Imagine that you were immortal. In particular, imagine that you knew for certain that you were going to stay healthy and strong forever.
What would you do with that knowledge? Of course it’s a difficult question, because nobody has ever had that experience, as far as we know.
Our entire life, we learn to watch the clock. We may not be looking at it every moment, but on some level we can always hear it ticking.
We make our plans knowing that our life will have a certain arc, and we work to fill in that arc. This knowledge informs all of our decisions down to the day and even the hour.
Sometimes I read science fiction stories in which a character is immortal. Yet their way of thinking about time usually seems too familiar, too similar to our own.
Does anyone know of a story in which an immortal character’s way of thinking about time is truly informed by their unending existence? If so, I’d love to get a reference!
So I guess our working definition of immortality will be a sustained consciousness of a person’s true and conscious bodily history for eterinty (requiring infinite memory).
I guess one question would be whether we could still become or be forced to become mortal (like the Q in ST:NG). If immortality is a choice, it might be less stressful to consider. But then, if suicidal intentions are a mental “disease”, would choosing to become mortal be succumbing to illness, and, in that case, were we ever really immune to death? For those who had already survived eons, they might become so separated from death that they see choosing mortality as belonging to another “diseased” race altogether. They’d be like time billionaires. Anyone who disagreed with them would perish, which would confirm their own ideality. Ideal forms were thought be ancients to be uniform, connected, omnipresent in time in space. That might produce a motive of manifest destiny. Taken to an extreme, these people might become like cosmic background radiation. Over time these entities would gain a powerful understanding of others, but how they would treat them or communicate with them is a question. Even other young immortals would be treated as “other”, I’d imagine, since there’s no guarantee that they are not “diseased” with the possibility of choice.
I don’t know of a story that addresses immortal thinking at the scale you’re talking about, but (if I’m remembering it correctly), Bill Murray’s character reaches that point in Groundhog Day.
SPOILERS below
After countless attempts to woo his producer, he finally realizes that there’s no shortcut and he has to improve himself. So he spends his seemingly unending days learning to play the piano, to speak a new language, and to be more caring of those around him. If I’m recalling the details correctly, he stops trying to win his producer’s heart during this growth and learning phase, suggesting he’s planning with the knowledge that he has as much time as will take to improve himself. I’d consider that a type of immortal thinking.
Being immortal in the classic sense would alter your thinking, but you still might be subject to thinking in terms of milestones. Your own death is not the only consideration. Unless you’re experiencing a Groundhog Day time loop, the world and your community will change (evolve?) at some rate. If you’re attracted to someone, you might not want to wait to long before you go a-courting just because you’re going to live forever.
Response to Dan: One can readily set up a fictional situation in which mortality is not an option. For example, a character can live within a simulation world like an essential daemon in the Unix operating system: The daemon always restarts, even on reboot.
I’d think that if you were truly immortal, you could still take interest in the workings of the universe – it could be like zooming a fractal, which can get boring after a while, but in this case it is the system of understanding itself that would be evolving. However, if you didn’t have infinite memory/perception, maybe you’d be destined eventually (after an unfathomably long time) to enter a cosmic Groundhog Day without knowing it. On the other hand, if you did have infinite memory/perception, maybe you’d have already attained the greatest level of understanding possible. Unless there’s some higher infinite universe to find, in which case the definitions seem to become kind of meaningless.