5 ms·

I guess I don't understand the desire to live forever. Do people really want suffer through daily life for eternity? Disclaimer: I barely make it through a week

I guess I don't understand the desire to live forever. Do people really want suffer through daily life for eternity? Disclaimer: I barely make it through a week without thinking about not wanting to live though.

kafkaesq 10y ago
There really is so much beauty (and yes, meaning) out there to experience, comprehend, and enjoy. And there are so many kind, brilliant, fascinating people (and other living entities) to experience and share notes on it all with. Despite all the inevitable hassle and suffering and messiness. So yes, I'd say it's worth it. You don't have to try to stretch it out indefinitely, time-wise, if that's not your thing. I think the key to our journey through all of "this", whatever it is, is to treat it as if it is, in fact, infinite (or rather timeless), even though our conscious experience of it happens to be stuck on a one-way track which makes it seem (to our primitive minds) like it's finite.
- ZeroFries 10y ago
  But why do you need to experience that beauty through one particular consciousness track, experienced through one particular mind (even this statement is incorrect, because if you define a person as a particular configuration of matter, then you are a new mind each time-interval)? Make way for new configurations, for more brilliant, fascinating minds.
  - Capt-RogerOver 10y ago
    If you are speaking in terms of spiritual experiences, you can of course be having any kind of those and nothing can really be argued about it, because they are subjective. If, however, you are making an objective claim about "past lives" and reincarnation - there is no solid evidence for it. 99% of "past life memories" examples are in the form of "I had a family and we had a house" (omg, that sounds like our dead relative, you must be him reincarnated), or in a form of an obviously imagined past life of a historic figure, with details which have been read in history books by the individual claiming to experience the said past life. And interestingly they always seem to read about the historic figure first (giving their subconscious mind the change to soak up that knowledge (in this life though)), and "experiencing a past life" only after. So to answer your question - because you only get one particular mind, and that's it. This is what science shows us. Whether you "feel like" you are "one with all other minds" is just a subjective experience. It's not physical reality.
    - ZeroFries 10y ago
      I'm not making a claim about reincarnation or past lives. I'm saying something along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_individualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_individualism. And no, science has not shown that you get one particular mind. It could, at best, show that you experience one mind at a time. But what is experiencing the mind?
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    It's a physics thing - our current manifestations are biochemical, so our perceptual experiences are constrained by the laws of thermodynamics that hold sway at that scale. Of course, sooner or later they'll figure out a way to upload it all into some kind of a computational environment that's entirely different from anything that can be conceived based on the laws of physics as we understand them now; that exists entirely independent of the notions of "time" and "space" as we currently perceive them. But them I'm not sure we'd still be "us", anymore, by that point.
- Capt-RogerOver 10y ago
  "timeless" is a very good word for describing all phenomena that could be connected to the experience of a "soul". There is no evidence, nor really even clues to the soul being infinite, continuously going on to eternity. However, if one studies the experience itself, it would be very accurate to say that the soul is timeless. It is simply that there is no information about time in the feeling of a soul. It's not connected to any time-based experience. It's like there is an object in the mind's processor that described the "soul". And in that object there is no field with the type "Datetime". It's not needed. The object can very well function without it. It is also very compatible (or rather accessible from) with any other experience, whether it has a Datetime field or not. One can think about the past, the present, the future, the Abstract - and one can feel the "soul" in any of them. Since the experiences connected to the soul are really the only ones that seem to "matter", (being in this regard different from any practical life problems or circumstances), it behooves a lot to understand this timeless nature of it.
sliverstorm 10y ago
The world is beautiful & fascinating, and given the chance I wish I could learn every discipline involving the natural sciences. (I still could, but it would have to replace something else) I guess you could say I want to know everything about the natural world, and it will be a long time before humanity learns everything about it, so I wish I could stick around to see all those discoveries.
darawk 10y ago
