If memory serves, the average human lives for around 500 years before opting for euthanasia, mostly citing some kind of ennui. What the hell? 500 years is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
As far as we go, no single human has ever experienced 500 years of life. I do agree realistically it doesn’t seem enough to run out of things to do, but we can’t exclude that as a factual unknown detail of human psychology, it would be a limit. Maybe even if we don’t run out of specific things to do, we simply wear down our emotional range and ability to feel much about any of it? It could even be framed as such a thing as, maybe there’s some kind of desensitisation going on with your dopamine receptors that they’re not good enough at rebalancing yet.
Basically I think you could just take that as a simple part of the premise of the setting, a speculative guess about how precisely human psychology could interact with immortality, and move on.
I find it very hard to believe that a civilization with as much utter dominion over physics, chemistry and biology as the Culture would find this a particularly difficult challenge.
The crudest option would be something like wiping memories, or synthesizing drugs that re-induce a sense of wonder or curiosity about the world (similar to MDMA). The Culture is practically obsessed with psychoactive substances, most citizens have internal drug glands.
At the very least, people should be strongly encouraged to have a mind upload put into cold storage, pending ascendance to the Sublime. That has no downsides I can see, since a brain emulation that isn’t actively running is no subjectively different from death. It should be standard practice, not a rarity.
Even if treated purely as a speculation about the “human” psyche, the Culture almost certainly has all the tools required to address the issue, if they even consider it an issue. That is the crux of my dissatisfaction, it’s as insane as a post-scarcity civilization deciding not to treat heart disease or cancer.
A mind upload without strong guarantees potentially carries huge S-risks. You’re placing your own future self in the hands of whoever or whatever happens to have that data in the future. If one thousands year from now for whatever reason someone decides to use that data to run a billion simulations of you forever in atrocious pain, there is nothing you can do about it. And if you think your upload is “yourself” in a meaningful way enough for you to care about having one done, you must think that is also a very horrible fate.
As far as we go, no single human has ever experienced 500 years of life. I do agree realistically it doesn’t seem enough to run out of things to do, but we can’t exclude that as a factual unknown detail of human psychology, it would be a limit. Maybe even if we don’t run out of specific things to do, we simply wear down our emotional range and ability to feel much about any of it? It could even be framed as such a thing as, maybe there’s some kind of desensitisation going on with your dopamine receptors that they’re not good enough at rebalancing yet.
Basically I think you could just take that as a simple part of the premise of the setting, a speculative guess about how precisely human psychology could interact with immortality, and move on.
I find it very hard to believe that a civilization with as much utter dominion over physics, chemistry and biology as the Culture would find this a particularly difficult challenge.
The crudest option would be something like wiping memories, or synthesizing drugs that re-induce a sense of wonder or curiosity about the world (similar to MDMA). The Culture is practically obsessed with psychoactive substances, most citizens have internal drug glands.
At the very least, people should be strongly encouraged to have a mind upload put into cold storage, pending ascendance to the Sublime. That has no downsides I can see, since a brain emulation that isn’t actively running is no subjectively different from death. It should be standard practice, not a rarity.
Even if treated purely as a speculation about the “human” psyche, the Culture almost certainly has all the tools required to address the issue, if they even consider it an issue. That is the crux of my dissatisfaction, it’s as insane as a post-scarcity civilization deciding not to treat heart disease or cancer.
A mind upload without strong guarantees potentially carries huge S-risks. You’re placing your own future self in the hands of whoever or whatever happens to have that data in the future. If one thousands year from now for whatever reason someone decides to use that data to run a billion simulations of you forever in atrocious pain, there is nothing you can do about it. And if you think your upload is “yourself” in a meaningful way enough for you to care about having one done, you must think that is also a very horrible fate.