Would you like to live forever?

If we are going to be vegetables, then go all the way and be it mentally and physically. There are trees that seem quite happy to become thousands of years old, and they don’t have a particularly exciting time.

@Faerie: Congrats on post 1000.

Unless heaven has an endless supply of entertainment lined up to occupy and satisfy our hedonistic souls, that would seem the only option, yes. :frowning:

Mintaka


wash your mouth!!!
our supreme and divine overlords does not look kindly upon being referred to as ‘simple’. lazy, yes, but not simple.

http://icanhascheezburger.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/funny-pictures-everyone-knows-basement-cat-does-harold-campings-reseach-for-him.jpg

My unreserved apologies to all felines and their admirers. :wink:

Mintaka

One possible way to get around the inevitable ennui that must surely eventually attend eternal life would be to have a kind of memory reboot and/or erase facility — sort of a selective blue screen of death. That is, once your memory is saturated and can’t take any more, you get to erase selected bits (or maybe even all of it) so that you can start learning things all over again.

It’s interesting to speculate what would happen to your mind if you did erase certain bits but not also erased the fact of the erasure itself. You’d probably have far too many of those “Oh, I know that but hell if I can remember” moments. And then you’d beat yourself up over not being able to dredge the needed memory to the surface, perhaps even knowing that you can’t.

While it would alleviate the tedium of eternity, it’d still be a pointless strategy in all sorts of ways, not least in that it would be a meta-cognitive hell.

'Luthon64

I don’t see how that’s possible. There can’t be infinte pieces of entertainment, so even if the pieces of entertainment can number [tex](\infty - 1)[/tex] then there will come a time when the entertainment will run out and need to be repeated.

An interesting perspective is found in The Library of Babel (there is an English audio file of the short story floating around the internet somewhere but I can’t find it anymore). Here’s a part of it that I remember (not quoted):

[tr][td]In this story, our narrator describes his universe, it consists of bookshelves arranged in a hexagonal shape to close-off a room. Each room snugly fits against another room in a repeating hexagonal pattern, layer upon layer upwards to infinity and downwards to infinity. Each room leads up or down to other levels but also to the adjacent rooms and librarians move freely among them.

On the shelves of these rooms are books, each and every book appears unique. They all consist of the letters of the alphabet and punctuation arranged seemingly at random. One book might open with the line “KLSDFK!,L JSFKLJSF LKJ,KLJ .,OIDF-KJ” while another might consist of nothing but the letter “P” repeated to the end. No two books have ever been found which are the same, but rumours among the librarians spread that some have been found in nearby rooms that contain short stories with many spelling errors. The librarians have speculated that any idea ever expressed (including this one) is written down somewhere in the library, and the librarians spend their entire lives in search of these rumoured treasures. There is also, conceivably, the idea that there is a book that catalogues the location of all other books, and because it is conceivably possible to write such a master catalogue, it must exist. But perversely, there might be thousands of duplicate master catalogues which contain errors, leading the librarian in the wrong direction. Nobody, near this librarian’s location or one who was met in this librarian’s lifetime has ever found a master catalogue, or even found a partial catalogue.

But they know there is an end to the books.

The books contain 400 pages. There are 60 characters across each page and 90 lines down the page. There is a finite number of positions that can be filled with characters. The characters which can appear in a position are limited to 26 alphabetical characters, 10 numerical digits and 15 punctuation marks. There are only so many ways these can be arranged to be unique.

Because they know the library is infinite and because they know there are finitely many books, they know the books must be repeated. As boring as it may be, there are an infinite number of exact copies of the book which starts with the line “KLSDFK!,L JSFKLJSF LKJ,KLJ .,OIDF-KJ”.[/td][/tr]

So, even in Heaven, if there’s a way to express an interesting idea, a novel piece of entertainment that can be written in a book (of any length, not just 400 pages). There are finitely-many books like that. Even if they make the screenplay of the book, and the stage adaptation of the book, and the 3D experience of the book, and the theme park of the book, there are still finitely-many of these pieces of entertainment. Even if it happens to be a huge number, it is still a number. Even if the pieces of entertainment number [tex](\infty - 1)[/tex], there will be repetition, there will be a loss of novelty, there will be boredom.

