each choice would last forever, giving it more weight rather than less.
From my finite point of view, each of my choice lasts for my whole life, there is no subjective difference.
Perhaps, but plenty of people get so absorbed in their lives that they don’t do this anyway, even with only finite time available to them.
True, my initial comment should read “can be meaningful” rather than “is meaningful”.
Our identity already changes significantly over time; for example, I am a very different person in many ways than I was a decade ago. Thus, change is an inevitable feature of existence that we already need to embrace even for a finite lifetime.
Put another way, if one is seeking meaning through a lifelong stable identity, then one is looking in the wrong place because there is no such thing.
There is a whole spectrum between “misguidedly trying to be one and only one thing” and being an entropy machine.
This is circular reasoning. If it were possible to be immortal–which is the hypothetical being considered–ageing and dying would no longer be a necessary part of the human experience, so there would need to be a better reason to choose them than “ageing and dying are part of the human experience”.
You mean like the sentences after that?
If you define the weigh of each choice as being the subjective length of time of it’s effect solely, then I would agree. But that is only one way to look at it. The other one, from my initial comment, was that each choice is more “precious” (willfully using a different term here for clarity rather than anything deep) if you only can make finitely many. In that sense, the weight of a single choice is that you know it will rob you of the opportunity of the other ones that you could have made. If you are immortal, you can just also make them later.
Ok, my “entropy machine” statement was very vague and only moderately clearer in my head. For the sake of the argument, could we assume there is no physical issue with our brains over long periods of time? Say it feels like a healthy 20-30 year old mind forever.
My entropy thing had more to do with what one would do or chose to do. I was thinking about it vaguely in terms of “if someone or something can do everything, it communicates no information about that thing”.
What would be the point of trying to do everything apart from filing the time that you have? Maybe things would have meaning for N years with N very large? Doesn’t matter how large, it’s still nothing. And then you need to keep at it even though it’s lost meaning to you, or try something else, again, with the knowledge this is an inescapable cycle.
So that’s starting to be interesting. If we add the forgetting, then you have sort of this sliding window of memories, yeah you address part of my above points. I was going to say that it could lead to being just trapped in sort of a periodic pattern largely, and that that would be meaningless, but I realised that would have been dishonest. First of all because of the unproven assumption, but more importantly because we have been talking about subjective meaning so far rather than objective meaning. So even if true, that would not necessarily render the experience meaningless subjectively.
All I can say is that, if I were given the choice in how to be made eternal, that would have to be part of the deal to soften the blow. Also this is not what I took it to mean so not what I had in mind when commenting. There’s room for arguing about objectives meaning but I feel like even agreeing on whether that’s a thing is a whole other conversation.
Damn, I’m going to really sound like a contrarian I am sorry. I disagree with this. There is a fundamental difference to me between reincarnation, which involves death (or indeed, the erasure of the knowledge of your past life) and a discrete jump to another one and a sliding window of perceived memory but with continuous consciousness. I wouldn’t call reincarnation “immortality” in the context of this argument because we have been talking about subjective experience, and subjectively, even assuming reincarnation, you only ever experience one incarnation with no knowledge of prior ones.
Yes but it was more of an additional remark. I was just arguing death made for a meaningful experience. But it’s not the only meaningful experience one can have, so it does not reinforce my initial point.