Eternal Life (thanks, but no thanks)

I'm not disposing anything. I am simply pointing out that your answers are as much guesswork as mine are. Whether or not our guesses are true, it doesn't get us any closer to solving the dilemma. Your guess seems to simply be - "There is no dilemma" *hand waiving motion*.Maybe your guess is right, but that doesn't move us forward anywhere so the discussion pretty much comes to a stop. You are right - I don't. Even if I did, it wouldn't solve the dilemma, I'd just not ask about it...which is the way your God seems to like it. So I won't survive my death? Something different will come into existence from me? Then I don't really care.If there is enough of me that survives this stripping process, then I still wonder whether I will eventually die by change or I will simply be the same not human entity for all eternity. Whichever way it pans out, I certainly don't desire it. Oh well, I'll just have to hope you guessed wrong.

Hence why I was asking if anyone could tell me if this was a geniune dilemma or not. You can't: simple. As I said, I wouldn't be worried about it, but the dilemma would still exist. It might be best to avoid equivocating between 'having a dilemma' meaning 'to worry over a perceived dilemma' and the existence of the dilemma itself. Any dilemma can be 'solved' by simply hand waving it away and saying 'trust that it will be fine', but that doesn't actually solve the dilemma it just stops us worrying about it (or at least that is the intention of the hand waving). I understand - the point is that I don't want such a hollow and pointless gratification for an afterlife. Obviously, if bliss is forced upon me I will have to enjoy it. The point of my OP is that if I had a choice, I'd rather not. Unless someone can point out why the dilemma isn't a dilemma.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Yep - I don't want to argue whether this or that scripture is interpreted correctly, I want to hear what each personal religion of anybody that wants to answer the question has to say about this dilemma.It would have been nice if God had answered me personally, but he seems to be busy at the moment so I'll have to rely on someone to be divinely inspired to give me an answer. That's almost a great way out - but it is not bliss I am worried about per se. It is eternal life, and you can't get away with defining eternal life as eternal death, unfortunately To be frank, scripture is irrelevant. It just so happens that most people that believe in eternal life happen to do so on the basis of scripture. However, if an atheist, or a religious person with no scripture can formulate a way to make eternal life desirable, I'm all ears.

We're 20% of the way through this thread. There are some interesting answers.iano's God is like the God of Islam. He requires submission. We should just trust that when he says eternal life in paradise is to be desired, it is, and God does not need to explain it any further. The dilemma doesn't exist because God says so. See Message 59, Message 44.John 10:10's God will give me the choice of perishing or continuing (unless John believes John was using the word 'perish' as a metaphor like iano's "Biblical death"), but I will go through an eternity of change so in a million years I suppose who I am now will no longer exist, thus my choice seems to be quick death or slow death. Message 27ICANT's God is promising me a city whose streets are paved with gold, a mansion with a beautiful garden, 72 virgins and hypothetical omnipotence (aka ability to create own universe etc). Message 39Buzsaw's God promises that it will be blissful. Message 40Stile postulates an afterlife that continues for as long as you want. This seems to bypass any terminal boredom problems, and he postulates certain 'boundaries' to personal growth and development so that one largely stays the same, but one also changes. Ultimately, neither of us were entirely comfortable with where that seemed to lead though it looked more promising than anything else so far. Message 23I hope to see if Bluejay or cavediver have any ideas.Here is the best I managed to do three years ago:

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In a way, my desire for permanence has been found. If the universe just IS and time is but a dimension then Shakespeare is, and 'always' 'will be' an entity in the universe, so will {me} and my loved ones. It isn't just the expanse of space that is wonderful, it is the entirety of space-time that is wonderful, and it often moves me to tears to think that I'm a part of it.

