An argument that has been given time and time again against the notion of an afterlife is that it will become boring. In this post I attempt to formalize this argument as to give some much needed clarity to it. When I started writing this post, I believed that I had something close to a proof that the afterlife would become boring. Throughout the process, however, I have come to think the opposite: That there here is something close to a proof that the afterlife will not become boring. This death is not final, however, and I end the post with sketching another argument against the afterlife, built on a lemma of the former argument.
Discrete Experiences
Here we will take “afterlife” to mean an afterlife of infinite duration. The crux of this argument is that we may describe our experience discretely. What do I mean by this? Well, consider your experience of the following shades of red:
If we describe our experience discretely, then we will say that there are only finitely many shades of red that we can experience between these colors. Is this true? It is very hard to see how this could be true physically: The wavelength of light seems to be continuously variable, unless space is discrete. But we actually do not need to care about this at all, since we are talking about our experience. Imagine that you perceive some light with a wavelength of 700nm. Immediately afterwards, you perceive light of wavelength 700.0000000000001nm. Will you perceive the difference? I very much doubt it. There might actually in fact be a slight difference in your conscious experience, but we can just ignore this difference, since it is imperceptible, or at least makes no difference to the enjoyment of your experience.
There is a sorites argument lurking here. If we say there is no relevant difference between 700nm and 700.0000000000001nm, then surely there is also no difference between 700.0000000000001nm and 700.0000000000002nm. From repeated repetition of this argument, we can prove that NO colors are distinct (Parmenides is cheering from his grave). How do we avoid this argument? Usually I reject arbitrariness in Sorites cases (see my post about the chicken and the egg), but in this case we are talking about what we should care about, rather what really is the case. So here we can employ a bit of an ad hoc solution: We simply round off. So for example, we might round off to the nearest whole nanometer, in which case the wavelengths mentioned above count as 700nm, and the wavelength 700.5nm counts as 701nm. This blocks the inference that all colors are the same. It is of course horribly arbitrary, but that does not matter here. All that matters is that a difference of the unit chosen (for example 1nm) would not affect our enjoyment of a given experience.
This idea can of course be applied to all of our types of experience: There are finitely many groups of indifference for our visual experience of shape, color, our hearing, our touch etc. This means that we can construct only finitely many possible moments of experience, where each is meaningfully distinct from each other.
Now suppose that you are watching a movie (a wild example, I know). Is there a frame rate where it would no longer make a difference to your enjoyment if it was higher? Suppose that the framerate was 20,000 fps, for example. Would it really make a difference to your enjoyment if the framerate was any higher at that point? What if the framerate was 2,000,000 fps? At some point it is very hard to see how you could possibly get any more enjoyment out of seeing pictures pass by at an even faster rate. If we accept this, then we get the following:
There are finitely many possible moments of experience1. There is also a finite possible rate of moments per second2. This means that there is a finite number of possible seconds of experience. We can of course take these seconds and combine them in sequences to possible minutes of experience and so on. But for any finite duration d, there will only be finitely many experiences possible of that duration.
The Argument
This is all we need to make an argument that the afterlife will be boring:
For any duration d, there is only a finite possible number of experiences of that duration.
If, for any duration d, there is only a finite possible number of experiences of that duration, then there are no experiences of duration d, that are experienced after some finite time t, and that will be experienced only finitely many times.
Any experience of duration d will either be experienced finitely many times or infinitely many times.
Therefore, all experiences of duration d after time t will be experienced infinitely many times. (from 1, 2 and 3)
If all experiences of duration d after time t will be experienced infinitely many times, then the afterlife will become boring.
Therefore the afterlife will become boring. (from 4 and 5)
This argument is of course logically valid3. Is it sound? Well, 6 and 4 are conclusions, so they follow logically from other premises. Premise 3 just looks to be the law of excluded middle in a disguised form, if we take “infinite” to mean “not finite”, or vice versa. I think premise 2 can be proved. Therefore the only premises we can doubt are premises 1 and 5. Let us first look at premise 2 though, since that is by far the most complicated.
Premise 2
“If, for any duration d, there is only a finite possible number of experiences of that duration, then there are no experiences of duration d, that are experienced after some finite time t, and that will be experienced only finitely many times.”
Let us explicate that a bit. This is a conditional. The antecedent is simply premise 1, and the consequent is:
“There are no experiences of duration d, that are experienced after some finite time t, and that will be experienced only finitely many times.”
How do we prove this? Suppose that there is an experience (call it E) of duration d after some time x, which is only experienced finitely many times. Then there will by definition only be finitely many instances of E after time x. This of course implies that there will be a last instance of E. Consider now time x’, which is the moment right after the final instance of E. After time x’ there will be no more instances of E (by definition). But there are only finitely many possible experiences of duration d (the antecedent), and therefore only finitely many experiences of duration d that will only be experienced finitely many times, then it holds for all such experiences that there is some time after which none of these will be ever be experienced again. Call this time t. It then holds that there are no experiences after time t, that are of duration d, and that are only experienced finitely many times. This is of course exactly what we were out to prove.
