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genetic engineering? ai singularity perhaps? How do you intend to live forever?

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[-] TriangleSpecialist@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

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

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.

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.

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.

[-] bitcrafter@programming.dev 0 points 1 week ago

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".

[-] TriangleSpecialist@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

each choice would last forever, giving it more weight rather than less.

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

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.

True, my initial comment should read "can be meaningful" rather than "is meaningful".

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.

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

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".

You mean like the sentences after that?

[-] bitcrafter@programming.dev 0 points 1 week ago

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?

[-] TriangleSpecialist@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

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

If you define the weigh of each choice as being the subjective length of time of it's effect solely, then I would agree. But that is only one way to look at it. The other one, from my initial comment, was that each choice is more "precious" (willfully using a different term here for clarity rather than anything deep) if you only can make finitely many. In that sense, the weight of a single choice is that you know it will rob you of the opportunity of the other ones that you could have made. If you are immortal, you can just also make them later.

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.

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.

My entropy thing had more to do with what one would do or chose to do. I was thinking about it vaguely in terms of "if someone or something can do everything, it communicates no information about that thing".

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.

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.

So that's starting to be interesting. If we add the forgetting, then you have sort of this sliding window of memories, yeah you address part of my above points. I was going to say that it could lead to being just trapped in sort of a periodic pattern largely, and that that would be meaningless, but I realised that would have been dishonest. First of all because of the unproven assumption, but more importantly because we have been talking about subjective meaning so far rather than objective meaning. So even if true, that would not necessarily render the experience meaningless subjectively.

All I can say is that, if I were given the choice in how to be made eternal, that would have to be part of the deal to soften the blow. Also this is not what I took it to mean so not what I had in mind when commenting. There's room for arguing about objectives meaning but I feel like even agreeing on whether that's a thing is a whole other conversation.

(Honestly, you could argue that this is essentially what reincarnation would do anyway,

Damn, I'm going to really sound like a contrarian I am sorry. I disagree with this. There is a fundamental difference to me between reincarnation, which involves death (or indeed, the erasure of the knowledge of your past life) and a discrete jump to another one and a sliding window of perceived memory but with continuous consciousness. 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.

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?

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.

this post was submitted on 06 Dec 2025
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