An eternal life is a worthless life.

[Violet]

NO, I want to live forever , I don't care if its mentally painful , I just want to exist .

No. You don't want it any cost. Well.. maybe you do... but you won't be wanting it for long.

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You're going to be examining an awful lot of vacuum and large balls of hydrogen. And that only happens if you can figure out how to get off of this rock. Lots of travel time will be spent in a can unless you've got some magic FTL drive up your sleeve. With your anything but limitless head, that might be a problem.
Sounds really dull.
If your hope of tolerating a life that extends forever lies in forgetting your past experiences, how does that differ from reincarnation?

I sincerely doubt if the Dream would give me such a luxury as boredom.

As for how it differs from reincarnation: reincarnation removes the sense of self... it forces all the memories be forgotten. This drops memories slowly, and some will forever be ingrained in the head as Monkey Truth.

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If i had to guess what my soul looks like well....

Really? I was rather thinking Cornish Hen.

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Do people forget things, in heaven? That might help for a little while, but it won't fix the issue, just postpone it. Think you can forget something you've done eighty million times? Most of us get bored having to do the same thing for a week straight.

Heaven's slavery. It's a peaceful wonderful existence... and you can be content forever with nothing.

Boredom only has meaning for the free.

[JuliaL]

I sincerely doubt if the Dream would give me such a luxury as boredom.

As for how it differs from reincarnation: reincarnation removes the sense of self... it forces all the memories be forgotten. This drops memories slowly, and some will forever be ingrained in the head as Monkey Truth.

I can't say I'm familiar with either 'Dream' or 'Monkey Truth'. Can you explain?

If there is any continuing accretion of information in a finite mind over eternity the mind will be
filled. Eventually, memory will have to be lost at somewhere around the rate at which it
accumulates. If your sense of self persists, it would have to be at least content with the
knowledge of continuous memory loss. I'm sure I would find the condition futile and frustrating.
I would have to be a very different person than I am now to be happy with either that condition or
permanent boredom. Still sounds like an undesirable condition.

OTOH, forgetting is a very important mental function of our existing brains. Perhaps, we are in the middle of eternity and don't know, or care.

[robvalue]

I would only find the idea of an eternal life appealing if I could still choose to end it at some point. I'd never sign on willingly to a never ending life, no matter how good it may sound initially. At least not if my mind works anything like it does now. At some point boredom is going to be dominant, and inescapable. And that's assuming something worse doesn't happen that I can't escape.

I'm happy in the knowledge that this life is temporary.

If I could live in a reality of my own making though (I could do whatever I want literally) in theory living forever would then be a good option. I can make myself forget things and do them for the first time, never getting bored, and I know nothing bad will ever happen to me.

[dyresand]

I would only find the idea of an eternal life appealing if I could still choose to end it at some point. I'd never sign on willingly to a never ending life, no matter how good it may sound initially. At least not if my mind works anything like it does now. At some point boredom is going to be dominant, and inescapable. And that's assuming something worse doesn't happen that I can't escape.

I'm happy in the knowledge that this life is temporary.

If I could live in a reality of my own making though (I could do whatever I want literally) in theory living forever would then be a good option. I can make myself forget things and do them for the first time, never getting bored, and I know nothing bad will ever happen to me.

Well if life is eternal i would would hope it there is reincarnation.
at least you get dumped into a new body when you die. And get to live life all over again. Except you don't get to keep the memories that is the sad part of it all.

[TheRealJoeFish]

If I could live forever without, say, losing mental ability, I think I would want to.

I guess the best would be having the ability to live forever but also the ability to kill yourself. If I was in such a scenario, though, I imagine I'd probably go on forever in a sort of Dread Pirate Roberts scenario ("I'll most likely kill myself in the morning...")

I am scared to death of having a set number of years in front of me, and no more. Although I suppose that's counterproductive...

[robvalue]

I have no idea what the idea behind recincarnation is. You don't have any of your memories, personality, DNA even, according to some you may not even be the same species. In what way are you in any way still "you"? At best you retain the same index number in an array. Hooray!

The idea of being reincarnated over and over sounds hellish to me. Please don't do that to me, whoever sorts that kind of thing out.

[Godscreated]

By definition, if you have an eternal life, you have sufficient time to do everything there is to do, and then continue to do all of those things until you get so bored of them you can't stand to do them anymore. And you still wouldn't be even half done living.

Do people forget things, in heaven? That might help for a little while, but it won't fix the issue, just postpone it. Think you can forget something you've done eighty million times? Most of us get bored having to do the same thing for a week straight.

In eternity, you have the time. Even for negative things like crushing boredom, you have the time.

An eternal life would have an infinite amount to do, no end to the possibilities. Each one could be done for millions of years or a little at a time. There would be no worries of boredom.

GC

[Napoléon]

Do people forget things, in heaven? That might help for a little while, but it won't fix the issue, just postpone it. Think you can forget something you've done eighty million times?

I don't see any reason why you wouldn't be able to. Your line of thinking assumes that we'd be doing something over and over and over. We eat food every day but we don't get bored of that. If we ate the same meal, sure that would get boring. But if you're not eating the same meal every day then boredom is not really a factor, because by the time you come to eat it again, you've had your fill of other things in between.

Your answer to the question assumes that an eternal life would mean an eternal memory also. A memory where we remember every detail and every emotion. If not, then there's no reason to assume we wouldn't be able to forget.

The question is pretty flawed IMO because it doesn't define what kind of life we're talking about. If it's the exact same as what we have now, except for no ageing, and we assume the sun lasts forever as well as the climate conditions on our planet, I think it's safe to assume our memory would work the same way too. The real question is how much information can our brain take in before it starts pushing other stuff out. Considering our brains already do this with a finite life, it's a safe bet it would do the same with an infinite one.


My 2 cents on this hypothetical philosobabble bollocks

[dyresand]

A eternity in heaven and hell is worthless.

[abaris]

I don't know, reincarnation has some appeal. Not the Budhist version but the neopagan one. Life ends and starts over again. Kind of erase and rewind.