Re: The Meaning That Immortality Gives to Life

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@rawbw.com)
Date: Sat Oct 20 2007 - 23:09:38 MDT


Bryan writes

> On Tuesday 16 October 2007 23:53, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>> You can't consider boredom without also considering the emotional
>> aspect of it. Everyone puts a lot of effort into repeating pleasant
>> experiences expecting that they will be pleasant all over again.
>
> I think that my message to which you wrote your response was talking
> even of the future where mental revision has allowed us to do away with
> emotions or do away with our weak control/understanding of emotions. I
> suspect that 'boredom' or 'redundant mental cycles' will still be very
> much a reality.

Perhaps this has been addressed, but if not, would someone please
explain what I'm missing here? (I've made the point before, but can't
recall if anyone refuted or even addressed it.)

Surely boredom is an *active* system response. We developed the
capacity to be bored or the emotion of boredom for reasons that
are very clear, evolutionarily speaking. But note carefully that one
may have sex very often, and may even eat multiple times a day
with these activities rarely, rarely becoming boring. This too is easily
accounted for; getting bored by sex or food would almost never
promote survival among our ancestors.

Even *now* we have drugs to combat boredom. From lowly
caffeine all the way to tightly controlled drugs, otherwise extremely
dull activities can be made quite interesting. Surely in the future we
can choose what will resemble sex and food in this regard and
what won't.

So I'd appreciate very much an explanation, given this argument,
why anyone here thinks that boredom in the far future is something
to worry about.

Lee



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