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A position I hinted at in Message 37

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Naturally I'm grotesquely simplifying everybody's position so far. I'm just trying to collate them into one post for ease of reference.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

I'm not suggesting one can have eternal 'life' when one is dead. I am simply asking about eternal life - whether my body ceases its metabolic processes at some point during my life or not. It is just semantics, you are quite right. But I am specifically talking about eternal consciousness, an ongoing experience, an afterlife, the promise of eternal life that many religious believers state they believe will happen.All you are saying is that there may be no eternal consciousness, which is fine by me, and that the scriptures may be saying that but that few if any people have interpreted it that way. Fine by me too. Either way, in this scenario I don't get eternal life/consciousness/experience/the eternal life that many state they believe. Instead salvation/bliss is exactly what I wanted: oblivion. I don't think a semantic argument is really important. If you think the term 'life after death' is oxymoronic - I agree. But its a convenient four letter word that expresses a certain meaning that most people can happily comprehend. I don't have to spend three volumes of work defining exactly what I am trying to say precisely because I am asking for the opinions of others as to what they think this 'afterlife' is meant to be like, and why I might want to have it.As I said, scripture is entirely irrelevant. Religion is entirely irrelevant. The point in the OP was generally driving towards a certain concept of permanent awareness/consciousness/'life'/being/existential perception/whatever-three-volume-concept-you-need-to-basically-get-what-I-am-driving-at, which I dressed in religious robes knowing that most people who have a strong opinion on what eternal awareness/consciousness/'life'/being/existential perception/whatever-three-volume-concept-you-need-to-basically-get-what-I-am-driving-at are religious.Now I appreciate that if we're going to get really hands on about this, we might have to do the metaphysical legwork about what exactly I mean and if you want to go down that road I'm perfectly happy to do so - but only if that is where you want to go with it all.Your objection was nicely put in Jay Rosenberg's, Thinking Clearly About Death:

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Unfortunately, however, the answer is...a plain, unequivocal, "No, there is no life after death." For death, is the end of life.

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He goes on to try and formulate a better question thusly:

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Does a person's history necessarily come to an end with that person's death?

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Which I still find problematic and he goes on to phrase it as

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Is a person's death an event in that person's history

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Which is getting closer to accuracy. But it still needs refinement; For instance we still don't know what a person is. We might need some stronger suggestion that the history of whatever a person is, continues after whatever it is we are calling death.Well - you can see this can get muggy quite easily. If you want to continue down that rabbit hole, I'll come along with you. Hopefully, for the moment, we can settle on the reformulated question "Is there anything to be desired in an infinitely long period of awareness/consciousness/'life'/being/existential perception/history/whatever-three-volume-concept-you-need-to-basically-get-what-I-am-driving-at"?

I think we're just getting our metaphors mixed up.I see lots of lifeboats. The lifeboats represent possible afterlives. There is a Heaven boat and a Hell boat. There is the Elysian Fields boat and the Hades Boat. There is a Nirvana Boat and the Realm of being skinned alive boat. There is an Astral Plane boat. All of these boats promise eternal life and they all look equally seaworthy to me. None of them looks appealing. Thus I would rather have none of them/oblivion/death of the soul (which I represented by just jumping into the ocean without a life boat).

By seaworthy I mean 'will actually successfully give me eternal life'. I'm assuming that in Hell I'll get eternal life? Perhaps we should just drop the metaphors and return to the OP - maybe that'd avoid this confusion?

Allow me to ask the important question as far as the topic is concerned, will there be a procession of events, a sequence of things that happen? Will my thoughts travel from one idea to the next? Or does everything freeze like in a painting?If the former, can you see a way out of the dilemma I outlined?

I know that feeling. I have written probably three times the number of posts that my post count shows. Most are thankfully lost to the ether. Freud said something similar (I hope that doesn't worry you )

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After all, one's own death is beyond imagining, and whenever we try to imagine it we can see that we really survive as spectators. Thus, the dictum could be dared in the psychoanalytic school: at bottom, nobody believes in his own death. Or, and this is the same: in his unconscious, every one of us is convinced of his immortality.