That now leaves premises 1 and 5 to be defended. Let us take one premise at a time and see what might be said for and against it:
Premise 1
The first premise sounds:
“For any duration d, there is only a finite possible number of experiences of that duration.”
This is of course what I argued for in the first part of this post. I do think that I did show this with a quite high degree of certainty - at least with regards to our current life. But we are of course not talking about our current life, we are rather talking about the afterlife. Perhaps the arguments for this fail to hold for the afterlife. How could this be? Well, we would have to have an infinite capacity for different experiences. Here is one example of how this could play out:
You are looking at a representation of a decimal expansion of pi. This representation slowly zooms out infinitely, revealing more and more numbers every second. Since pi is irrational, there will always be unique strings of numbers appearing. Since you have infinitely precise perception in the afterlife, you will always be able to read the full collection of numbers before you. This means that, at every moment, you are having an entirely new visual experience, that you have never had before.
So it is technically possible to escape the argument, since we can produce infinitely many unique experiences in this way. But does this solve the problem? Remember that we don’t just care about experiences that are actually distinct, but rather about experiences that are distinct in terms of giving different amounts of enjoyment. At some point it is hard to see what new enjoyment would be gotten from a new digit appearing after you are already able to see the first 10^1000000000000 digits. More pressingly, you would need to have an endless capacity for the amount of things you could focus your attention to at one moment. You would have to be able to keep all the information of all the numbers in front of you in your mind at once - attending to, reading and understanding all the numbers at once.
But even if we think this is possible, that is still not sufficient. Imagine that you are rewatching the same movie infinitely many times in a row, except that each time the resolution doubles. Will it keep being interesting forever? Even if you could in fact perceive and attend to the increase in resolution forever, it is just completely implausible that it would still be entertaining forever - there is simply not enough of a difference to be entertaining.
This is of course more of an intuition pump than a formal argument, but I believe that it is a quite convincing one; denying it is a hard bullet to bite.
Premise 5
The fifth premise sounds:
“If all experiences of duration d after time t will be experienced infinitely many times, then the afterlife will become boring.”
I think this premise will be the one which will be most open to attack. Let’s first motivate this premise a little, before we look at some objections.
For motivating this premise, it will first help to remember that “d” here is a variable. That of course means that you can put in any duration you want, no matter how large, as long as it is finite. So you might put in 1 second for d, but you might also put in 1000 years or 1 googol years. We then have to consider whether, experiencing the same sequence of 1 googol years infinitely many times would become boring. I think it is very plausible that it would. Keep in mind, it is not just that you will be having similar experiences and be doing similar activities and so on - rather you will be having the same experiences. Imagine repeating the same sequence of 1000 years, down to the minutest detail, infinitely many times - no variation. There will of course be interludes of other experiences, but these too will be ones that you experience infinitely many times. After time t, you will never again experience any set of experiences that you have not experienced before. Time t will of course be ridiculously far into the future, but that does not matter, since there will still be infinitely more time to kill after time t. I think humans are very bad at imagining just how long infinity is (I think this SCP article does a quite good job of making it visceral), which is of course to be expected. But when considering it carefully it becomes daunting just how much time you have on your hands if there is an infinite afterlife.
So is this argument knock-down? Well, before we consider objections to this premise, it is worth to note that a proponent of an afterlife might just accept the conclusion. They might just agree that the afterlife will become boring, but that might still be compatible with the afterlife being preferable to death. It is not clear that boredom is really bad enough to outweigh all else. Consider a man who finds himself bored one afternoon. He just cannot find anything interesting to do, so he decides that the only prudential thing left is to kill himself. We would think that this man was deluded! Boredom is just not a pain big enough to warrant ending one’s life. Imagine now an afterlife where you always have the option to kill yourself. These two cases are of course analogous: At each moment in the afterlife you have the choice between killing yourself out of boredom or keeping on living. But if the man in the first case is irrational, it is hard to see how someone who kills themselves in the afterlife could be more rational. One disanalogy might be this: In the first case, the man might be bored at the moment, but he will surely not be bored for the rest of his life if he keeps on living - if he would, then it might actually be prudential for him to kill himself. But in the afterlife there might be a point where you only look forward to boredom. Anyways, this is only a minor point.
A Reversal of the Argument
I actually think that the argument given thus far could be turned on its head, so as to give an argument that the afterlife would never become boring! How so? Well, so far, when talking of experiences, I have only been considering sense-experience. But there is of course another aspect of experience, one which is probably even more important: Mental experience. When speaking of boredom, we are simply speaking of the mental state of being bored. So what we should really care about is whether, after time t, all sets of experience contain the aspect of being bored. Taking this into account, I believe we can show how the earlier argument cannot go through.
