For me the answer seems so obvious that it is a question hardly worth
asking. Of COURSE I’d want to live forever. I cannot imagine anyone
truly honestly saying otherwise.
Now I don’t say that to mean that I enjoy living so much that I could
not imagine dying. Nor do I mean that I fear death so much that I would
dread the very concept of having that happen to me. No. Though I do
fear death most of the time and I do like living some of the time those
facts have nothing to do with why I would not even consider choosing a
finite lifespan given a reasonable choice to do otherwise. Rather I
derive that I would most certainly want to live forever on the basis of
purely rational consideration. That is I compare what I know about life
and about death and I cannot see any rational reason to choose death.
You see death is a complete unknown. We don’t know what happens because
it is by definition beyond the scope of our experiences. Our
experiences are so far as we know the only things we can use to acquire
knowledge.
Asking whether you would like to live forever is basically asking
whether you would favor that which you know over that which you don’t.
For myself the answer is always that which I know.
Now an astute observer might note that what I just said is absurd most
the time. To say that I would always favor the known over the unknown
just seems untrue most of the time. The classic example in our
current society is the movie. If I always choose the known over the
unknown then I would never choose to watch a new movie rather than a
movie I have already seen when given a choice. Since most people,
myself included, generally prefer to watch new movies to old movies except in circumstances where I have very good reason to
believe that the new movie will not be good and certain knowledge that
the movies I have already seen are good. Ha!
Fortunately for the sake of my argument, watching a movie is nothing
like dying. (Well at least most movies…) A better analogy would be
this. Say you’re at a movie theatre and a powerful tiny dragon wizard
flies up to you to and delivers unto your hand two tickets. A normal
brown ticket and a glowing amethyst ticket. The dragon tells you
this:
“You may not leave. You can only go forward. You have two choices from
this point on. You may use the brown ticket and walk into the door on
the left. There you will find yourself with the ability to watch
any movie you have ever seen and as many such movies as you desire.
After which you may leave and continue your life as normal. But this
night, tonight, you may not watch any new movie or any movie you have
not yet seen. What’s more I’ll even throw in a bonus. You can
even come back here whenever you want and use the brown ticket to
rewatch any movie you’d like any time you want for free. You can pay
for new movies on those days if you’d like instead. It’s your choice. I
will never grace your presence again.
“Alternatively you may choose to use the amethyst ticket and walk into
the door to the right. There will be playing “THE MOVIE”. Now “THE
MOVIE” is certainly not a movie you have ever seen nor any movie
you will ever see again. I will not tell you whether it will be
good or bad, terrible or right. It may not even be a movie. You may not
remember the experience. It may
be a non-event in your perpetual existence. Or it may be something
better than a movie a greater experience than any you have ever had. Or
it may be something worse, in all ways as bad as being tortured for a
millenia in the span of but a moment. I will not tell you whether it
will make your life better or worse, ruin you or be the key to your
future glory. For all you know that there is an equal chance of any of
those things and it is just as likely that your life will go on fully
unchanged exactly as it is now… but for one difference. You see
regardless of the nature of the experience if you use the amethyst
ticket you will pay a price.
“The price is thus. After you watch “THE MOVIE” you will never
again be able to watch or otherwise experiecne a movie. Period. Not in
any form or media. No one will be able to tell you about a movie they
have seen or otherwise try to share that experience with you . All your
life may well be identical to as it is now or very very different but
one truth will hold. For the choice of getting the ability to watch
“THE MOVIE”, the only certainty you have is that you will be giving up
the continual ability to experience movies in the way that you do now.
The dragon laughs and snorts fire at you.
“Now make your choice!”
OK so it’s not a perfect analogy but you get the idea. My argument is
that it is quite simply irrational to choose to use the amethyst ticket
which given this choice. No one would make that choice if their mind is
functioning normally and that is because the information you have about
one possibility greatly dwarfs the information you have about the
other.
So too with death. The only thing you know about death is that it is an
end of life. You know nothing else. It could be anything else but it is
of a certainty an end to life. Now there may be life after death. There
may be a greater or a worse life. There may even be a repeat of the
same life or a new variation on the same life.But it is certainly AN
end of life. Every thing else you might suspect is just pure ungrounded
speculation. To use a mere possibility with no logical grounds to think
that it is any more of a likely possibility than infinite number of
alternative possibilities as a grounds of making a decision is the
height of irrationality.
