I feel like this question comes up often as a kind of push back against the idea of living an unbounded number of years, or even just a really really long time beyond the scale of human comprehension for what it would mean to live that many years.
I think most responses rely on intuition about our lives. If your life today seems full of similar days and you think you’d get bored, not living forever or at least taking long naps between periods of living seems appealing. Alternatively, if your life today seems full of new experiences, you’d expect to keep having new experiences if you lived a long time. That’s probably a good description of why most people believe what they do.
But I think we can make a better argument for why living a long time wouldn’t result in your getting bored.
Much of the idea that you’d get bored is predicated on the idea that one day (so much as that remains a coherent concept in the future) is much like another. In fact, maybe you live the same day many times and that seems boring and not worth living. Yet days can only be the same from one’s understanding of them, or else be literally the same day and thus there would be no reason not to keep reliving it.
To explain, fundamentally no moment in the universe seems to be the same as any other moment because universe moments vary on dimensions that guarantee this. Yes, there may be many quite similar moments, but now two moments are literally the same. The only exception to this is that you might run a simulation in the universe that creates days that are identical from within the frame of the simulation. But if you do this then there’s no problem with living the same day multiple times, because if the same day is literally the same day that means you must be the same on each of these days and would thus have no realization you were reliving the same day (i.e. it’s “Groundhog day” but no one realizes it’s a loop). Yes, to us this might look like a kind of wireheading and might prefer that not be how we live, but from the inside we wouldn’t object and if we did it wouldn’t matter because the day would just reset and our objection we arise afresh each day without anything ever changing or us ever getting tired of living the same day over and over.
Thus we are left with days that are in fact unique, even if we believe them to be the same, and so we can get bored only to the extent we don’t care about the uniqueness of each day. This seems quite satisfying to me as a reason to want to live forever, to get to see the unfolding of events over billions of years or longer, but even if it’s not I think it should give you hope that there might be something to do over billions of years since notions of sameness of days are likely either limitations of human imagination or the result of being trapped in a looping simulation (which, again, you shouldn’t care about from the inside of the simulation).
When people barely live 100 years and we worry about them getting bored if they could live forever… that seems to me like finding a beggar who only has $100 net worth and is asking for some spare change, and explaining to him that giving him more money would be bad because eventually he would become a billionaire and everyone knows that power corrupts. Yeah, it has some philosophical merit, but is completely unrelated to the life as we know it.
For me, this looks like a very simplified treatment (I mean in a I-need-to-simplify-to-model-it way; I wanted to avoid the word ‘academic’). While the word boredom as you seem to use it is a very practical and complex emotion. I can’t disagree with your model but I don’t think it captures what people feel is boring now or what would be boring in the future. I think a good counterpoint is the one by Yoav, that you can just go to sleep until something new comes up. Something that is not possible if your time is limited, to begin with.
When this argument is presented to me, there are two counterpoints I often use:
Simple induction. I wasn’t bored enough to want to die yesterday, nor the day after that (today). Assuming that future days are roughly as similar as the past two, that degree of novelty is sufficient.
Options are not commitments. If I ever do want to die, I can do so. If it never happens, or doesn’t happen for a thousand or a hundred thousand years, that’s fine too.
For those who really want to engage on #2, I’ve had interesting conversations about akrasia-like self-disagreements where “I am bored and would prefer to have died” but “I have FOMO and will not willingly die”. For this, there is a possibility of mechanism design, where the decision can be made rule-based. Something like “after N years (say, 3⁄4 the median lifespan of your reference group), take a permanent poison, such that you must take an antidote every week/year. If you ever get bored/unhappy enough to not take the antidote, you die.)
A tougher disagreement is the Malthusian one—old people are already too powerful, and it’ll get far worse if they’re healthy and active for centuries (let alone longer). Further, they take resources/opportunities from the young. The availability heuristic for this is vampires, not techno-utopia. I have yet to really find a good counterargument for this—it quite likely contains a fair grain of truth, at least for the current planetary and human governance limitations.
Another option on two is to go into some kind of preservation instead of total death forever. then you can write instructions on when to wake you up (if X person asks, if X event happens, in X years, etc..). you still miss out on some stuff, but not literally everything.
The second benefit is that for people who stayed it’s not like you died and they’ll never be able to interact with you again, you just took a really long vacation :)
If powerful old people go to sleep when they are bored then they run the risk of being overtaken by younger, faster, and less risk-averse people. Maybe a good model is corporations: Corporations are also immortal and can learn more and more but they also have more to lose and they seem to acquire knowledge that also seems to slow them down. If there are changes in the environment or innovations they often cannot adapt fast enough and are quickly overtaken by younger players.
