(December 11, 2015 at 12:19 am)Stimbo Wrote: Are you serious? Take away the capacity to feel and react in a way fundamental to the species merely to make eternity endurable; what are you rewarding? A crime against nature is still a crime, however much it may be rationalised.
I'll put it another way. Any version of me that has to be altered to remove a fundamental part of my nature against my will merely to conform is not a version of me that I would recognise as myself; nor would I wish it to be. And neither would I wish such an existence on my worst enemy.
I don't think you have answered the question. You've just reiterated your position that humanity/nature is not to be tampered with for some reason. I'm not sure why I should value humanity per se, that seems rather parochial. We have existed for the blink of a cosmic eye, and in another blink we will be radically different, if not gone entirely. I can imagine a myriad of different forms and values we could take.
What is a crime against nature? Nature is dead. It doesn't care. As far as I can tell you can only commit a crime against a sentient entity, and that is based on violating its autonomy or making it suffer. This doesn't seem to have anything to do with the specifics we are accustomed to as humans in this extraordinarily thin slice of spacetime. All else being equal, if I had the choice of suffering for eternity as "myself" (whatever that means) or spending in it "artificial" (whatever that means) bliss, that's a no brainer.
Take a smaller example: anesthesia during surgery. This seems a lot like what you're talking about. When you willingly take anesthesia before a surgical procedure, you are very much removing "a fundamental part of your nature". You're essentially tampering with your humanity to spare yourself some agony. That's not something anyone questions at this point (the same sort of no brainer), but it actually was back in the 1840s or so when the practice first came on the scene, and for similar sounding reasons. Talk of "basic humanity" and whatnot. What this actually is is a sort of religious conservatism which superstitiously inflates the significance of totally arbitrary and parochial norms. "It being known to me gives it cosmic significance."
(December 11, 2015 at 12:21 am)Vincent Wrote: How do you know?
Eternity means forever. As in, no end. None whatsoever. So any discoveries that can be made, anything that can be done, will eventually. And after that, what then? I wouldn't want to sit around being blissfully happy doing nothing. For the rest of eternity. And to be quite frank, I don't think you would either. I don't think anyone would. But people are just so wrapped up in their fear of death, in their reluctance to die, in their desire to not accept the fact that this amazing thing called life will eventually end, that they yearn towards this idea of eternal paradise.
How do I know? Like I explained, even if we rule out magic (which we technically shouldn't if we are talking about a religious idea of heaven), something like wireheading can be proof of concept. Running an electric current through the right part of the brain produces unremitting bliss. Which is... not nearly as bad as it sounds. Why wouldn't I want unremitting bliss?
(December 11, 2015 at 1:03 am)wallym Wrote: Quibbling over whether a make believe place that makes you happy forever would actually make you happy forever is as silly as it gets. If it were real, you'd be happy forever. How you say? Who the eff knows. There's a magical place we'd be going to after we die if we were good with a big magic God thing in some alternate existence. I'm pretty sure all logical bets of how long you could or couldn't stay happy for would be off in that scenario.
To me it seems like an important question because if we admit that it would be a good thing, then we admit that it would be a good idea to approximate it ourselves, to whatever extent that is feasible. Which I think is probably the exact opposite of what people expect. It's not that we could only get so close to our idea of heaven, it's more a question of how many orders of magnitude we could surpass it by. Super-heaven. We live in primitive times.
(December 11, 2015 at 1:12 am)Vincent Wrote: I like to discuss it. Why? Because I think hope for Heaven and an afterlife is one of the main reasons why religion and belief in God still exists - it helps people lay their head down at night. And it's important to me that I can show people who believe in such nonsense why it's not even a very good idea in the first place, and why the entire concept is ridiculous. Being a mindless drone condemned to experience happiness and only happiness (which is the opposite of free will) for the rest of eternity in a paradise that never ends is a disgusting concept. I don't want my fellow human beings believing in this garbage. Lessening the appeal might make people more willing to question the existence of it altogether.
As I said above, I'm not sure being "condemned to be happy" is as bad as it sounds. It doesn't even seem like the opposite of free will. I mean, sure, if you want to suffer, suffer. I don't, though. If I truly had free will, I'd choose to be happy all the time. What is so disgusting about this? I find suffering disgusting, if anything, and I don't think that should be terribly controversial. It's suffering.