I certainly would at least like to be able to live exactly as long as I want. You can always choose to end your life, i'd just prefer not to have the choice made for me by nature.
- johnward 10y ago
  I guess I tend to think about living longer as having more of those later years. That seems kind of pointless. My life really peaked at 23 and has been downhill since. So if I could live the time from like 18-23 longer then that would be kind of cool. Some of that time was great because of less responsibility but the part I really miss is my body. At 30 I cannot physically do the things I did at 23.
  - D-Coder 10y ago
    I find that the older I get, the more wisdom I accumulate (or at least experience and the application of that experience). I'm... over 50, and if living indefinitely means being stuck with my current body, I'd accept that. Plus, the longer I live, the better the odds that someone will develop a treatment to regress my body's age to 25.
oh_sigh 10y ago
You should seek help.
feelix 10y ago
Part of the reason I have the occasional suicidal thought is because I'm physically dying right now because nature is killing me. If you took that away I'd actually be quite a bit happier.
olalonde 10y ago
No one wants to be forced to live forever but having the option would be nice. Also, it's likely that medicine will advance a lot in the next thousand years and most diseases will eventually be cured (including psychiatric ones).
saulrh 10y ago
I would argue that immortality should address problems like yours. It's not really immortality if normal, random lifetime ups and downs (the inverse of the regression to the mean [1]) make half your population commit suicide every hundred years. That's a pathetic excuse for immortality, and you can't claim to have defeated death until people don't want to die just as much as they can accomplish that goal. Same way that it's not really immortality if you can still starve to death, or die because you got hit by a train and your seat of consciousness got obliterated, or die because your anti-aging medicines don't do anything about your risk of cancer. Defeating old age is the biggest obstacle right now, but defeating traumatic risk and psychiatric risk are just as important. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value is also relevant - consider "person has no unsolvable long-term problems and if maintained at their average level would live forever" to be the null hypothesis and "has a bad century and commits suicide" to be the observation.
- AstralStorm 10y ago
  Devising ways to prevent such an end and making people psychologically tougher is also part of life extension. Not the most interesting one, but least researched.
abritinthebay 10y ago
> I barely make it through a week without thinking about not wanting to live though That.. is not normal. Are you ok? Do you have a support network to just.. talk to about stuff? Maybe try talking to a therapist just to see what's going on, no shame in that at all. Can work wonders just to talk about what you're thinking...
- johnward 10y ago
  Thanks for caring. I have a close family, wife, and a 5 month old. I went to a therapist for about 1.5 years but it didn't seem to help much. I go to a psych now. I've been seriously trying to figure it out for about 8 years now but not really having a ton of luck. Believe it or now this is the best I have felt in a long time. Having a son is a good reason to stay around though. I honestly think I may have chronic traumatic encephalopathy but they can't really diagnose you without a brain biopsy. I got hit by a car and suffered several concussions in hockey and football where everything was just spinning. Sometimes I randomly blackout while working out.
  - abritinthebay 10y ago
    Glad that you're on the up, a bit, at least. Randomly blacking out is... not good. I'm sure that doesn't help. Hopefully the psych will help but if, after 1.5 years, you feel the therapist isn't helpful maybe try a few different ones? It's not an exact science and finding the right fit can be hard.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Honestly? My answer would be a concatenation of my "Someday/Maybe" list and "To read" list. So many things to do, so many things to learn. So little time.
Capt-RogerOver 10y ago
+1 on "You should seek help.". If that is your current experience - that's not the natural mode for a human being. That's not something everyone automatically arrives at by just going through life. That's just your own psychological problems that are causing you to perceive life like that. Someone who is in such dark mood most of the time, will naturally attract other people who live in the same mood currently, and as a result, it will look like the rest of the people are all like that, and such person have a hard time to understand the happy ones. And it does not have to be this way, the problem in your thoughts and beliefs. In order to change them you need help. Whatever you do, at least don't undermine the science that tries to prolong life. I am not saying that you might have wanted personally to undermine it, it's just that the argument of yours (coming from similar people) comes up EVERY TIME eternal life is discussed.