The classical argument against eternal life is that it will get boring.
You’ll lose your ability to care. It’s as if you’d watched every
possible movie ever made or so many variations on movies that you can
predict with perfect accuracy exactly what will happen next in any
movie you are watching and of all the movies you’ve seen you’ve seen so
many times that you have every line and image memorized. At this point
the argument goes. I’d be so sick of watching movies that’d I just go
ahead and take that amethyst ticket just out of shear boredom.
There’s a lot of sense in that. I would agree that under those
circumstances choosing the amethyst ticket is not illogical IF
you really have experienced every movie to the point that you gain no
joy and no pleasure and no value whatsoever from watching any other
movie, it may well be logical to choose a random unknown over another
empty experience.
In this case I’d say there is a qualitiative difference between the
singular experience of “watching a movie” and the continual rich
experience of life itself. I am an optimist. I find it very
hard to even conceive of a universe in which I have experienced so much
and done so much that all other future experiences are empty of all
that makes them worthy of experiencing.
Note that this isn’t just being bored. Being bored doesn’t cut it. I am
bored all the time. I am bored right now while I am writing this essay
though I have never writen it before. I am bored everyday as I drive to
and from work. I can easily imagine a life in which I’ve made all of
the wrong decisisions causing me to basically be a little bored all the
time 24 hours a day. I can iimagine lamenting all the things I could
have done and dreaming of the possibilities long gone. I
can see this. But it wouldn’t make me willing to make that irrational
leap to the amethyst ticket. And nor should it.
In order to make the leap you have to have not just little pleasure and
little joy but NO pleasure or joy whatsoever. It’s much the difference
between being depressed and being at the absolute depths of despair. It
is the difference between mearly being hungry and being at the limits
of the ability of the human mind and body to cope with the lack of
sustenance. I can be bored all the time and still enjoy living. But I
can’t truly reach a mental state where I can’t conceive of anything
forthcoming that will grant me anything that is worthy of gaining and
still choose to see the forthcoming come to pass.
In this case I do see choosing death rather than living forever as
being logical. I just don’t see this case as being possible. In all the
infinite pleasures of life I cannot imagine rationally reaching such a
mental state because I have experienced too much. Indeed the more
expeirences I have the richer and more interesting my internal mental
life becomes to the point that I need less the joy of a particularly
unique experience to keep me interesting. My mind spontaneously seems
to generate new labyrinths of experience-like ideas to enjoy. And truly
doesn’t everyone’s?
But this does immediately lead to the idea of trying to come up with
additional inevitable circumstances that could come to pass in the
infinity of time that would choose you to pick the amethyst
ticket. There are two others that come to mind that are pretty
convincing. One comes up all the time but one I’ve never heard spoken
of before but for me would be the greatest likelihood to get me to
choose a different showing.
The first is pain. Imagine that instead of just getting to watch
another movie you once enjoyed you are instead forced to watch the very
worst movie you have ever seen in your life over and over again
throughout eternia. What if instead of mere boredom, you have to suffer
pain through infinite existence. If given the option to run out of the
theatre grab that amethyst ticket and throw yourself into the door on
the right, wouldn’t you eventually do it? At first you might tolerate
the bad movie but eventually you just won’t be able to take it. There’s
just a point where you can’t go on suffering. At that point death isn’t
irrational. Indeed to escape an intolerable situation through whatever
means at your disposal is at the height of rationality.
Again I agree with the sentiment. Given this loaded choice of course
you choose death. If you are given the choice between living
forever in a body that will decay perpetually or living your normal
life span and dying EVERYONE’s going to choose to die. In my opinion
this question isn’t even worth asking. The answer is so clear it has
nothing to do with the real question of whether you would want to live
presuming you can retain something like your current state of life.
But there is a bit of a better argument here too. Try this. Presupose
that when you choose the plain brown ticket and go to watch a good
movie that instead of thinking about what you get by not choosing the
amethyst ticket, think about what you lose by not choosing the amethyst
ticket. Namely that when you choose the amethyst ticket you are at the
very least making it so that you will never have to watch a terrible
movie again! To make the argument better, let’s say that if you choose
the brown ticket you will have to watch a random movie new or old every
day forever. So perhaps it is rational to choose death in order to
avoid not just a perpetual state of pain but the infinite recurrence of
pain. The argument goes, could you really choose to suffer all of
the ills you’ve ever suffered again and again throughout all time? Can
you really live forever knowing that eventually you’ll see pain and
loneliness and have the face cruelty and evil? Surely you’ll eventually
simply choose to die rationally just to avoid the inevitable occurence
of one more heart break, one more moment of deepest despair, one more
night of sleepless suffering….
