Imagine you were immortal.

Why would your mindset be inhuman? What would set that about? & why?

I think it's possible that humans could live for longer periods of time than they do, were there bodies not already so rapidly decaying.

I'm most curious about how you'd speculate centuries of time would affect your perspective, many people opt for millennial pessimism, gained from years of living, but I think it's possible also that one might take life into their own hands & not be defined by the negative things that happen in their lives, but the grand & beautiful.

@Winterwanderer A key part of the human perspective is "thanatos" or the will to death. If death were removed, the human perspective would begin to slip. As time goes on and I cease aging while all those around me continue aging and dying I would further have social connections and relationships severed and lose gradually increasing amounts of human connection. Extend this over an entire century and my entire original social circle would be gone, or at least mostly gone, and supplanted by an entirely new one which I would then treat differently because I know they're all doomed to the same fate.

Continue this trend over multiple centuries and gradually the human mindset would be eroded, its fundamental principles no longer necessary or even necessarily relevant to the immortal form. With time no longer being an issue then the way entire problems are approached begins to change and core principles would change into something that is distinctly inhuman. Human connections would likely no longer be valued much if at all and all time-based problems would be viewed as purely temporary setbacks.

Whether or not depression would set in would likely depend upon the individual, I don't doubt that I would have some depressive periods but I also get the feeling that would be overcome by the century mark as well as the depressive periods themselves are seen as just another temporary setback. So what if I spend a few months or years doing nothing? I live forever, it doesn't matter.

By the point this hits a millenia I think I would have a hard time seeing anything in human society as mattering a whole lot, since much of it revolves around time limitations and human societal ideals change so much over time. Even just by the 2 century mark because of how exponential rates of change work the society that I would be living in wouldn't just be as different from today as the early 1800s, it would be as different from today as prehistory is from the current. Nothing would be things that are familiar to my original human mind and I would have experienced that gradual slide knowing that as time goes on it will only continue onward at an exponentially increasing pace.

See, but then you assume that such things as curiosity & wonder would dissipate over centuries & millenia, but I beg to differ, even now, on a small scale, we can endure repetition with ease, we can even find comfort & solace in it, yet, even in our repetition of particular things, watching movies, roller coasters, love - we experience something new all on its own in a way we can't describe.

Each experience, each discovery, & each activity is its own thing, even upon repetition, & at times when we do feel something is repetitive, if we abandon shortly we often come back to it later with a newfound fondness, a new emotion & different thoughts & we ourselves are different people then.

Our world is so incredibly dynamic, in nearly every aspect, that I don't believe the human brain is completely capable of getting tired of it, because it's never the same & it's always wonderful in its own way, only when you generalise experiences together do they those their significance & potency.

I think there are many different things that could motivate & interest people, I think death & fear of death is only one, and definitely a strong one, but not the one & only prime motivator of action & all, especially for human beings.

You yourself are not indifferent to your past, your recollection remembers the experiences of your life & how they affected you, why would more years change such a thing? Older people don't show signs of indifference to humans as a result of experience, that's not a huge or significant trend, so why would arbitrarily more years cause such a thing?

I can see the ocean or a beautiful woman & find it all the same beautiful as I did before (affected somewhat maybe by my hormones & the like), why would the world lose its beauty or mystery after having seen it so much? Plus, it's always changing, & so are you, & everything in the world.

I just think humans & most things concerning them are incredibly complex, so I think there's any sureness of what a millennial life would be like, but I think there are so many things it could be, I think negative would only be a small part of it.

@Winterwanderer Oh no, I don't think that the wonder would decrease at all. Just that the mindset would change. You would find different things of interest and be setting very different goals for yourself if you could relieve yourself of all limits on time. Hell, you might go all transcendentalist and go climb a mountain and just chill out for a million years or something and watch the world be eroded and change around you, witnessing the raw beauty of nature on a scale which no human could truly conceive.

That's really what it comes down to, you would be transcending human experience by existing for more than a human lifetime and, thus, become something more than human. Something other than human. At the very least in mind, with all the advances in genetic and cybernetic engineering, you might very well be inhuman in body too eventually.

Ah, I did misunderstand some, but I don't know if our perspective on time is capable of that much change or flexibility, even if we live for "inconceivable" lengths of time, I think that our brain will not conceive of the time that has passed, but will still be bound strongly to the current moment.

I think someone could get an incredible perspective by sitting on a mountain & watching the world erode away over the millennia, but I think he would still have the same sense of time with a brain as we do, I think he would still be bored out of his mind & wouldn't truly notice incredible change as I think his brain would still forget a lot of the details as we do, also, it's not like he could speed up time either, if he sat there up on the mountain he would he watching nothing happen, day after day.

I don't think this human being, or me in this circumstance, would magically have more patience than I do now, I don't know if the human brain is capable of such patience & peace, but then again, some monks live similar (short term) lifestyles, but I don't know enough about their lifestyles to decide whether their lifestyles actually affirm or refute my point.

Oh you can alter your sense of time. There's a specific part of the brain that manages it, you can consciously control it in dreams and with some drugs. Or, you know, you could mess with your own brain structure. Again, with enough medical advancement you would just have to learn how to do the procedure or find a machine that can do it and there you go. Different sense of time. There are people who've had accidental brain injuries that did this. The brain is a much more mutable thing than I think most people realize.

But only to an extent, and what that extent is we are not certain of, & I think our opinions differ in how mutable we believe the brain & its mechanisms to be.

@Winterwanderer Mutable to an extent? I don't know, you already get things that are pretty inhuman just in a single lifespan. Sociopaths and psychopaths can go pretty far out there, and those are pretty well proven at this point to just come down to differences in brain functionality. Savant geniuses are also generally pretty... strange people that are well outside of human behavioral norms. Give a brain an infinite timespan to develop and it will alter itself infinitely. The infinitely increasing complexity is a certainty.

The term inhuman only makes sense when you accept the modern norms as the universal norms, but as for what is truly inhuman & what is merely abnormal, I can't particularly differentiate either.

Though I do think that someone who's worn centuries will be in many ways, "abnormal", unlike (modern) humans in quite a few ways, a perspective unlike those of other humans, abilities & characteristics likely quite idiosyncratic, even still, I imagine, if they were masters at adaptation & change.

@Winterwanderer I'm not speaking in universal norms, I'm only human. Just my own subjective point of view on it. Future humans and this immortal human concept will both be something more than my current definition of human, in my mind at the very least. Probably in different ways, but who knows. Maybe humans harnessing biological immortality isn't all that far off.

I guess it's difficult to define what characteristics are human & what are not in such a situation, because the words which define humans are somewhat subjective & general, so a very particular person as this might stretch the limits of what we've previously considered human, & it might force us to question the reason that led us to limit the human individual.

@Winterwanderer I'm a transhumanist myself, so I don't believe in limiting ourselves based on human limits. But I do think those limits are a key part of what we think of as human.

I do think it's heavily integrated into our thought processes, but so many of these limitations humans set on themselves are arbitrary & even harmful at times, preventing people from being more than what their current thought processes & perception of self allows them to be.

These limitations have often defined humanity, differently throughout the eras, & I think that, though norms & social expectations & all things similar help guide humans & shape culture, if they're adhered to, anything outside these laws are excluded, and many, many of the influential ideas arise from uninhibited individuals.

If we were to traverse into thoughts & ideas far from the norm, we would learn so much! As if discovering an entirely new, better world, an immortal would be forced into such a perspective, isolated by his great & numerous differences from the people of every era.

@Winterwanderer Indeed, a man out of time and of all time.