kafkaesq 10y ago

There really is so much beauty (and yes, meaning) out there to experience, comprehend, and enjoy. And there are so many kind, brilliant, fascinating people (and other living entities) to experience and share notes on it all with. Despite all the inevitable hassle and suffering and messiness. So yes, I'd say it's worth it. You don't have to try to stretch it out indefinitely, time-wise, if that's not your thing. I think the key to our journey through all of "this", whatever it is, is to treat it as if it is, in fact, infinite (or rather timeless), even though our conscious experience of it happens to be stuck on a one-way track which makes it seem (to our primitive minds) like it's finite.

ZeroFries 10y ago
But why do you need to experience that beauty through one particular consciousness track, experienced through one particular mind (even this statement is incorrect, because if you define a person as a particular configuration of matter, then you are a new mind each time-interval)? Make way for new configurations, for more brilliant, fascinating minds.
- Capt-RogerOver 10y ago
  If you are speaking in terms of spiritual experiences, you can of course be having any kind of those and nothing can really be argued about it, because they are subjective. If, however, you are making an objective claim about "past lives" and reincarnation - there is no solid evidence for it. 99% of "past life memories" examples are in the form of "I had a family and we had a house" (omg, that sounds like our dead relative, you must be him reincarnated), or in a form of an obviously imagined past life of a historic figure, with details which have been read in history books by the individual claiming to experience the said past life. And interestingly they always seem to read about the historic figure first (giving their subconscious mind the change to soak up that knowledge (in this life though)), and "experiencing a past life" only after. So to answer your question - because you only get one particular mind, and that's it. This is what science shows us. Whether you "feel like" you are "one with all other minds" is just a subjective experience. It's not physical reality.
  - ZeroFries 10y ago
    I'm not making a claim about reincarnation or past lives. I'm saying something along the lines of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_individualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_individualism. And no, science has not shown that you get one particular mind. It could, at best, show that you experience one mind at a time. But what is experiencing the mind?
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  It's a physics thing - our current manifestations are biochemical, so our perceptual experiences are constrained by the laws of thermodynamics that hold sway at that scale. Of course, sooner or later they'll figure out a way to upload it all into some kind of a computational environment that's entirely different from anything that can be conceived based on the laws of physics as we understand them now; that exists entirely independent of the notions of "time" and "space" as we currently perceive them. But them I'm not sure we'd still be "us", anymore, by that point.
Capt-RogerOver 10y ago
"timeless" is a very good word for describing all phenomena that could be connected to the experience of a "soul". There is no evidence, nor really even clues to the soul being infinite, continuously going on to eternity. However, if one studies the experience itself, it would be very accurate to say that the soul is timeless. It is simply that there is no information about time in the feeling of a soul. It's not connected to any time-based experience. It's like there is an object in the mind's processor that described the "soul". And in that object there is no field with the type "Datetime". It's not needed. The object can very well function without it. It is also very compatible (or rather accessible from) with any other experience, whether it has a Datetime field or not. One can think about the past, the present, the future, the Abstract - and one can feel the "soul" in any of them. Since the experiences connected to the soul are really the only ones that seem to "matter", (being in this regard different from any practical life problems or circumstances), it behooves a lot to understand this timeless nature of it.

sliverstorm 10y ago

The world is beautiful & fascinating, and given the chance I wish I could learn every discipline involving the natural sciences. (I still could, but it would have to replace something else) I guess you could say I want to know everything about the natural world, and it will be a long time before humanity learns everything about it, so I wish I could stick around to see all those discoveries.

darawk 10y ago

I certainly would at least like to be able to live exactly as long as I want. You can always choose to end your life, i'd just prefer not to have the choice made for me by nature.