But I disagree. Then again I’ve never faced the kind of great despair
many people speak of when they go through this example. But my argument
is rather simple. There are two unknowns countering this argument. One
you cannot prove with any degree of certainty that your perpetual
existence MUST entail repetitive suffering of a level so bad that you
can’t stand to have it any more. Surely an optimist would think that
you can during the course of your infiinite life thrive to order your
life in such a way as to avoid those sufferings and maximize your true
pleasures. Now you might make bad choices but since you have an
inifnite life you have infinite opportunities to correct for your
mistakes. It doesn’t seem likely to imagine that you would simply let
yourself suffer repeatedly even as you acquire knowledge to prevent
that suffering.
But even if you were doomed to it through no fault of your own, I’d
still argue that this is no real reason to choose the purple ticket.
Rather you are simply letting your fear get the better of your reason
if you make that choice. A mear moments thought suggests that the
unknown of death has an equal likelihood to doom you to the same or
greater sufering as you are likely to experience in living. Remember
you don’t know what death is for your subjective existence. It could be
worse, it could be better or it could be nothing and there’s no reason
to suspect any one over any other. If you choose the unknown on a leap
of faith that it will be better than you are not thinking rationally.
You can instead choose to have faith in your knowledge and your ability
to make youre life better. That is, in my opinion, the wiser choice.
Now the final argument. It’s the one no one seems to make but I believe
is really lying at the heart of the whole fear of inifinite life. You
see I believe that no one REALLY belives that it is rational to choose
death over life just because they know that they will eventually feel
pain again and they know that they will eventually feel boredom again.
If that knowledge alone were enough to make you choose death you’d have
to kill yourself right now. No, in truth, we understand that the
question when framed correctly presupposes that you’d live a basically
similar life to that you lead now. You’ve faced pain and you’ve
survived. You’ve faced boredom and you’ve gotten over it. It didn’t
make you give up now why would it after the millionth or billionth time
make you give up? We are all resigned to the inevitability of more evil
experiences and more good experiences but that does not change the
overall value of human existence. We have to believe that life is
basically worth while else humanity would not continue to persist.
No, I think the reason we really fear an infinite life is not because
we fear some inevitable experience but because we fear the
inevitability of knowledge. You see what favors life over death is that
life is grounded in what can be known, it is an existence of growth of
knowledge and understanding and awareness that we can now perceive and
imagine where as death is mearly the complete unknown. We cannot
rationally give up our capacity for reason under most circumstances.
There is nothing in truth we fear more than losing that.And death
brings in that very possibiltiy. But there is one thing that we, most
of us fear almost as much as losing our very ability to reason. That is
to put it simply reaching the limits of our reason.
Much of our normal lives we accept that we are often wrong. We accept
that our understandings of many many things are not complete. We seek
out the wisdom of others. We try to strive to improve ourselves. All in
the hopes that we will acquire more reasoning ability and become better
for it. But we know generally that we’ll enver know everything.
We’ll never answer all the questions before we die. We know there’s an
end to our striving and we can calmly accept that knowing that other
human beings will build upon the body of knowledge and understanding to
bring forth greater wisdom.
For the most part throughout that existence you never really had any
reason to doubt your capacity for reason. You could see some things you
couldn’t grasp and that were hard for you to understand. You
encountered many circumstances where you basically HAD to acquire help
to grasp a deep or complex concept and there may even be cases where
you gave up, put aside an idea choosing explicitly to focus your growth
of knowledge in other areas rather than to work hard in an area that
was difficult for you.
But how many times did you when you did this think that the thing you
couldn’t learn was impossible for you to learn? And not just
impossible because you were too occupied or because you lacked the
training or the background or because you lacked the interest or the
tools but impossible for the simple reason that YOU were simply
incapable of knowing it. It was simply beyond you. You were no match
for the idea. You could perceive it as being important and meaningful
and you knew enough to know that it mattered but you also knew that no
matter how many weeks or months or years you might try to work to
achieve it you would simply never be able to. Some people will. You
won’t. You’re just not good enough.
