So I was watching a debate between Cliffe Knetchles and an atheist. At one point, the atheist mentioned that in the christian context, he wanted neither of the two afterlife possibilties. That for him, the concept of eternity seems overwhelming and unbearable. It made me visualize myself in his mindset and think about the future in eternity. I asked myself if im about to live through eternity, at what point will i be used to it and be able to say “okay, i have started living through eternity”? And i worked my way to a conclusion.
Lets say you get a 1 year contract with a company and it spans from January 1st X to January 1st Y. On January 1st X youre starting the contract, then lets say on June 15th, the middle between the beginning and the end, youre pretty much halfway through it, which means youre not starting anymore. Eventually, you will reach the end of your contract.
Now, lets apply this to eternity: You die and wake up to your new eternal life. Its day one, the beginning. The thing is there is no ending, so at what point will you reach the middle of eternity? Where do you establish the middle point on a line that starts but never ends? And if you havent reached the middle, you are still at the start. If not, where does the starting end? Eternal life begins, but never stops beggining. Its a perpetual beginning.
I found this thought experiment fascinating and fun and wanted to share it. I hope you guys will find it as intersting as i did.
That is a question that bothers me in many ways. You get used to living when you entertain yourself with certain things for a long time. Given the fact that there is no end to eternal life, such life could be disastrous if there are not always new things to entertain oneself with.
You never reach the middle of eternity since you cannot reach eternity.
I think, even in your terms, the correct conclusion is it never stops progressing. The beginning of something is an event, conceptually. Your awakening is it. It’s over. It’s begun. You’re now in eternity and nothing more can be said about time. I think.
What if something eternal or infinite isn’t a straight line but a loop? So, it goes on forever, but you could be in the middle of the loop. - Let me fix that lol, maybe not in the middle of the loop because the loop has no beginning, middle or end.
Problem here seems to be that there is no such thing as eternity. Eternity is just a concept made up in mind perhaps via imagination. When one dies, that is the end of the life.
The dead don’t wake up. There is no new eternal life. Maybe there is eternal death, but no eternal life.
I think its quite likely that time doesnt exist. That all things exist at the same point in space and time. In which case there is no afterlife because there is no before and after. What exists for us is the pattern we form within the whole.
Time could be a language describing intervals. We use the expressions denoting the past, present and future in language. Time is in the expressions.
Living happens in the present. Death means there is no present, no possibility for future or anything.
Living beings can share things and moments and co-operate with the other living beings due to having the present. Dead cannot share, co-operate or be seen by the living because they lack the present.
Dead becomes the objects for thought and remembering by the living beings. Dead have the past as their history or memories. So time exists, but in different forms.
But if there is no living being in the world after apocalypse, does time exist? There will be changes, intervals and events of the material objects. But is it time?
My suggestion was that the origunal questiion supposes that time exists. However, not all physicists appear to agree. Carlo Rovelli says that time is not a fundamental property of physics. Our impressuon of time is a consequence of entropy increasing.
If time doesn’t exist it cannot be “the language we use to describe intervals” because there are no intervals. It might be, and I think this is your point “the experience we have of a Universe in which entropy is increasing”
Surely theories governing the existence or none existence of time are based on empirical facts about the universe which are true or not. The only thing that will change on your death is your experience of the Universe. Arguably nothing else except your experience has any value to you but it exists nonetheless.
Intervals certainly exist. Without intervals, there would be no changes and motions. We observe the changes and motions and call them intervals. To describe intervals, we use the language and measurment of time. No?
No effects must follow causes and thats why we experience phenonema as a sequence.
Time is featureless. Its not caused by anything and it does not cause anything. The measurements we make are based on something else, the route taken by the Sun, springs under tension atomic decay.
The concept is sometimes described as eternalism.
Personally I am sceptical but it tempers my fear of death. Our lives may be patterns in eternity rather than fleeting moments
Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli is a good introduction to the Science.
As well as eternity, there is also the concept of living indefinitely, which is a much more feasible concept. I feel that sometimes a lot of the talk of living eternally being hell / boring etc is to comfort ourselves about how short and unfair our current lives are. In reality of course there are a lot of potential kinds of life in-between living for 80 years (much of it in a state of physical decline), versus forced existence for infinity years.
Now, addressing the OP more directly, I basically agree. I think the human mind has a finite capacity anyway, so at the very least it is possible to have a reality rich enough that a human feels they are still experiencing entirely novel things even when, in actuality, they are in a cycle of repeating some things they actually did before.
If this feels like a cheat, then we can broaden it to a being with infinite memory. Could that being have an existence where they never get bored? I think so, potentially, but a universe of (literally) infinite possibilities and a godlike being living within it experiencing them…is just so far from life as we know it that it is very hard to conceive.
