Live Forever or Die Happy?

[sand knoll]

Die happy for sure

[valid cedar]

Live forever happily(you didnt imply live forever = be sad)

[eager crater]

Live forever and embrace the pain.

[hybrid shale]

4eva is a mighty long time

[violet zodiac]

I feel like the biggest caveat to this question ALWAYS is, do by live forever, do you mean you cannot die ever, even by choice? And you still feel pain? If you live for hundreds of billions of years and you are just floating out in space when nothing else exist, are you still just in excruciating pain, alone for eternity? Because if yes, then answer is obviously die.

I know that answer sort of misses the spirit of the question, but it's what my mind always goes to.

Also interesting side note. I wonder what happens to the human mind if that terrible scenario I mentioned above does happen.

[sand knoll]

That's the point. You don't know what comes with live forever, but you're guaranteed to die happy.

[sour turtle]

Literature is often an extension of philosophy and immortal characters almost always are suffering.

This topic could go very deep, but I think it boils down to constantly having to dramatically change as society changes around you just to avoid alienation and loneliness and the issue that when you do find happiness it will always been taken from you over and over. Whether the death of loved ones or even your favorite nature spot having a parking structure built on it.

I would choose to die happy and certainly hope that I do.

[valid cedar]

I'd still live forever.

Nothing against dying happy, but I'm just extremely curious to see what the world would look like in thousands and millions of years. If u realize how much we have changed in just a few millennia, imagine in just 5000 years what the world would be like

[digital rapids]

You are addressing great discussion points. The question is a prompt to provoke a larger dialogue.

[digital rapids]

I feel we cannot compare 'the human mind' to that scenario because hundrends of billions of years is beyond what any mind has lived. The mind would develop along with time, assuming some neural like network that processes experience. So, it may be a mind which can withstand pain and emptyness. Isnt that part of the omnipotence property people ascribe to 'god'? Going with the biblical narrative; before light, god existed. That is an emptyness our minds do not understand but the 'god-mind' comes from that state.

[digital rapids]

We can add elements to the initial prompt, like the condition of being able to choose when our death occurs. No sentient being would opt for endless suffering.

Life prolonging technology is very close.

[digital rapids]

If we remove the 'living forever' part, what is it that makes a person die unhappy?

We can use a Buddhist response and say to remove attachment, hence end our suffering.

But, dying happy may have something to do with our expectations and what we are greatful for.

I find it challenging, existentially, to retain meaning despite the changing of my life. I feel there is a way to 'stay on track' for what is important and life with sound values. There may be an enlightenment needed to ensure the values we have are actually good and of our own volition. Culturally embedded values are not yours, but often indoctrinated into us.

[sour turtle]

My guess is the mind may break before it evolved to that state in the floating in space example. Check out Michel Siffre, a French researcher that lived in isolation in a cave for a couple of months in the early 60's. Interesting stuff.

[sour turtle]

"what is it that makes a person die unhappy? "

That is probably the real root of the question. The alternate is what makes a person happy? Many seem to believe the root of happieness is "progress" we need goals and to make progress towards them. Whether having, then raising a family, or getting a job and being promoted, finding a study and mastering it. Under that theory I suppose someone could be happy for a very long time as long as they kept finding goals but that assumes they maintain the desire to keep finding things to discover.

"We can use a Buddhist response and say to remove attachment, hence end our suffering"

I must put an asterisk on this one since I do not know much about Buddhism, but based on that sentence, I would rather feel pain and joy than numbness. Detachment would be too bland for me personally assuming I could even detach. I am an emotional person.

"I find it challenging..."

I agree it is challenging, as hard as that is in one life time imagine having to adapt multiple times are societal values change. Sure you could stick to your principles that you discover over one normal lifetime, but that would probably lead to alienation from society in the future. As you say cultural values are embedded so most people may see us, in this time, as barbaric in the future. Just as we judge our ancestors in the past for "barbaric" practices.

[obsidian marten]

Depends. What's the degree of suffering? Do I still have meaningful and fulfilling experiences beyond the suffering? Or in another stranger perspective, pain is only another endless event to the immortal, indeed even to us mortals we can view pain, suffering, loss, fear, regret, and death, as merely more passerbys in the momentum of living. None of them are fundamentally different from the view that they are tied together by a common core in the course of the passage of time. What meaning does pain still hold for a hypothetical eternal being? In that the being remains a conscious observer that still experiences pain. Alternatively, we could view the universe as such a kind of being but to what degree it could be seen as "eternal" is also in doubt.

What would it mean for the universe to be only dark? That some few sentient entities would not get to have their brief bubble of self-reflection? In a certain cosmic perspective everything in its grand diversity is also fundamentally the same. But to most sentient entities this is no relief to their torment.

We must exist within the framework that we can access, guided by our humanly desires, for better or worse it's all only what we and others like us feel.

[obsidian marten]

This goes way beyond chronobiology, but the problems with examples like this is that they are not truly approachable in good faith. The mind cannot exist as a floating immortal in space. Why don't we turn to a more realistic scenario? Let's say that a devil has offered you a deal. They say you and your family can life forever. Your family gets to live in a paradise on a gigantic hyper-modern island with infinite arrays of VR technology experiences. But the catch is that you get to live in total isolation in hell's basement. There the same VR technology will be used to mentally torture you continuously for at least 1 billion years. But we do not even need a billion years. It is enough to say the rest of your life, or a year, or a month, a week, or even a flimsy day because the pain will not be like a flash to you. The pain will be a completely immersive and encompassing imagination. Where does the pain start and where does it end? The brain is not built for managing and operating in such environments for any considerable length of time. Soon the experience takes over everything; you are made to feel pain and suffering and yet you cannot process it normally. There is no longer any space to process such a horror. What ramifications do this have for the philosophical query?

[obsidian marten]

From what I gather it is not so much numbness that Buddhism describes but instead transcendent experience. The mind has achieved a state in which it is evolved beyond whatever world it happens to exist in. In this sense, and through that embrace, true suffering becomes fleeting and ultimately impossible. It is about both resolute and absolute acceptance not avoiding human existence.

[obsidian marten]

I described something similar (although more darkly and more crudely) in the directly replied to comment and the two above it.

[obsidian marten]

I don't judge people for barbaric practices in the way that you mean but I do judge people for senseless practices that cause harm while accomplishing nothing, as in human sacrifice in service of the delusion of gaining favor from the gods. For the most part cultural evolution has indeed moved beyond that, but we have not moved beyond violence and delusion. I don't really know why we could expect the future to be so different.

[digital rapids]

@sour turtle @sour turtle mmhmm i remember this case study

[digital rapids]

The mind we are speaking of is our mind, so the limitations of our mind are inherent in the thought experiment.

We would need a meta mind, beyond our current capacities to withhold such experiences.

What would this meta mind entail?