The Shrine

I notice in stuff that deals with paradise, it's a fairly common scene you'd see say a kid running around in circle chasing butterflies, and then a guy looks that and says no he rather live in real life or hell or whatever over this paradise because perfection is bad or whatever. But, I think this argument totally misses the point. First, I don't think most people's idea of paradise is going in a circle chasing butterflies for all of eternity. I think you must have made a wrong turn toward hell if that's how you're supposed to spend eternity doing. I'm not aware of paradise being a contract like you signed up to stream LoL games for the rest of eternity and you can't even quit or some angel whips you for failing to live up to your bargain. Of course, a lot of such depiction of paradise wouldn't even necessarily be better than just you winning the lottery in real life right now, so I guess paradise must be run by some pretty incompetent omnipotent beings if they can't even give people more satisification than what can be obtained on the mortal plane. I'd assume that any paradise deal should at least have:

1. You can do whatever you want, or nothing at all, at no obligation.
2. There's obviously no possible physical harm, so like you can eat all you want and never get fat, for example, or ski all day without worrying about breaking your leg or worse.
3. Whoever's in charge of this place can at least come up with entertainment as good as what we can find in real life so that you don't somehow exhaust the possible things to do. Okay, eternity is a long time, but I at least expect to be entertained in a time frame that's comprehensible to mere mortals.

Heck, the Matrix is sort of that premise, as the Architect said how first they made everything perfect and people hated it. Seriously? If your life has everything going exactly the way you want it are you going to cry about how this all seems wrong and want someone to whip you instead? I mean yes in real life it's a good idea to face some adversity because it's not possible for everything to always go right, and even if you're super wealthy and never need to work for the rest of your life you need to at least worry about your physical health since doing nothing all day and getting fat will likely shorten it. I just had the flu last week and it ruined my weekend, and I'm not sure what positive I got out of that. Well, maybe it helped build my immune systems, but again if we're talking about paradise with a deity on my back I think it's pretty safe to assume the said deity can ensure guys in paradise land wouldn't have to worry about some flu wiping out its residents because nobody has ever been sick for eons and lack the resistance.

Consequence free decadence is not my idea of paradise - it's a false idea that's not in our DNA. Even without the obvious physical health suffering that would occur from constant indulgence, our brains still aren't wired for it. A reward unearned looses its lustre.

How often do you find guys without jobs, but the money to live a life of luxury, who aren't severely depressed? It's not often you find people who are truly satisfied in that situation.


On paradise? My thoughts:
1. I do think that an eternal guarantee to a healthy physical body would be one thing, but in a way like Groundhog Day rather than superman. If you are killed, or damaged too much, you wake up tomorrow at 100% health, but it should still be a huge ordeal to suffer that.
2. I would find it very rewarding to see how well I could survive in various environments. In the desert, on a ship at sea, on an island, on the tundra.
3. Taking part in fights, or large scale battles, as long as everyone woke up tomorrow fully healed.
4. Living long enough to see the rise of cultures and cities, and the destruction of those same cultures and cities; and doing what you can in attempts to save your city. Saving it without super-powers would be immensely more satisfying.
5. Short breaks for deserved celebration, and the peaceful breaks... Though only if deserved, as the more deserved it is in the coming, the greater the value.

It doesn't have to be decadant. If whatever your job is says they'll pay for everything but you don't have to work anymore, would you work just as much or find time to do other stuff? You don't have to do absolutely nothing productive. In Alpha Centauri, if you go with the Transcedence victory your civilization becomes some kind of godlike conscience and the ending says this new entity is going to experiment with evolution and stuff 'until the stars themselves grow tired'. I get that we can't say anything definitive about eternity but I'm pretty sure it takes a time measureable in 'until the stars themselves grow tired' before you run out of things to do. Money doesn't solve everything in real life but it's still better than without it, and people who have money that turns out to be depressed usually have other issues. I mean you can say winning the lottery sucks because then you suddenly have relatives and friends you never knew existed asking you for money, but in general winning the lottery is still going to improve your life. And again we're talking about paradise here so it's not like you have to worry about any baggage that would come with being affluent in real life.

