hi hi Who are you to say my perception is an error and my imagination is flawed? There is no [b]correct[/b] perception. My existence is the only thing that is immediately real to me. A movie or a TV show has no innate emotion, they are just sound waves and patterns of light that I am free to interpret or not at my discretion. I've seen plenty of patterns of light and experienced lots of sound waves in my time and quite frankly being as good as previous experiences just doesn't cut it. In order to get a positive response, they're going to have to be progressively [b]better[/b] than the last. I seriously doubt that a heroin addict's tolerance can be attributed to an flaw in their imagination.

hi hi Suppose the sensation of novelty becomes boring? The body isn't the only thing that can become desensitized to something. A commonly discussed mental desensitization is in regards to violence.

Feeling bored or suffering from ennui is very much an individual personality trait than something universal. My suspicion is that when we get radical life extension we are going to find a fraction of people who simply "give up" at some point, while the rest are constantly reinventing themselves and finding new meaning. Of course, immortality blues could be fixed through psychosurgery. Except that most people suffering from it thinks it is part of their self, so they do not want it fixed. People who can't keep up, yet find their long lives meaningful, probably form a sizeable fraction of the Brinkers.

theshadow99 wrote:

Realistically... Eventually life would get stale... Even if you constantly had new experiences. Why? Every action or reaction is based on only so many possible outcomes, so life does in fact become repetitive...

You must be a fairly simple finite state machine :-) Even something as limited and simple as chess has more than 10^50 possible positions (and hence moves), more than any physical entity could get through. In the *really* long run you are right, of course. A finite brain will eventually have to return to a state it had previously been in (this is a fun counterargument against many concepts of an afterlife). But the recurrence time can be very large (we are talking double exponent time here, ~2^10^11 years). And a growing system (i.e. a posthuman) can avoid it for as long as it expands at a modest (logarithmic) rate. Realistically, the staleness of life depends on fairly ordinary factors of motivation, life satisfaction level, novelty seeking etc. There are plenty of young people who are suffering from immortality blues in their teens. And hundred year olds who cheerfully tick on.

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Realistically people aren't meant to live that long. Couping with longer life may in fact prove completely alien to how we work.

"Meant to" - are you implying intelligent design? Evolutionarily speaking our lifespan has likely been determined by the need to survive long enough to secure the survival of our offspring (and *maybe* to have a few elders around as group memory, the "grandmother hypothesis"). However, we are already living far outside the "natural" lifespan thanks to good nutrition, safe and nonviolent environments, and modern medicine. How alien are our grandparents? More fundamentally, since ageing appears to be the result of *lack* of selection pressure after reproductive age, we have good reasons to think that changing it would not be against evolutionary constraints. It might still turn us very different from what we currently are, but that is not a valid argument for that it would be *bad*.

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Their is considerable research done however that only the young tend to think outside the box in certain things, and in so doing cause certain advances in history.

Please quote some of this research. As a researcher working on the ethics of life extension I would find it very interesting to read. (The thing that comes directly to my mind is the studies on scientific productivity, where there are well-known early peaks for some disciplines such as mathematics. However, recent studies suggest that these peaks have been moving upwards in age, probably because there is more science to learn before you can make a dent on it).

I dabble in psychology and sociology... Reading papers here and there... I also used to work in a school, so I read alot of stuff from both disciplines on their impact to education... My chances of finding the papers themselves 2 years after I read them is low however... One I remember was actually an study of young (college age to 28) versus older (40+) engineers. The willingness to experiment with truly bizarre ideas was exponentially higher in the younger versus the older. Not every wild idea panned out, but some truly inventive ideas did and in the study the older ones hadn't even thought of the same things. And no I didn't mean 'ID' , but their in the biology of aging systems slowly wear out... It's what is referred to as a 'biological expiration date' or was last time I read up on the subject... Humans find it hard to live past 100 years of age due to the buildup of these factors. There were some studies on the elderly involving quality of life and mental health related to the idea we have a hardwired 'expiration date'. They found mental systems had the same sorts of failures, resulting in dramatically higher rates for all sorts of mental disorders, lower mental quality of life, and less mental 'elasticaty'. In particular I remember reading about how most found common activities less and less interesting as time went on. Personally I know I already have trouble filling my idle time in the rare case I get it. Writing is rarely a 'always on' type of thing, plenty of times nothing comes to you and you need to do other things to get ideas. And I never did like chess, which is odd as I like strategy in PC and tabletop games... Anyways... I know I wouldn't have an issue for the first couple hundred years normally... But if I was being abused by the powers that be for 50 or 100 years I may start to think differently...