I’m willing to wager that that doesn’t happen very often for you.
Humanity isn’t in general that honest with itself. Even those times
when a person does try to humbly admit that they are not up to the
task, I’m willing to bet that that person really only ‘suspects’ that
they are not capable of knowing something or achieving something and
doesn’t really feel certain that even given an infinite amount of time
they couldn’t do it. We generally believe first and foremost in
our own capacity for knowledge and understanding. We believe we can
grow and become better and learn more and achieve more. We don’t
think we are the best at everything but for the most part a little
bitty piece of us thinks that for any particular thing in another life
given different circumstances and enough time we very well could be the
best at a great many things.
Therein lies the real trap of the infinite life. If you live forever
inevitably,eventually, you will reach the very limits of human
potential. You will run up against that wall of what is possible and
what is not and have to look into the mirror and admit to yourself that
“I’m just not that good”. And not just with regards to one thing, but
EVERYTHING. Everything you endeavor you’ll reach the ends. Every thing
you strive for you’ll eventually gain a knowledge of what it is exactly
that you can do and what it is that you can’t relative to all of the
other infinite entities around you. Chances are you won’t be
particularly pleased with the results. We learn that we aren’t that
smart. That we aren’t that clever or creative or even interesting in
the grand scheme of things. We’re just for the most part kindof
mediocre. At best we have one talent that sets us apart and most of the
time not even that. In an infintie amount of time you could not
avoid these truths. Eventually you’ll reach a point where you just
can’t learn any more. You just can’t be any better. You’ve reached your
limits. You’re at max level. Game over.
So of course you might then choose the unknown. Start a new game. Heck
you might even be tempted to start a new character long before you
reach those limtis so that you don’t have to face that dreaded
disappointment of not knowing. Perhaps in truth we are very much
grateful to know that our lives are finite so we can keep telling
ourselves that x and y are things I could have learned but I didn’t
because I was too busy learning a and b. It’s easier that way. IT makes
life more pleasant. No wonder we fear an infinite lifespan.
I keep coming back to the fact that I am an optimist though. I feel
those same fears we all do but I for one brush them aside. I’ll choose
to live forever right now because right now I see no evidence to
suggest that there are any limits to what ANY human mind can come to
conceive of and understand. I believe we have an infinite potential
easily a match for an infinite existence and I will continue to believe
so until proven otherwise.
So to put it al together I believe the following:
Given the option of continuing a life basically
similar to my own indefinitely versus choosing to allow my life to end
after its natural allotment of hours and given my current set of
knowledge about death and life and presupposing nothing aobut the
nature of the afterlife whatoever I will choose to prolong my continual
existence indefinitely or until any of the following comes to pass:
a. I gain some additional knowledge
about the nature of death. In that case I must re-examine the choice.
b. I fall into a state of perpetual
continual intolerable wrong (such as pain or suffering or loneliness or
boredom) that cannot conceivably be allieviated. In which case I
will choose death to avoid persisting in that state if it is the only
way out.
c. I reach some certain
knowledge that I have reached the limits of my capacity to acquire
knowledge and understading while confined to a physical existence. In
which case I will not really care about choices particualrly much as
all things will seem pretty pointless to me so I might choose death
mearly for the heck of it.
And that’s pretty much it. I think it is rational to want to live
forever and I think most people know it. When asked whether they want
to live a few more hours or a few more days or a few more years you’ll
always choose a little more. You’ll always want a bit more life, a bit
more time. Why wouldn’t you? If you ever stand before a great abyss and
contimplate jumping, I think the rational person will always turn away
until the day when there is no other choice but to jump and no sooner.
ASIDE:
I should note that this speak of the rationality of
choosing NOT to let to oneself die is not meant to reflect on the
question of whether ‘suicide’ is rational. Although the two questions
are very much related I don’t think that the ‘suicide’ question is
really the same at all as choosing between eternal life and death.
Suicide is a much more complex topic really and requires a greater
breathe of knowledge than I am ready to bring to bear though I
have approached the topic in the past and will likely do so again in
the future be aware that I see it as one of the hardest questions in
society and philosophy and one of the most important ones to get the
answer right about. In contrast the infinite life question might
give us some insight into that deeper question, it is in itself just an
abstract philosophical puzzle worthy of thinking about only in so far
as it expands your mind and makes you wonder. That is the joy of
philosophy.
