Comment on the immortal's dilemma

The problem with expansion in my view is that it assumes that adding more states yields ever more meaningful differences in experience.

But look at say resolution, say 480p, go to 720p, go to 1080p, go to 4k, keep going.  All the larger resolutions are either scaled up versions of the lower resolution content or stitching-up(mosaic-like) of chunks of the already seen content at the lower resolution.

Say you exhaust all content at 1080p.   Can you expect to find meaningful differences in the 4k set of images? Nope, the 4k consists of stitching up the 1080p images, and the 1080p images not only have zoomed up chunks of the 4k image but they also have scaled down, zoomed out versions of entire 4k images.  At 4k you won't find meaningful differences, and this likely holds for all higher resolutions you go to.

That is vision, basically the most important sense, scaling up eye sensors will basically not get you outside of the finitude of the possible, no more meaningful content differences can be extracted.    The rearrangement of small sequences deals meaningful differences, but once you reach a certain threshold of sequence size up to which you've seen all sequences, further increases do not add further meaningful differences.

You could say that, although I've not the math to show it, it is my intuition that a similar phenomena to what is seen in computation happens with regards to content.   In computations, once you reach a certain threshold of versatility in the workings of a machine, that is universality, increasing the versatility of the machine beyond that does not allow you to compute things beyond the simpler machine's capabilities.  

I suspect that it is the same with regards to content, once you reach a certain threshold in the complexity of sequences you're dealing with, a certain length or size, further increases do not yield meaningful differences.  

Infinity in essence is bound by the finitude of the possible.  Which refers to the hypothesis that there are a finite number of meaningfully different possibilities, and anything else is just rearranged combinations of these finite possibilities, that do not add any further meaningful difference.

That said, even if you end up trapped within a loop for eternity, so long as you controlled the transition between states, it shouldn't truly matter that you repeat.   The problem with mortality is not only that you die, missing out on many potentially pleasing experiences that you could controllably experience indefinitely, but that without certainty of the finality of death you do not know, for sure,if you will continue to exist in some manner outside your control.

Immortality grants control and certitude(when accompanied with adequate technology or means), if you're in a pleasant state and can guarantee it indefinitely, one might consider the endless repetition pathetic in a sense, but I don't see why the lack of novelty must objectively and necessarily truly mean it would indeed be pathetic.-coolball 

link to original site