Won’t I get bored living forever?
I feel like this question comes up often as a kind of push back against the idea of living an unbounded number of years, or even just a really really long time beyond the scale of human comprehension for what it would mean to live that many years.
I think most responses rely on intuition about our lives. If your life today seems full of similar days and you think you’d get bored, not living forever or at least taking long naps between periods of living seems appealing. Alternatively, if your life today seems full of new experiences, you’d expect to keep having new experiences if you lived a long time. That’s probably a good description of why most people believe what they do.
But I think we can make a better argument for why living a long time wouldn’t result in your getting bored.
Much of the idea that you’d get bored is predicated on the idea that one day (so much as that remains a coherent concept in the future) is much like another. In fact, maybe you live the same day many times and that seems boring and not worth living. Yet days can only be the same from one’s understanding of them, or else be literally the same day and thus there would be no reason not to keep reliving it.
To explain, fundamentally no moment in the universe seems to be the same as any other moment because universe moments vary on dimensions that guarantee this. Yes, there may be many quite similar moments, but now two moments are literally the same. The only exception to this is that you might run a simulation in the universe that creates days that are identical from within the frame of the simulation. But if you do this then there’s no problem with living the same day multiple times, because if the same day is literally the same day that means you must be the same on each of these days and would thus have no realization you were reliving the same day (i.e. it’s “Groundhog day” but no one realizes it’s a loop). Yes, to us this might look like a kind of wireheading and might prefer that not be how we live, but from the inside we wouldn’t object and if we did it wouldn’t matter because the day would just reset and our objection we arise afresh each day without anything ever changing or us ever getting tired of living the same day over and over.
Thus we are left with days that are in fact unique, even if we believe them to be the same, and so we can get bored only to the extent we don’t care about the uniqueness of each day. This seems quite satisfying to me as a reason to want to live forever, to get to see the unfolding of events over billions of years or longer, but even if it’s not I think it should give you hope that there might be something to do over billions of years since notions of sameness of days are likely either limitations of human imagination or the result of being trapped in a looping simulation (which, again, you shouldn’t care about from the inside of the simulation).
When people barely live 100 years and we worry about them getting bored if they could live forever… that seems to me like finding a beggar who only has $100 net worth and is asking for some spare change, and explaining to him that giving him more money would be bad because eventually he would become a billionaire and everyone knows that power corrupts. Yeah, it has some philosophical merit, but is completely unrelated to the life as we know it.
For me, this looks like a very simplified treatment (I mean in a I-need-to-simplify-to-model-it way; I wanted to avoid the word ‘academic’). While the word boredom as you seem to use it is a very practical and complex emotion. I can’t disagree with your model but I don’t think it captures what people feel is boring now or what would be boring in the future. I think a good counterpoint is the one by Yoav, that you can just go to sleep until something new comes up. Something that is not possible if your time is limited, to begin with.
When this argument is presented to me, there are two counterpoints I often use:
Simple induction. I wasn’t bored enough to want to die yesterday, nor the day after that (today). Assuming that future days are roughly as similar as the past two, that degree of novelty is sufficient.
Options are not commitments. If I ever do want to die, I can do so. If it never happens, or doesn’t happen for a thousand or a hundred thousand years, that’s fine too.
For those who really want to engage on #2, I’ve had interesting conversations about akrasia-like self-disagreements where “I am bored and would prefer to have died” but “I have FOMO and will not willingly die”. For this, there is a possibility of mechanism design, where the decision can be made rule-based. Something like “after N years (say, 3⁄4 the median lifespan of your reference group), take a permanent poison, such that you must take an antidote every week/year. If you ever get bored/unhappy enough to not take the antidote, you die.)
A tougher disagreement is the Malthusian one—old people are already too powerful, and it’ll get far worse if they’re healthy and active for centuries (let alone longer). Further, they take resources/opportunities from the young. The availability heuristic for this is vampires, not techno-utopia. I have yet to really find a good counterargument for this—it quite likely contains a fair grain of truth, at least for the current planetary and human governance limitations.
Another option on two is to go into some kind of preservation instead of total death forever. then you can write instructions on when to wake you up (if X person asks, if X event happens, in X years, etc..). you still miss out on some stuff, but not literally everything.
The second benefit is that for people who stayed it’s not like you died and they’ll never be able to interact with you again, you just took a really long vacation :)
If powerful old people go to sleep when they are bored then they run the risk of being overtaken by younger, faster, and less risk-averse people. Maybe a good model is corporations: Corporations are also immortal and can learn more and more but they also have more to lose and they seem to acquire knowledge that also seems to slow them down. If there are changes in the environment or innovations they often cannot adapt fast enough and are quickly overtaken by younger players.