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Is life meaningless if we can live forever?

Aralt 7 June 8
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44 comments

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1

That is a mute question but life is meaningless anyway!

@Gwendolyn2018 Yeah, I guess that was some sort of Freudian skip!

@Gwendolyn2018 Oops, there I go again!

@Gwendolyn2018 If they all made the same mistakes they must have b

@Gwendolyn2018 What happened?! Like I tried to say, if they all made the same mistakes they must have been coping each other's notes! wink

@Gwendolyn2018 I'll bet that's a big problem these days. Didn't I hear that there was a special search-engine available to sus out plagiarism?

@Gwendolyn2018 I assume this is HS. Of course what you said is correct. It would be easy. I was sort of referring to College but these days, they are probably not much more sophisticasted either!

@Gwendolyn2018 Imagine a PHD dissertation that was plagiarised! Yuk Yuk. BTW. If you would live forever you'd trip over your hair! You could play Repunzel!

@Gwendolyn2018 To combine paraphrasing: "Hair today, long tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps down this pretty face from day to day"

2

Living forever in a peaceful and happy heaven would be crappy. we really do need drama and mayhem

Nardi Level 7 June 8, 2018

Nyx, or Chaos here, ready for duty!

@StephanieD78 I'm always up for chaos makes life interesting 🙂

@Nardi pending with what 1 uses for reigns, and to which side they choose to pull them.....
?Lest ye forget....?️

@StephanieD78 whichever way we decide always pull the reigns softly and let the beast feel in control. Sit back and enjoy the ride 🙂

0

Moses and noah lived almost a 1000 years and they had no complaints.

Have you seen copies of their birth certificates and obituaries?

@fishline79 They must be hidden with the other biblical facts

2

Life will never be meaningless for me as long as I'm alive. After I'm dead I'll have plenty of time for life to be meaningless.

skado Level 9 June 8, 2018

A more interesting question is if life would remain interesting if it went on indefinitely. Is there truly a limitless fund of novel experiences? I'm not so sure. But it's nice to have options. To be able to live forever so long as you can end it when it doesn't make sense for you, sounds fine to me.

2

I woke up today, seemed to anyway, enjoying it pretty much so far. Is that meaning? Means enough to me.

@Aralt Well if that's the meaning you meant then that's the meaning I mean. 🙂

3

Human life, in and of itself has no meaning. It just exists, like everything else just exists. Life's "meaning" is individually subjective. As others have said here; people give their own meaning to life. I don't see the length of a human life as being connected to any meaning (also echoing others comments).

I believe if Humans achieve biological immortality (and I think it is possible), it's my hope that along with immortality comes wisdom, greater knowledge, peace, and the eventual vanishing of religion.

Ha, but its that mortal desire to posteurize, ego, which won't quit whinning about leaving behind legacies and tales to tell...

Dreamer!

2

I don't know about immortality making life meaningless, but it would definitely make things seem a lot less urgent. I'm 435. I've been thinking I'd like to learn to play the piano.

@Aralt Maybe you could learn to use the subjunctive tense.

2

If I can live forever and continually accumulate, assimilate and aggregate new information and experiences into an ever growing, deepening and interconnecting view/awareness/understanding of reality then it will never be meaningless.

And imagine the "reality shows" you could watch!

@fishline79 ?

0

Or if we can't? 100 years, 1000 years, 10,000 years. Just specks in the overall flow.

1

We DO live forever.

Einstein showed that all matter is a form of energy, so since energy can neither be created nor destroyed, we have always existed and will always exist in some energy form, and quantum physics already proves that multiple dimensions exist.

There could be reincarnation, for that matter. "For physicists, the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." -Einstein.

since when did quantum mechanics "prove" that multiple universes exist ? are you confusing the third law of thermodynamics ? Einstein never claimed any form of reincarnation, only the preservation of energy, not matter,

1

That's kind of a moot question, isn't it?

JimG Level 8 June 8, 2018
0

No, because eternal life is a separate concept from meaning so one does not preclude the other.

"eternal life is a separate concept"....
forgive my childlike lack of knowledge, just seeking wisdom here...... who, separated the concepts, and who are who?

1

It begs the question: Live forever as an old person or eternal youth? Even if eternally young, "forever" is a long, long time.

2

This sums up my viewpoint perfectly.

Imagine all of the Mayflies out there saying, "What have you guys got to bitch about?"

0

Meaningless does not equate limitless.

0

Yea, but it'd be a lot more convenient, unless you're suicidal.

1

In all honesty, it is meaningless already. What will your life have meant in another 1000 years.
What I did 50 years ago has no meaning.

0

Well, I would say “no”. The biological function of this human machine is only the mechanics of life. What gives like meaning is how you live it. The experiences, the love, the wonder of viewing the world and how you affect others in a positive way. Leaving the world or just a small part of it better than when you found it. A line from one of my favorite poems which I have posted on this site: “The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and YOU may contribute a verse.” Walt Whitman.

0

Life is what you make it, forever or not ?

1

Why would living forever change anything as far as meaning? It means our environment would be constantly changing and new challenges would abound. This is predicated on living a relatively pain free, comfortable life

1

In the first place, life is not meaningless. Life is a grand tour, full of wonder, awe, beauty, and mystery. How long a body stays alive has no bearing on the issue.

My personal opinion is that the sense of personhood as a separate individual is an illusion, sustained by memory. Perhaps all these overlapping lives should be thought of as a single entity. Even if your body lived a thousand years, I think that you would be a different person. You’d have no use for those old memories from a thousand years ago—they’d be hard to manage. The question of personal identity is tricky. I address that issue in “The Staggering Implications of the Mystery of Existence”, available on the Kindle Store.

1

Would that be sometime. To live in a mansion in the sky with extreme happiness for eternity.

It might be more possible to be reincarnated as a wise 1000 year Old Oak tree. As long as a Christian dose not come along and cut me into Bibles.

0

Well...
I've been to the OTHERSIDE (and back)
... I know... Eyebrow raise...
BUT (Take it or leave it as you will)
'fact' is I can tell you with ANSOLUTE EXPERTISE' The Answer is:
Yes And no.

😉
Let me know if you want to know more

1

Apparently, to some ~

Varn Level 8 June 8, 2018
2

No. Not any more than it's suddenly meaningless because we don't believe in god. Meaning does not come from god or from mortality. It is found by each individual in each moment.

It's true that belief in god can be a shaky basis for meaning (until the abstraction starts leaking, which it invariably does, sooner or later). It's true that the pressure of mortality can focus you and presumably the absence of that pressure could unfocus you. But what would it matter? With unlimited time, you would just be focused by unhappiness caused by bad life choices; that works, too.

Besides, any sort of immortality that's absolute is a fantasy that's never going to happen. The closest we'll likely come to "living forever" is biological immortality, where disease and aging are taken out of the picture. But you can still die by misadventure, so you still can expect to eventually have an accident and die. So in that scenario you would still have always some nonzero possibility of dying in the next moment, just like now.

I suppose it's just possible that a long way in the future it will be possible to move one's memory and consciousness into a newly-grown body or robot of some kind, without compromising quality of life. That's a problem for another day, sort of the opposite of borrowing trouble. In terms of what's remotely likely to be true in the next few generations, I don't see the challenge of finding meaning changing substantially, other than hopefully getting rid of silly religious notions about how that's accomplished.

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