When giving the argument, we had to show that experience can be described discretely. When giving this counter-argument, that is not necessary: If there are infinite possible mental states you can have, then the first premise of the argument is simply and obviously false, and so the argument does not go through.
So let us here suppose that all experience, including mental states, can be described discretely. Then everything up to premise 4 follows, and we return to premise 5. What do we mean by the afterlife becoming boring. We could mean that some parts of it are boring, or that all parts of it are boring. The first possibility is not really that interesting: Some parts of our current life are boring, but that does not mean that life is bad or not worth living (see the short discussion above). So we want to know whether all experiences after time t in the afterlife will be boring. Well, after time t all experiences of duration d are repeated infinitely, but there is nothing about that that entails that all experiences of duration d include only experiences of boredom. Suppose that one of the experiences you will repeat forever is that of drinking and enjoying a milkshake. Then you will enjoy it every time that experience occurs, since enjoyment is a part of that experience.
So for the argument to work, we need some sort of reason to think that all experiences after time t are of boredom. It can certainly look plausible: When we have experienced the same thing enough times, it tends to become more boring. So it is not that surprising if all the experiences after time t - all of which you will experience on repeat - will be boring.
There is, however, a simple way out of this. You could simply believe that we have a limited memory. In fact you must believe that if you think that we can only have finitely many possible mental states: Remembering is a mental state, and thus there must be a finite number of past experiences you are able to remember. So long as the number of possible sense experiences you can have is so great, that you cannot have them all so many times, that they all become boring before you forget having had them, then the afterlife would never become boring. Considering the vast number of possible experiences available to us and the limited mental capacities we have, this is far from implausible.
Conclusion
If what I have said above is true, this shows that the afterlife would never become boring. In any case, I believe that I have shown that there is at least some non-trivial assumptions that have to be made in order for the argument to go through.
What is the point of all this? The reason this argument is even interesting is (at least partly), that the idea of a boring afterlife is incompatible with many versions of theism. If I have successfully shown that the afterlife is not necessarily boring, then I have also removed this potential conflict. In so doing, however, I believe that I have also just kicked the can down the road, so to speak.
I have indeed (I believe), shown that from your own point of view, an afterlife is preferable to death. But consider premise 4 from the argument:
“All experiences of duration d after time t will be experienced infinitely many times.“
There is something completely aesthetically abhorrent about this idea - the idea that the afterlife will be an infinitely continuing series of people living their lives on repeat. God would be watching his creatures living in an infinite Groundhog Day (or Groundhog Millennium or whatever), getting enjoyment out of drinking the same milkshakes, having the same conversations, thinking the same thoughts, for all eternity. While this scenario might be good subjectively considered (and one you should prefer yourself to be in, plausibly), there still seems to be something deeply wrong with it objectively considered.
This is not as much a finished argument as much as it is just an invitation for further reflection.
By finitely many possible moments of experience, I of course mean finitely many possible moments where each moment is different from each other, such that switching one for another will (possibly) change the enjoyment or quality of the experience - I do not mean that there is necessarily only finitely many metaphysically distinct possible moments of experience. But the former sense is all that is needed for the argument, since we only care about the enjoyment of experience when talking of boredom. I will not make this clarification every time I mention “experience” (that would make the below argument incomprehensible), but you should take me to be making this clarification implicitly.
A similar clarification as the one made above should of course also be applied to the rate of moments of experience per second.
It might not be entirely clear that this argument is logically valid, since the structure is somewhat complicated, but we can formalize it like this:
P
P → ¬∃x(T(x)∧F(x)))
∀x(F(x)∨I(x))
∴∀x(T(x)→I(x))
(∀x(T(x)→I(x)))→Q
∴Q
This argument is valid. We can take our atoms to have the following meanings:
x: Experience of duration D.
P: For any duration d, there is only a finite possible number of experiences of that duration.
T: Is experienced after time t.
F: Will be experienced only finitely many times.
I: Will be experienced infinitely many times.
Q: The afterlife will become boring
This then leaves us with the following argument, if we substitute directly:
For any duration d, there is only a finite possible number of experiences of that duration.
If, for any duration d, there is only a finite possible number of experiences of that duration, then there does not exist an experience of duration d, such that it is experienced after time t, and will experienced only finitely many times.
For all experiences of duration d, it will be experienced only finitely many times or it will be experienced infinitely many times.
Therefore, for all experiences of duration d, if it is experienced after time t, then it will be experienced infinitely many times.
If, for all experiences of duration d, if it is experienced after time t, then it will be experienced infinitely many times, then the afterlife will become boring.
Therefore the afterlife will become boring.
With a bit of smoothing out of the language, we are left with the argument in the main text.
I think you can slightly strengthen premise one to include the infinite case using Poincare's recurrence theorem, but it would require an assumption that the function that updates experiences is measure preserving.