If continued conscious existence were just a matter of piling on more & more baggage… then yeah, I’d totally agree, there’s an issue here. It’s one facet of deathism’s hidden truth that immortalists seem to be impressively bad at recognizing.
(Speaking from having been caught in that loop for several decades.)
But I don’t think it has to be this way at all. I don’t think consciousness is inherently tiring.
I feel vastly more conscious now than I was 20 years ago, for sure. I also have way more energy and energetic stability than I did 20 years ago. And it’s obvious to me how they’re connected. I’ve consciously taken off a lot of baggage in that time, especially in the last five years.
I think what you’re observing here is that behavioral loops that don’t adapt to context are draining and are guaranteed to end at some point. I mean this in the sense of “God damn it, here I go again having exactly the same relationship problem with yet another person.” Either you find a way to escape these loops, or they eventually kill you.[1]
But there’s totally a skill of breaking out of those loops, and you can get better at that over time rather than worse. As long as your skill growth with them exceeds the rate at which you take on baggage, you’re good!
If you buy all that, then the thing to zoom in on is why you feel like consciousness is tiring. That’ll give you your hint about what structures you’re carrying around in you that are sort of choking out your vitality.
And with all that said… eternity is way longer than I hear basically anyone acknowledging. When I first grokked what quite literally living truly forever would be like, I was horrified. I think that horror is largely about how my current setup relates to eternity. So that’s part of what I’d need to reconfigure in myself if I were to become truly immortal and enjoy it. I so very rarely hear immortalists talk about this, so I’m tempted to think most of them haven’t yet tasted that scale in an intimate way.
I’m skipping basically the whole causal engine here. A quick sketch: Maintaining a loop in defiance of its fit to context takes energy, which builds a kind of tax on your cognition and emotional systems. This in turn creates something kind of like technical debt at the metabolic level. This is kind of like saying “Stress is bad for your health.”
You’re coming from a psychologic/spiritual point of view, which is valid. But I think you should perhaps consider a bit more the scientific perspective. Why do people get Alzheimer’s and dementia at old age? Because the brain fails to keep up with all the experience/memory accumulation. The brain gets worn out, basically. My concern is more scientific than anything. Even with the best psychotherapy or the best meditation or even the best brain tinkering possible, as time tends to infinite so do memories and so does “work” for the brain to do, and unfortunately the brain is finite, so it will invariably get overwhelmed eventually.
Like, I don’t doubt that in a few centuries or millenia we would have invented the technology to no longer get our brains worn out at age 100 but only at 1000 or 5000, but I don’t think we’ll ever invent the technology to avoid it past age 1 billion (just a gross estimate of course).
Personally, I’m only 30 and I don’t feel tired of living at all, fortunately. Like I said, I wanna live forever. But both my intuition and these scientific considerations tell me that it can’t remain like that indefinitely.
I think it is factually correct that we get Alzheimer’s and dementia at old age because the brain gets worn out. Whether it is because of failing to keep up with all the memory accumulation could be more speculative. So I admit that I shouldn’t have made that claim.
But the brain gets worn out from what? Doing its job. And what’s its job...?
Anyway, I think it would be more productive to at least present an explanation in a couple of lines rather than only saying that I’m wrong.
Alzheimer’s is a hardware problem, not a software one. You’re describing a software failure: failure to keep up with experience. If that is a thing, Alzheimer’s isn’t evidence for it.
Can we really separate them? I’m sure that the limitations of consciousness (software) have a physical base (hardware). I’m sure we could find the physical correlates of “failure to keep up with experience”, as well as we could find the physical correlates of why someone who doesn’t sleep for a few days starts failing to keep up with experience as well.
It all translates down to hardware at the end.
But anyway I’ll say again that I admitted it was speculative and not the best example.
If continued conscious existence were just a matter of piling on more & more baggage… then yeah, I’d totally agree, there’s an issue here. It’s one facet of deathism’s hidden truth that immortalists seem to be impressively bad at recognizing.
(Speaking from having been caught in that loop for several decades.)
But I don’t think it has to be this way at all. I don’t think consciousness is inherently tiring.
I feel vastly more conscious now than I was 20 years ago, for sure. I also have way more energy and energetic stability than I did 20 years ago. And it’s obvious to me how they’re connected. I’ve consciously taken off a lot of baggage in that time, especially in the last five years.
I think what you’re observing here is that behavioral loops that don’t adapt to context are draining and are guaranteed to end at some point. I mean this in the sense of “God damn it, here I go again having exactly the same relationship problem with yet another person.” Either you find a way to escape these loops, or they eventually kill you.[1]
But there’s totally a skill of breaking out of those loops, and you can get better at that over time rather than worse. As long as your skill growth with them exceeds the rate at which you take on baggage, you’re good!
If you buy all that, then the thing to zoom in on is why you feel like consciousness is tiring. That’ll give you your hint about what structures you’re carrying around in you that are sort of choking out your vitality.
And with all that said… eternity is way longer than I hear basically anyone acknowledging. When I first grokked what quite literally living truly forever would be like, I was horrified. I think that horror is largely about how my current setup relates to eternity. So that’s part of what I’d need to reconfigure in myself if I were to become truly immortal and enjoy it. I so very rarely hear immortalists talk about this, so I’m tempted to think most of them haven’t yet tasted that scale in an intimate way.
I’m skipping basically the whole causal engine here. A quick sketch: Maintaining a loop in defiance of its fit to context takes energy, which builds a kind of tax on your cognition and emotional systems. This in turn creates something kind of like technical debt at the metabolic level. This is kind of like saying “Stress is bad for your health.”
You’re coming from a psychologic/spiritual point of view, which is valid. But I think you should perhaps consider a bit more the scientific perspective. Why do people get Alzheimer’s and dementia at old age? Because the brain fails to keep up with all the experience/memory accumulation. The brain gets worn out, basically. My concern is more scientific than anything. Even with the best psychotherapy or the best meditation or even the best brain tinkering possible, as time tends to infinite so do memories and so does “work” for the brain to do, and unfortunately the brain is finite, so it will invariably get overwhelmed eventually.
Like, I don’t doubt that in a few centuries or millenia we would have invented the technology to no longer get our brains worn out at age 100 but only at 1000 or 5000, but I don’t think we’ll ever invent the technology to avoid it past age 1 billion (just a gross estimate of course).
Personally, I’m only 30 and I don’t feel tired of living at all, fortunately. Like I said, I wanna live forever. But both my intuition and these scientific considerations tell me that it can’t remain like that indefinitely.
This is factually false, as well as highly misleading.
I think it is factually correct that we get Alzheimer’s and dementia at old age because the brain gets worn out. Whether it is because of failing to keep up with all the memory accumulation could be more speculative. So I admit that I shouldn’t have made that claim.
But the brain gets worn out from what? Doing its job. And what’s its job...?
Anyway, I think it would be more productive to at least present an explanation in a couple of lines rather than only saying that I’m wrong.
Alzheimer’s is a hardware problem, not a software one. You’re describing a software failure: failure to keep up with experience. If that is a thing, Alzheimer’s isn’t evidence for it.
Can we really separate them? I’m sure that the limitations of consciousness (software) have a physical base (hardware). I’m sure we could find the physical correlates of “failure to keep up with experience”, as well as we could find the physical correlates of why someone who doesn’t sleep for a few days starts failing to keep up with experience as well.
It all translates down to hardware at the end.
But anyway I’ll say again that I admitted it was speculative and not the best example.