James

I’m told they make you spend the first two years (and remember, each day is as 10,000 years) learning to play the harp. I’m bored already, just thinking about it.

Fair enough. I suppose it would be too much to hope that there will be anybody really and truly interested in calculating that circumference/radius thingy.

Just a small niggle, though. If I’m not mistaken [tex](\infty - 1)[/tex] = [tex]\infty [/tex]

Mintaka

Sure, that’s 100% correct for all practical applications of infinity. But the former is a “smaller” infinity than the latter and yet equal. In order to understand the basic maths of infinity we’d have to talk about Hilbert’s Hotel and to differentiate “smaller” and “larger” infinities we’d have to look at Aleph numbers.

Here’s a way to look at it; think of a number to represent infinity. This is infinity of the first kind, the one we use all the time. If you could write that number down in decimal notation (say 9 999 999 999 was found to be infinity), would that be the largest number? No, you could write an infinite number of 9’s in a row (in our example, you could write nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine of the digit 9 in a row, which is obviously a bigger number). This is the second kind of infinity. Now is an infinite number of 9s the largest number? No, you could put an infinite number of 9s after the decimal point to make a “bigger” infinity. That would be a third kind of infinity.

I hope that more clearly explains the statement “it’s a smaller kind of infinity”. It’s all weird set theory that I don’t even pretend to understand completely and I may be wrong (and am open to correction) in the interpretation of Aleph numbers, but that’s the way I think of the concept.

James

Um, not quite. Strictly speaking, the symbol “∞” has no precise mathematical meaning and is a catch-all for magnitudes that may grow beyond any finite limit without regard for their type. Therefore, expressions involving “∞”, such as “(∞ – 1)”, are too loose to have any significance beyond indicating that something’s bigger than can be expressed with any finite quantity. The technically correct expression would be “אo = אo – 1” because אo is the cardinality of all sets of countably infinite things — i.e., those that can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the natural numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, …).

'Luthon64

Thanks Mefiante for the clarification. That’s a much better way to put it.

:slight_smile:

De nada, though I’d’ve left well enough alone had I been aware of your reply before posting. 3G is especially slow today. >:(

'Luthon64

My mother of 94 died on Saturday :’(. When you compare her size to what she used to be I cannot help but wonder what became of the rest of her that just seemed to disappear into thin air! The atom theory doesn’t seem to make sense but I know it’s the way it is!

I’m so sorry!!! Moms are special.

jeeslike brian, that was a good innings! alas, nobody lives forever. still doesnt make it less sad.

Thanx Faerie & GCG…yes they are special: I always feel that when a mother dies, the world is a little worse off: all one hope for is that her offspring honour her memory and live up to her expectations.
Incidentally, she wished to be cremated and in Windhoek where she died, it apparently takes 5 months to be cremated! My sister lives on a farm outside the city and I said we have a lot of wood there! Is it bad of me to think that?

Does it make you FEEL bad? Who cares what others think? It all comes down on how you feel about it.

I, for one, would prefer the cheaper option every time.

I guess it’s my xtian upbringing (My mother was a Calvinist disciplinarian while my Dad was an Atheist and when he died my sister, also an atheist, placed a piece of firewood on his chest in the coffin and said: “Dad I guess where you’re going to you may need that!”)

unfortunately cremation is not as easy as building a bonfire. it’s actually not the most awesome job in the world to cremate people. just take my word for it. the result of the insane heat is not a neat pile of ash. some extra work is needed.
personally, i would like a sky burial, or feed me to the lions. or dump my ass in the ocean. or if there is simply no other way, cremation. coffins are the most claustrophic shit ever invented. the idea of spending my years-after in a box in the ground, shudder.
i did cremate my dead bearded dragon once. it was very emotional. it gives great closure. i buried my most beloved cat in the garden, and i still feel like a dog for leaving him behind when i moved.
cremation is the way to go. cant imagine why it would to take so friggin long to do it though.