RE: An eternal life is a worthless life.
December 22, 2014 at 3:57 pm
(This post was last modified: December 22, 2014 at 4:00 pm by Tonus.)
(December 21, 2014 at 7:51 pm)Lucanus Wrote: On the contrary, take an eternal life. Any experience you could have in that is potentially infinitely replicable. Wouldn't that mean that any experience you could have in an eternal life is ultimately worthless and meaningless? Why, then, would anyone even want an eternal life? Isn't then the very concept of eternal life an illogical exploitation of our natural fear of the unknown?I think that what makes life enjoyable is having something to strive for. As long as there are challenges to meet, we could live a very long time without any problem. Whether you could find enough challenges to last an eternity is perhaps dependent on your memory: maybe memories would degrade with time, so that an eternal life that was an infinite loop of the same challenges would always seem fresh.
It's a moot point, and I do think that we treat life as a very precious thing because it seems so short compared to all of the things we want to experience and enjoy. Even people who believe in an endless afterlife grieve the loss of life of those around them. Perhaps there is a part of every mind that recognizes that the world we presently experience is the only one we can be absolutely sure of.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
