There are various things we can do to prolong our lives. We can eat healthily and get plenty of exercise. In the future, technology may allow us to do a great deal more. Eventually, we may be able to turn off ageing, or acquire new bodies as our old bodies wear out, or perhaps even upload ourselves into robot or virtual bodies.
Most of us want more life than the amount we're usually allotted. But how much more life do we want? Would you want to go on... forever?
Various religions promise followers eternal life. But how desireable is life without end? It depends in part on what sort of life it is. According to the Bible, the joys of heaven involve a great deal of singing God's praises, a prospect the author Mark Twain doesn't find terribly appealing:
Singing hymns and waving palm branches through all eternity is pretty when you hear about it in the pulpit, but it's as poor a way to put in valuable time as a body could contrive.[1]
Being in the company of God would no doubt be indescribably great. But wouldn't even that joy start to fade a bit after a few thousand years?
It seems we human beings are constituted so that, while something bad like losing a limb, or good like winning the lottery, can make us sadder or happier for a while, we fairly quickly adjust and return to roughly the same level of happiness that we had before. But if that's true, then it seems that, in order to enjoy eternal, perpetual bliss in the company of God, something fairly radical is going to have to change not only in our environment but also in us if we're not to find even God a bit of a yawn.
What of an eternal earthly existence? Is that desireable? Wouldn't that eventually become boring? In the opera The Makropulos Case by Janáček (based on play of the same name), the central character, opera singer Emilia Marty (formerly Elina Macropulos), is provided with an elixir by her father. The elixir will indefinitely extend Emilia's life if she continues to take it. She has now lived over 300 hundred years, yet still doesn't look a day over thirty. However Emilia has grown to find life unbearably dull. After seducing a Baron, she reclines, completely indifferent to what she's just experienced. She laments that 'In the end it's the same, singing and silence'. Emilia refuses to take the elixir again, preferring to die.
In his celebrated paper 'The Macropulos Case: Reflections of The Tedium of Immortality', the philosopher Bernard Williams (1929-2003) agrees that while dying too early is a bad thing, dying too late may also a bad thing, and, as Emilia Macropulos comes to recognise, being unable to die would actually be a curse. In which case, even if some form of Earth-bound immortality is technologically achievable, perhaps in the form of an elixir of life, or through our being uploaded in electronic form into robot or virtual bodies, it's debatable whether it's actually desirable.
Unless. What if we could be uploaded into a virtual environment that is perfectly suited us? It could provide endless novel stimulation. It could also improve us - educating us, constantly opening new doors to us - so that even if we became bored with one activity, there would be endless others we could take up. Poor Elina Macropulos may have become bored with sex and singing, but she did not have to continue as a singer. She might have become an explorer, a cellist, a surgeon, an architect, or a scientist. Equipped with virtual bodies, our horizons would be even less limited. We could change ourselves so that we could breathe underwater or travel through space unaided. We could enjoy meeting an ever expanding circle of fascinating people. And our environment needn't be limited to just this universe bound by its particular laws. We could even explore alternative, physically impossible realities.
Still, the worry persists: wouldn't even endless novelty get boring? Wouldn't novel experience after novel experience become a drag? Wouldn't we eventually feel trapped and bored by even an endless merry-go-round of delights?
Actually, I don't see why endless new stimulation is required to make life endlessly enjoyable. What most of us seem to enjoy is just more of the same. We like a bit of variety: in the food we eat, for example. But then we like that variety repeated: 'Great, it's friday. Fish again!'. But if that's how we're constituted - to enjoy routine - then I see no obvious reason why eternal life should inevitably become boring.
Even if some of us humans are put together in such a way that we require constant new delights in order to remain happy, we could rewire ourselves so that we don't. One obvious fix would be to limit our memories. Even if you 've eaten a particularly exotic and exciting flavour of ice-cream countless times before, you're not going to think 'Oh, not this again' if you can't remember eating it before. The millionth taste will be as wonderful as the first.
In short, I'm not convinced eternal life must inevitably become tedious.
(Extract of my book What Am I Doing With My Life? And Other Late Night Internet Searches Answered By The Great Philosophers.)
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