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I know that isn't exactly your point, but I thought you might find it interesting anyway. Moving on - it seems we need to get clear on how you define your 'self'. This is a very difficult task, that has kept philosophers busy for centuries.Maybe you think it is the soul, or the brain or the personality or something else. You mention that the common metaphysical thread is the 'self', but what is that thread made of? Well perhaps that isn't actually too important: personally more important than 'self', I think, is getting to grips with 'What matters in survival?'. If have a massive brain damaging accident and I still have experiential continuity but I have lost Mod's personality (same memories/goals/beliefs/desires etc) - I don't have what matters to me in survival. Don't get me wrong - I basically agree with you. However, I find myself wondering about what personality I would have in a million years and I'm thinking - if I change over time it will be more different than I was ten years ago...by a lot. In fact - if you showed me who I was in a million years and said see Mod survives his bodily death... I might be tempted to say 'So what?', since it doesn't give me what matters (all traces of this Mod have long gone).It is like the analogy of the car I put forward earlier, that over time gets all of its parts replaced. There is a continuum of car-entity, but after thirty years it is made up of entirely different parts so can it be the same car? Can we really say that the car we now have is thirty years old?I appreciate you spending the time to think about it, and having the courage to express yourself. It is a difficult, unintuitive subject, and I was kind of hoping to get a few people to really think about what matters to them and what immortality or eternal life or what have you might actually be like and whether or not it is any good.I would like to close on another couple of thoughts.1. You can imagine a meeting that happens without you being present, even though you have to 'spectate in the minds eye' to do so. As such you can imagine a universe without Bluejay.2. You can certainly have a feel for what it is like to not exist - just imagine the universe ten years before you were born. Or even during any period of run-of-the-mill unconsciousness.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

That does seem to be a summary of Paul's of Tarsus' theology, to be honest. In crude, more lengthier form:The Lord gave us the Law.
We cannot live up to the Law.
The punishment for breaking the Law is Death.
Jesus did live within the Law.
He does not deserve Death.
Yet Jesus is put to Death.
This Death is so that those that do deserve Death do not need to have it.
If only they accept the sacrifice that Jesus made for them.I capitalise 'law' and 'death' because different people seem to understand them in different ways and I don't really want to get to in depth into discussions of interpreting the texts Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

As is so often the case, I have found someone else who has more formally worded this dilemma. Bernard Williams in "Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality" raises it also, though he does it slightly differently than me.He argues that we can definitely die too early, but tries to build a case that it is also possible to die too late. His variant of the dilemma runs thusly. There are...

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...two important conditions which must be satisfied by anything which is to be adequate as a fulfilment of my anti-Lucretian hope, namely that it should be clearly me who lives for ever. The second important condition is that the state in which I survive should be one which, to me looking forward, will be adequately related, in the life it presents, to those aims that I now have in wanting to survive at all

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Good old philosophers eh? He raises the same kinds of points that have been raised in this thread - constant change is no good since it is no longer me that is living forever, stagnation is no good because my aims in life are to grow, I'd only end up getting bored of myself, there is probably a limit on how much stimulating pursuit there exists etc etc.If one could take a drug and know that taking the drug would guarantee happiness for the rest of your life (and that life would be the same length of you current life), but it meant you would be basically an idiot incapable of looking after yourself and you'd just sit around with a dopey grin and be happy...would you take that drug? I wouldn't. And I think this is the best argument against the enforced bliss of heaven. Bliss in and of itself is not enough for an enjoyable life. Immortality would seem to rob life of any meaning at all.For anyone interested in pursuing these things down other avenues, might I recommend Death with Professor Shelly Kagan at the open Yale courses website? It is 26 50 minute lectures on philosophy. It was while watching these lectures that I first started asking this question in earnest - though it had occurred to me in muddy format before.The first half is metaphysics and is interesting though not necessary to understand the second half. If you want to know all about Socrates' arguments for the immortality of the soul, then fill your boots, but if you want to get onto the Death part of the course skip to lecture 14.Some downsides to immortality are discussed in Lecture 18 if you want to watch someone else's thoughts related specifically to this thread.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

