as he scores a hole-in-one every time, then golf is no longer fun, and so on - even the perfect breakfast gets samey and eventually he wants it to end.
I prefer Greg Egan’s Permutation City for a fictional thought experiment on what humans might do if they were immortal.
The film Beetlejuice proves the human mind can endure unbelievably long wait times at the afterlife equivalent of the DMV.
Well, yes, but the film Titanic proves two people can’t use a door as a raft.
In one of his Hornblower books, C.S. Forester makes the observation that some theologians had made the argument that Hell consisted of sinners being forced to do the same things they had enjoyed on earth (and which lead to their condemnation) over and over again until they became torture.
The original Twilight Zone episode “A Nice Place to Visit” (April 15, 1950) makes the same point, with its devil, Mr. Pipp (played by a pre-Mr. French Sebastian Cabot) showing newly-deceased gangster Henry Francis “Rocky” Valentine around his afterlife. Rocky thinks he’s in Heaven, of course, and that some screwup was made, until The Awful Truth dawns on him.
Mark Twain made the following observation in “Letter from the Earth”