johnward 10y ago
I guess I tend to think about living longer as having more of those later years. That seems kind of pointless. My life really peaked at 23 and has been downhill since. So if I could live the time from like 18-23 longer then that would be kind of cool. Some of that time was great because of less responsibility but the part I really miss is my body. At 30 I cannot physically do the things I did at 23.
- D-Coder 10y ago
  I find that the older I get, the more wisdom I accumulate (or at least experience and the application of that experience). I'm... over 50, and if living indefinitely means being stuck with my current body, I'd accept that. Plus, the longer I live, the better the odds that someone will develop a treatment to regress my body's age to 25.

oh_sigh 10y ago

You should seek help.

feelix 10y ago

Part of the reason I have the occasional suicidal thought is because I'm physically dying right now because nature is killing me. If you took that away I'd actually be quite a bit happier.

olalonde 10y ago

No one wants to be forced to live forever but having the option would be nice. Also, it's likely that medicine will advance a lot in the next thousand years and most diseases will eventually be cured (including psychiatric ones).

saulrh 10y ago

I would argue that immortality should address problems like yours. It's not really immortality if normal, random lifetime ups and downs (the inverse of the regression to the mean [1]) make half your population commit suicide every hundred years. That's a pathetic excuse for immortality, and you can't claim to have defeated death until people don't want to die just as much as they can accomplish that goal. Same way that it's not really immortality if you can still starve to death, or die because you got hit by a train and your seat of consciousness got obliterated, or die because your anti-aging medicines don't do anything about your risk of cancer. Defeating old age is the biggest obstacle right now, but defeating traumatic risk and psychiatric risk are just as important. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value is also relevant - consider "person has no unsolvable long-term problems and if maintained at their average level would live forever" to be the null hypothesis and "has a bad century and commits suicide" to be the observation.

AstralStorm 10y ago
Devising ways to prevent such an end and making people psychologically tougher is also part of life extension. Not the most interesting one, but least researched.

abritinthebay 10y ago

> I barely make it through a week without thinking about not wanting to live though That.. is not normal. Are you ok? Do you have a support network to just.. talk to about stuff? Maybe try talking to a therapist just to see what's going on, no shame in that at all. Can work wonders just to talk about what you're thinking...

johnward 10y ago
Thanks for caring. I have a close family, wife, and a 5 month old. I went to a therapist for about 1.5 years but it didn't seem to help much. I go to a psych now. I've been seriously trying to figure it out for about 8 years now but not really having a ton of luck. Believe it or now this is the best I have felt in a long time. Having a son is a good reason to stay around though. I honestly think I may have chronic traumatic encephalopathy but they can't really diagnose you without a brain biopsy. I got hit by a car and suffered several concussions in hockey and football where everything was just spinning. Sometimes I randomly blackout while working out.
- abritinthebay 10y ago
  Glad that you're on the up, a bit, at least. Randomly blacking out is... not good. I'm sure that doesn't help. Hopefully the psych will help but if, after 1.5 years, you feel the therapist isn't helpful maybe try a few different ones? It's not an exact science and finding the right fit can be hard.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

TeMPOraL 10y ago

Honestly? My answer would be a concatenation of my "Someday/Maybe" list and "To read" list. So many things to do, so many things to learn. So little time.

Capt-RogerOver 10y ago

+1 on "You should seek help.". If that is your current experience - that's not the natural mode for a human being. That's not something everyone automatically arrives at by just going through life. That's just your own psychological problems that are causing you to perceive life like that. Someone who is in such dark mood most of the time, will naturally attract other people who live in the same mood currently, and as a result, it will look like the rest of the people are all like that, and such person have a hard time to understand the happy ones. And it does not have to be this way, the problem in your thoughts and beliefs. In order to change them you need help. Whatever you do, at least don't undermine the science that tries to prolong life. I am not saying that you might have wanted personally to undermine it, it's just that the argument of yours (coming from similar people) comes up EVERY TIME eternal life is discussed.