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To argue against my previous arguments about ennui, it seems like you could solve the problem of getting bored by accepting a limitation on how long you keep unused long-term memory active. That might give you a disadvantage in some arenas, but is probably the only way to stay sane on a long timeline.

But you know ultimately speaking the extremely long lived might be the only way for us to get to other worlds that aren't accessible by gates? I say that for an oligarch who's seen it all, send him to an alien world to start civilization from scratch, that will keep him busy! The world is only boring when everything is going your way, as long as there's a fight going on there's something to do. Besides bored Oligarchs that don;t care anymore can make the universe a very interesting place. Where do you think supervillains come from :P ? "Hmm I think I'll take over the Planetary consortium..." Put a bunch of bored Oligarchs together and make them play tug of war with a piece of map, it will keep them busy for centuries!

theshadow99 wrote:

One I remember was actually an study of young (college age to 28) versus older (40+) engineers. The willingness to experiment with truly bizarre ideas was exponentially higher in the younger versus the older. Not every wild idea panned out, but some truly inventive ideas did and in the study the older ones hadn't even thought of the same things.

How much of this is biology and how much is psychology matters a lot. Younger people today have more energy, think faster and might perhaps be more creative than older people because of biological differences - but if we have anti-ageing therapies, these advantages disappear! Then we might get very experienced people with the same level of energy. On the other hand, younger people have less to lose and older people might have built mental representations that tend to stifle new thinking. These problems would not go away (but could, of course, be affected by other factors like how the economy works or tools to break inefficient thinking).

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And no I didn't mean 'ID' , but their in the biology of aging systems slowly wear out... It's what is referred to as a 'biological expiration date' or was last time I read up on the subject... Humans find it hard to live past 100 years of age due to the buildup of these factors. There were some studies on the elderly involving quality of life and mental health related to the idea we have a hardwired 'expiration date'. They found mental systems had the same sorts of failures, resulting in dramatically higher rates for all sorts of mental disorders, lower mental quality of life, and less mental 'elasticaty'. In particular I remember reading about how most found common activities less and less interesting as time went on.

But life extension treatments would remove the hardwired biological expiration date, whether it is due to telomere shortening, mitochondrial damage, pleiotropic genetic programs, or plaque build-up. We cannot easily extrapolate how a chronologically old but biologically young person would experience life by comparing to our current chronologically and biologically old. I think it is likely that much of the current mental ailments of the old are due either directly to biological factors or indirectly, for example their deteriorating health limiting their life choices, lack of friends or the prospect of even less opportunities in the future. As a group of people grow older today the variance in almost any trait increases: their health, mental state, economic situation, biomarkers for age etc all spread out. I think this is likely to happen with life extension too, but now the variance can grow without bound. I think ennui is going to be a highly individual problem in a life extended society. Like a lot of other problems - truly long-lived people will no doubt discover drawbacks (and possibilities) we currently have no clue about.

Extrasolar Angel wrote:

Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling touched upon this idea-the main character used a drug called Green Rapture that made him fascinated by the world and its aspects on the level of a growing up child.

