• Filipe
    25
    It may be logical to some people but I only thought about it today.
    Before continue I would like to give a disclaimer this text is more focused on the Cristian eternity (Because I have more experience with it).

    First of all, I would like to put it out there, I am terrified of Eternity because the longer you live the bigger is the loop.
    Time in itself to a human perspective is a loop because things are limited. And if you have "All the time in the world" it is categorical that at some point you will reach the limit of existence.
    But now the Cristian perspective says that the just will go to heaven and live throughout eternity exploring the universe and everything else...
    But not the eternity problem comes and even if you have 5x10^24 people to meet in 3x10^80 places and spend 10x10^7 with each one you will reach your limit of existence and yes you could start again and then again but eternity is by definition limitless.
    Another point to contemplate the eternity problem is that Time is ambiguous to the age of the observer because as long you live the percentage of each year becomes smaller and smaller so time seems to go faster, to a 2-year-old child 1 year is half of her life but to a 50-years-old 1 year is 1/50 of her existence so when you deal with things as "big" as infinite time becomes insignificant and even if you argue that our year is simply the time that the earth revolves around the sun but now you just made my point to me because time is simply too arbitrary.

    The very definition of infinite is arbitrary because there are infinities bigger than others and now the eternity becomes as small as a moment.
  • god must be atheist
    5.1k
    What I read is that you are saying that people run out of things to learn in a non-infinite time, yet they have to keep on living endlessly.

    This causes a problem of not doing any positive learning.

    But there is one factor that saves mankind in heaven: forgetfulness. Our brains (or minds, if we are bodiless) has a limited capacity, and HOPEFULLY this limit is smaller than the amount of learnables in the heavenly life. Therefore some things need to be pushed out of knowledge, and hence, never any shortage of "brand new" matrial, or what seems to be like it.
  • Filipe
    25
    My point is that, as long as there are "things" to learn and do they must be Finite and if you have an infinite amount of time it is categorical that you run out of things, so the only way to not face that problem is to have an infinite capacity and that would make you God.
  • Arne
    796
    and therefore. . . ?
  • Arne
    796
    I am uncertain as to whether eternal and infinite are synonymous. I suspect their relationship to time may be different.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    The very definition of infinite is arbitrary because there are infinities bigger than others and now the eternity becomes as small as a moment.Filipe

    You're right unless time as we experience it is simply a subset of something even bigger.
  • Razorback kitten
    111
    Why does it matter that an infinite afterlife would leave you bored or to have some godlike mental capacity if there is no such thing as an afterlife?

    infinite is arbitrary because there are infinities bigger than othersFilipe

    Only to a mathematician. Infinity has no size in reality and "bigger" means nothing to infinity.

    Your brain has a capacity. Even if we never figure out what it is. Don't be worried about eternity because we are very finite. The universe in infinite but only if you freeze time and travel around outside of it. Otherwise it all changes through time and nothing in itself is infinite in time. In other words, by the time you get back from the other side of the observable universe, nothing will be the same. Only the space itself is infinite and it's empty space, not real stuff. So eternity is impossible for something real, like your mind.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    That's when you do a comparison, in this case quantitatively.

    Yes 1 year is half of 2 years
    Yes 1 year is 1/50 of 50 years
    But 1 year is still time 1 year
    Only when you compare 1 with some other number (bigger in this case) you find that it's small but only in comparison.

    I mean imagine you eat 1 apple and your friend eats 1000 apples. You ate only 1/1000 of your friend's apples but that doesn't mean you didn't eat an apple.
  • Eiwar
    8
    It looks like Nietzsche's conception of eternal return. But I think that if we would interpret present as including all the past, there would be no the same moments.
  • ZhouBoTong
    837
    My point is that, as long as there are "things" to learn and do they must be Finite and if you have an infinite amount of time it is categorical that you run out of things, so the only way to not face that problem is to have an infinite capacity and that would make you God.Filipe

    I can solve this problem...when did your brain become perfect? What I mean is, do you remember 100% of what you have learned forever? Or do we only remember a tiny percentage of our experiences, and as time passes, those memories weaken without reinforcement. In an infinite amount of time I would learn AND forget an infinite amount of information (with what is know just slightly outnumbering what has been forgotten). So you would need to be eternal and half-machine to really have this problem...the human species along with technology seems hypothetically capable of complete knowledge (however unlikely), but any individual homo sapien need not worry as we are entirely INCAPABLE of storing that much info.
  • A Gnostic Agnostic
    79
    I recently posted about how this theoretically works, but it was removed without explanation.

    It has to do with the nature of good and evil.
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