I'm an atheist so I don't believe in a heaven. I think the closest that you could get it a world that's

• free from overt deprivation & suffering (disease, famine, etc.)
• free from oppression
• full of opportunities for rich, meaningful social interaction (humans are social animals)

I'm not talking about whether you believe in heaven or not. You can use the Matrix for a technological version of that. I just don't get all this assumption that if you make everything too perfect it's going to somehow suck.

Don wrote:It doesn't have to be decadant. If whatever your job is says they'll pay for everything but you don't have to work anymore, would you work just as much or find time to do other stuff? You don't have to do absolutely nothing productive. In Alpha Centauri, if you go with the Transcedence victory your civilization becomes some kind of godlike conscience and the ending says this new entity is going to experiment with evolution and stuff 'until the stars themselves grow tired'. I get that we can't say anything definitive about eternity but I'm pretty sure it takes a time measureable in 'until the stars themselves grow tired' before you run out of things to do. Money doesn't solve everything in real life but it's still better than without it, and people who have money that turns out to be depressed usually have other issues. I mean you can say winning the lottery sucks because then you suddenly have relatives and friends you never knew existed asking you for money, but in general winning the lottery is still going to improve your life. And again we're talking about paradise here so it's not like you have to worry about any baggage that would come with being affluent in real life.

I don't disagree there. Without money your life options are highly limited, you have struggles that may not necessarily be interesting, or fair. Going out into the wild with nothing but some rations and knowledge is something that appeals to me though - but without money, losing that challenge is a lot rougher than it is to lose it if you do have money.

Using the civ example, I find the game far more interesting on the highest difficulty levels than I do on the lower ones. I find Crusader Kings 2 much more interesting on Iron Man mode, and starting as a Count, than I do on other modes and starting as the ruler of the Caliphate or Frankish Empire. The challenges are real, and the rewards are far larger, even if their contents are the same.

Very interesting topic, by the way.

I get that there's challenge without a safety net but then even thrill seekers try to minimize risk. People might say extreme games or whatever is dangerous but if the usual outcome is someone fall out of their bike and died then you wouldn't have people continue doing that for long. People train for this stuff to reduce the chances of accidentally dying. If losing on deity in Civilization means you can never play the game again then you probably wouldn't mess around with it. EverQuest ran a permadeath server and pretty much all that happened was people farm the stuff closest to the guards the whole time because it'd be stupid to try anything else. I know there's always people talking about how the thrill of the encounter with death is what empowers it but I think that's really an armchair quarterback thing. 99.9% of the time you're talking about this in some kind of fiction so you know whoever you're talking about isn't actually going to die anyway, and even if this is all somehow real, is it really that death-defying if you survive such a situation for 100 times in a row? Obviously you've taken considerable measures to make sure that odds are in your favor and in that case I don't see how it'd be any different from Seeker's idea of where if you somehow died you just wake up tomorrow to start over again and I'm sure any paradise backed up by a omnipotent being can easily supply that.

I just find the theme where you're backed by an omnipotent being who can create whatever you want and that you'd somehow not want it and hang on to your mortality to be very silly, assuming one doesn't have a particular different view of the world. Yes you might eventually run out of things to do, but that's a timeframe more like 'when the stars themselves grow tired', not 'within 5 years'. Heck, that's literally a scene of Suikoden 3 where Luc says he got tired of his eternal life and wants to destroy the world, and it's like YOU ONLY BEEN AROUND FOR 30 YEARS SINCE YOU WERE AGELESS! I was in a lunch with my coworkers and one guy started talking about how people died of boredom shortly after they retire, and another guy is like if money is no concern he'd just go vacation and ski all day, and in real life you'd have to worry about your physical health too. If your physical health is also of no concern, why would you be worse off? Of course we can't even get to a stage where money is of no concern in real life for most of us, but it seems totally sour grapes to say, 'who wants paradise anyway?'