British Humanist Association video What should we think about death? https://facebook/video.php?v=10152276928150923&set=vb.26806660922&type=2&theater *Scroll down to the end for the TL; DR version.* I agree with the final point: we “live” (in a social sense, for a while) through our legacy. I don’t entirely agree with the argument that we partly enjoy something because it ends, hence the fact that life ends gives it additional meaning and purpose. I disagree both with the premise and its application to life. “One of the things that makes these things pleasures [e.g. cake, book] is that they come to an end” i.e. a never-ending book or cake would lose its appeal. Food makes us full, but would a never-ending book lose its appeal if the writer managed to maintain quality and not run out of ideas? It is not being limited that makes it enjoyable, but the cessation of our consumption (voluntarily or otherwise) preventing us from disliking additional units. Hence, lasting forever is not guaranteed to be a bad thing. “If life were eternal, it would lose much of what gives it shape, structure, meaning, and purpose”. To gain no more happiness from life, we would have to be bored of every single activity in the world simultaneously; to such a degree that unhappiness caused by participation in an activity would not be offset by participation in a new activity. Eternal life means being able to read every single book in the world a million times over, pick up all the grains of sand in the world and move them individually to the other side of the world, etc, and still have time to do it again. However, the human brain cannot hold such memories in its head. Professor Reber explains that due to the way neurons combine, the brain’s memory storage capacity may be something like 2.5 petabytes (about a million gigabytes), so if your brain worked like a TV recorder, it could hold more than 300 years (scientificamerican/article/what-is-the-memory-capacity/). Since the brain would run out of capacity, one might be willing to repeat activities eternally, on the assumption that not recalling an activity would enable someone to do something again with no loss of enjoyment. This presumption is rebuttable, as I have only a layperson’s experience in boredom. Eternal and mortal lives do have a different shape and structure (in a literal sense: one ends, one doesn’t) but there seems to be no reason for the two to have different meanings and purpose, unless one defined the meaning and purpose of mortal life to have some reference to death (e.g. to be remembered after death). TR; DR: human physiological limitations means eternal life wouldn’t get boring, but have fun living right now anyway. Im off to play CounterStrike.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 00:11:47 +0000
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