Maybe you have a cancer that would kill you in three months.
So, get a powerful rocket.
Accelerate close to the speed of light, and make a one light-year round-trip journey that from your reference frame takes about a month, but takes slightly over a year from the point of view of the earth. If your speed during the first journey was v1, now repeat the same trip with a speed of v2 = (3c2+v12)1/2/2. Then repeat with a speed of v3 = (3c2+v22)1/2/2. And so on, forever.
Fact: Each journey will take a bit more than a year of earth-time but only half of the you-time of the previous. So the total you-time of your journeying will be 1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + ... = 2 months. You’ll never die. At every future time, you will be alive.
But this is pointless. You might as well stay on earth, and then you’ll have three months of you-time. Three months of you-time followed by death is better than two months of you-time with no death.
6 comments:
I tried to explain this plan to a friend of mine when I was in junior high school a long time ago, but my plan involved a black hole (and wasn’t worked out mathematically) and my friend couldn’t get over the fact that the black hole would actually kill me. Only by consulting my memory, though, I cannot tell you for sure whether I thought up this plan because I considered it to be genuinely desirable or just because playing around with relativistic thought experiments is fun. So I’m not sure whether my junior-high self shares your intuition about preferences.
And in this case, you get a similar problem: the accelerations will kill you.
There might be one upshot to this plan: It helps you stay alive until a cure for cancer is discovered. :)
Fair enough, but only if you stop long enough to check on medical progress.
"Three months of you-time followed by death is better than two months of you-time with no death."
This, to me, sounds intuitively and obviously true, I would certainly prefer three months of me-time + death over two months stretched forever. However, I wonder how you'd reconcile this with a Thomistic view of existence always being preferable to non-existence? Even if it's existence in a frozen state, is being itself not a good worthy of any cost for the Thomist? I feel like I remember hearing this kind of line of reasoning from you back when you discussed the Horrific Thesis of Hell, but maybe I'm misremembering.
Two points. First, if eternalism is true, then in both scenarios you exist simpliciter, and "existence at a time" isn't really existence, but just location-at-a-time, much like location-at-a-point. And I think eternalism is true. It could still be the case that existence-at-a-time is always good, but it takes more of an argument.
But even if existence-at-a-time is always good, it only follows that it is always better to tack on more time to a life. But if you have to change that life to tack on more time, it no longer follows. Thus, one would not have to say that a life of 80 years of vice is better than a life of 75 years of virtue. But one would have to say that 75 years of virtue followed by non-existence is worse than 75 years of virtue followed by 5 years of vice.a
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