Sounds like something we could adapt directly into EP: Green Rapture Originally a designer recreational drug used in South-East Asia, Green Rapture was found to be useful for treating ARDD (Age Related Dysthymic Disorder). The main effect is an increase in interest in the world, usually expressed as childlike curiosity or a feeling that experiences are 'fresh'. High doses can produce a hallucinatory effects where everything is endlessly fascinating; people with obsessive tendencies sometimes suffer obsessive fugues where they become so fascinated by something that they cannot drop it. The typical therapeutic dose merely makes life interesting but tries to avoid the sheer rapture. Type: Chem, App: inhaled, Onset: 30 seconds, Duration: 4h, Addiction modifier: +10, Addiction type: Mental cost: Low [ People suffering from Immortality Blues can reduce the effects of their ennui by taking the drug, but run the risk of switching the negative trait to drug addiction instead. ]

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"Green Rapture washed gently over Lindsay, a tingling wave of curiosity. Green Rapture was the ultimate anti-boredom drug, the biochemical basis of wonder boiled down to its complex essence. with enough gr a man could find a wealth of interest in his own hands. Lindsay smiled with unfeigned delight. ‘Marvellous,’ he said." "Without Green Rapture, the mind gnaws away at the fantastic until it becomes the commonplace." "Under the influence of Green Rapture, his brain succumbed momentarily to the lure of mathematics, that purest of intellectual pleasures."

i think, if i were faced with it, my own personal solution would be a long trip on a slow ship, so to speak. Literrally head out to the stars the old fashioned way rathern then those "newfangled" gates long sleep in between stars (or slow down processing speed) then, when arrive at destination, bam, something that noone else has ever seen, probably literrerally (spelling errors my bad, my muse's spell check seems to be off)

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

Arenamontanus wrote:

In the *really* long run you are right, of course. A finite brain will eventually have to return to a state it had previously been in (this is a fun counterargument against many concepts of an afterlife). But the recurrence time can be very large (we are talking double exponent time here, ~2^10^11 years). And a growing system (i.e. a posthuman) can avoid it for as long as it expands at a modest (logarithmic) rate.

You assume off course that the brain operates on only discrete states. An analog brain has infinite positions between '0' and '1', and thusly, is not required to ever reach a previous state.

If there is any amount of noise in the system, then you will get a finite number of distinguishable states. And if my mind returns infinitely to infinitesimally close states (which include memories), then I think it is still proper to say that I am repeating myself.

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I do have to wonder how much of our getting trapped in a mindset and struggling to keep up with new evolutions (for instance, how our parents dress like dorks, while we can still learn to be hip and cool) is a function of hormones, programmed into our body. If it is, there's no reason why chemical alterations or shifting to a new morph wouldn't suddenly shift you to 'hip, cool and learning' again. Of course, if you're bored of change, you may not want to make the change which causes you to appreciate change. So I guess that ennui may be a self-reinforcing cycle.

Yes, this is how I see it. Depressed people are not motivated to become less depressed (they *want* to be less depressed, but it is hard for them to do anything about it). Fixing ennui is the higher order version of this: the bored immortal might not even want to be not-bored *or* dead, yet find their existence unbearable.

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Yes, this is how I see it. Depressed people are not motivated to become less depressed (they *want* to be less depressed, but it is hard for them to do anything about it).

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Let's not forget about learned helplessness as a reinforcement for ennui.

I have to admit that as someone who was depressed and went and got help I can attest that in some cases there is a chemical component component involved but most of it lies between the ears and in your thinking pattern. It looks something like what Root is talking bout a learned helplessness. It's not exactly that but close enough, when you become set in your ways there's this mix of hopelessness at not only having seen it all, but also it not turning out the way you thought and in turn letting it affect your self worth. So I'm thinking that things like cognitive therapy would actually be very useful for dealing with the Immortality blues. On the other hand it could be done with psychosurgury but it would be like killing a fly with a 12 gauge. But it's nowhere as terminal as the posts in this tread make it seem. So I'd actually recommend being able to buy off the flaw over time using Rez, as in investing some of your personal energies into breaking the cycle creating those blues. Besides from Lestat to Louis, to Angel and that silly sparkling Edward...we all know that vampire A) are whiny bitches that never let anything go B) are in need of therapy rather badly.

Why do you say that? Maybe some of them are spike babies.