(October 25, 2019 at 2:07 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(October 24, 2019 at 3:46 pm)mordant Wrote: Schopenhauer regarded this as the fundamental problem of the human condition -- that we are in a constant contention between suffering and boredom.
I don't think he meant boredom in the sense that a lot of young people mean it ... that "there's nothing to do" that I'm interested in, when in fact there is, if you get off your ass and have a better attitude. I think it is based more in the notion that while there can inherently be no such thing as a totally non-novel experience, nevertheless experiences have much in common with other experiences and after a few hundred years of that, it will have insufficient novelty to be of real value. When there is little or no value in your moment to moment experience, then your moment to moment experience feels subjectively meaningless, and you grow weary of it.
So even in an infinite universe with infinite time -- maybe one can say, especially in that scenario -- the commonalities between current and countless prior experiences become far greater than their unique qualities.
I wonder how much of this is perspective driven. The alphabet contains only a handful of letters, but with those letters we can compose and express an infinite array of sentences. The universe contains a handful of different atoms, but those atoms can be arranged in perhaps infinite amount of ways to create all the variety and diversity of things we see in the universe. The ability of things to aggregate and recombine ensures that there will always be something "new" to experience throughout eternity, and I don't know how much the commonalities affect that. Sometimes the change in one variable is enough to give the whole thing new life, such as when you paint the interior of an old home, and the whole house feels like its new. Or how some people get a haircut after a breakup, and feel like they've started a new life.
One must keep in mind that only a small subset of POSSIBLE configurations is of interest to us as the sort of beings we happen to be. One novel configuration is found on the inside of a blast furnace but I'm not about to go there in the interest of experiencing something new. Or to the near vicinity of a star, or the poisonous, violent atmosphere of gas giants. Then there are the configurations that are tolerable but don't particularly strike our fancy, like the need to get a certain amount of exercise in a certain time frame, perhaps in less than ideal weather. Or the need to be kindly and indulgent with a loved one suffering dementia, for the eight millionth time.
In other words the menu of possibilities is not really infinite due to the constraints of our very being. And while, sure, you can get a haircut after a breakup, I know someone who with the exact same motivation had some plastic surgery done that they now very deeply regret -- so there's the problem of unintended consequences.
You have a commendable positive outlook about the possibilities and I suppose I appear way more negative than I actually am in real life by comparison. Which of us is likely to be correct? The truth is probably somewhere in between, as life tends to be both better and worse than we expect. That is why I allow that it would be prudent of me to accept biological immortality if offered to me, because I should explore the possibilities. Even if I might do so with less expectation of particular outcomes than you, I acknowledge that my conceptual framing and experience are inadequate to make a confident pronouncement that it would be a waste of time.