For the purposes of this discussion, how are you drawing a distinction between the two? What defines a person so that we may know if two entities are actually one and the same person? Heh, nice. I'm glad someone brought this up. I was wondering why nobody else had spotted it. So - and here's the paradox - I may want to live until tomorrow, and tomorrow I will want to live until the day after, and while that may possibly continue indefinitely, I don't want eternal life. So how to solve this problem?It deserves more attention than the time I have right now, but I thought it important to at least say that I concede that it is a worthy and important question to get answered. To avoid the post being entirely without worth, I will provide something of a superficial answer before coming back to it later.It is possible to have too much of a good thing and an infinite amount of something is very likely to be too much.This is superficial of course because it assumes that life is a thing that one can have too much of which is essentially begging the question - but for the time being it'll have to serve as at least a starting point.Here is something from the previously cited Bernard Williams:

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Suppose then, that categorical desire does sustain the desire to live. So long as it remains so, I shall not want to die. Yet I also know, if what has gone before is right, than an eternal life would be unliveable. In part, as EM’s case originally suggested, that is because categorical desire will go away from it: in those versions, such as hers, in which I am recognizably myself, I would eventually have had altogether too much of myself. There are good reasons, surely, for dying before that happens. But equally, at times earlier than that there are reasons for not dying.

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Basically, a categorical desire is one which Williams says gives us a motivation for continuing to exist. The options are that you will resolve all your categorical desires before you die, or they will remain unresolved when you die (by death I mean cease to exist). Too much life might be a bad thing if you end up with no categorical desires. Different argument, but at least I have made headway to supporting the notion that life might a thing that one could in principle have too much of.With that, I have to leave it since I will only end up spending more time than I have getting into it. I appreciate it doesn't really come close to answering the central thorn of the problem you pointed out, it seems to be diverting the question. As such, I'm giving this round to you

Second hand car dealer: I have a great car for you. $1000!
Mod: What kind of car?
Second hand car dealer: A great one!
Mod: Why would I even want to buy a car from you, if I don't know what kind of car it is?
Second hand car dealer: Hey, if you are going to trust me to sell the car to you you have to also trust that when I tell you how great it is. You can't trust me and not trust me, that is a contradiction!
Mod: What the heck kind of logician are you?
Second hand car dealer: Look - if I convince you that the car is great will you buy it?
Mod: Maybe. I'm certainly happy to admit that the car that you are offering is great, if I think it is.
Second hand car dealer: If you give me $1,000 that means you must trust me to give you the car, right?
Mod: Yeah.
Second hand car dealer: So since you are going to have to trust that I'll hand the car keys over when you hand me the $1,000 you should also trust me that the car I'm selling you is as great as I say it is. If you don't you are the one with poor logic skills.
Mod: I can see why you guys have a reputation for fast-talking salesmanship. I knew a guy called iano who tried a similar stunt on me once.
Second hand car dealer: So you don't trust me? Fine, I'll take the $1,000 anyway and give you a crappy car with nails sticking out of the seat and I'll tie you down on to them.
Mod: What the...!?Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

OK, so why do I care about this life? It is a jolly good question. First let me clarify something I said earlier. I mentioned that I am a different person now than when I was a teenager - this was not a true reflection of my position, but a simplification for illustration.

Token mad scientist

To me, the personality is key to personal identity. It alsmost sounds trivially true when it is worded like that, but it is a point of contention so I will underpin it with an example. A mad scientist kidnaps me (philosophy loves a mad scientist thought experiment), and he says to me:- "I will not hurt you and I will not kill you. When I am finished you will walk out of here on the same two legs you were walking on when you were kidnapped. However, I am going to reconfigure your brain. First I will erase all of your memories, beliefs, desires etc. Then I will change the configuration so that I am inserting a dead person's (Let's call them "Mike") memories, beliefs, desires etc."The mad scientist is not tinkering with my soul, he doesn't knock me out so I have experiential continuity (even if I later forget that I had it), I have the same body and the same (albeit radically altered) brain but I have for all intents and purposes, a completely new personality.When I consider that scenario, my feeling is that this is little different from being dead. My personality no longer exists, so the thing that makes me me no longer exist...I have been erased, destroyed, killed...even if the thing that for nearly thirty years was 'my body' is still biologically living.The mad scientist does this, but in an insanely benevelant twist, he goes on to say that he will configure Cynthia's brain (some other poor schmuck he has kidnapped) to have all my memories, beliefs, desires etc. after wiping out her own. So now Mike's personality will be housed what used to be called my brain, and my personality will be housed in what was once called Cynthia's brain.Then, with a malevelont change of heart (he is mad after all) the mad scientist turns truly evil and says that he will then torture one of the bodies in a horrifyingly gruesome fashion - but since he is also sometimes nice, he will give me the choice of which body that will be (remember this is happening before the mad scientist has reconfigured anybody's brains). Chivalry/altruism aside for the moment, it is my feeling that I would want my body to be tortured, since I will be in Cynthia's body and thus when you torture 'my' body you are actually torturing the body that now belongs to Mike.

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Now that is done, let us assume that eternal life is one of eternal change. And let us assume that upon death we gain a perfect memory. The example above doesn't quite cross over. After all - the future 'me' in a million years has all the memories that I do, even if he has different beliefs, desires, values, fears, hopes etc etc. That said, I still don't think preservation of my memories is quite sufficient to warrant that much desire since Futuremod has more memories that are different than me than he has in common with me.What has this got to do with the question Iano asked? I'm getting there (I did say that doing justice to the question would take longer than I had in my earlier reply...).

Mad scientist redux

The Mad scientist kidnaps two people (Cynthia and Mod) and he gives his evil spiel again. He will erase our personalities. He will put my personality in Cynthia's brain. He will then do some heavy duty tinkering. He will put my memories into Mod's brain. Then he will put Cynthia's personality in there, and he will play with things so that from Cynthia's personality's point of view there is a direct and memorable transition from my memories to hers that meshes things together so that her values/beliefs etc all make sense (thought experiments are fun like that - I appreciate the sex change and second childhood pose a practical problem, let's not worry too much about that right now. Hey look over there, something shiny!).The same question is posed, chivalry/altruism aside, who do I want to be tortured?I don't feel I have that much care about the Cynthia-Mod hybrid, my feeling is that I would much rather it was tortured than the full-Mod-personality-in-Cynthia's-brain was.

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If Futuremod has a whole new set of memories, he has the same memories as myself, but different everything else...I simply don't care what happens to Futuremod. I don't even care if Futuremod exists (well, I kind of care a little bit - but only in so far as Futuremod is a repository of my memories and no more). However, Tomorrowmod has almost all the same memories as I do, he has only a very small number of unique memories, and his beliefs, values and so on are almost indistinguishable from Mod. So I do find myself caring about what happens to Tomorrowmod.

This petty pace aka In Conclusion

It is seemingly paradoxical that every Todaymod cares about Tomorrowmod, but Mod doesn't care about Futuremod. So what to make of that? It should be made clear that in the eternal change/eternal life scenario it isn't that I don't want eternal life per se - it's that I simply don't care if I have it. This all assumes that there is infinite unique experience to be had and that boredom won't ever be an issue...I know a few people, myself tangentially included have brought up boredom as a possible problem.From what I can tell, it is possible to live for quite a number of years while retaining the same core personality, though I'm willing to entertain that eighty years of adulthood is enough time to potentially qualify the end person as a Futuremod sufficiently different that Agedtwentymod wouldn't care what happens to him.I appreciate that this answer is still incomplete, and certainly as a result it is imperfect. Hopefully it should illuminate why I don't blow my own brains out (besides, I don't have a gun - in order to get one I'd have to mix with some very shady people (have you any idea how dangerous hanging around with shady people can be? ))Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Your in depth analysis of my philosophical dilemma has stunned me into converting. Allahu Akbar!