The Immortal's Dilemma

[Punp]

Chess Theory

Chess was once seen as a complicated game with a myriad of possibilities branching out from very simple rules. Understanding these rules could dictate the future moves to come, and thus help with the strategy of planning - but it was suggested that each game of chess would be unique and unknowable each time. Then the culture evolved into writing books of predefined outcomes for the game, listing popular starting moves and the optimal moves to take each time, and how to counteract those moves. This is known as playing "by the book", and is why the opening moves for chess championships move so quickly.

Due to years of iteration, study and proliferation through publication, within a human lifetime a player may learn to play chess "by the book". There is no time lost in exploration or the thrill of the game, and thus the player can get to "the end" as soon as possible. Chess is close to becoming a solved game. Naughts and crosses is a solved game - a game where, assuming all players play perfectly, the win and loss is predictable from the start.

With enough data, most games can be completed so quickly to the point that they are no longer worth playing. When the win or loss is immediately visible, there is no value in the experience of the game.

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Narrative Theory

Through the ages there have been storytellers, and a fair share of those have formulated narrative structure theory to make storytelling both easier to analyse and to understand. By laying out the rules of the story, it's possible to contrast and compare them against others. Concepts such as genre, characters, themes, symbolism, narrative arcs etc are all fairly well established narrative traits. What makes an action film an action film is generally understood to be by what it contains.

By following simple narrative structure it's possible to make an interesting and engaging film.

By understanding simple narrative structure it's also possible to dissect any entertainment media to read through it to its conclusion. It's possible to recognise every trope, every theme and every genre signature as they happen, and realise it's all been said or done before in a thousand different ways.

Machine learning is reflecting this back at us in novel yet incredibly tired ways. Like this infinite stream of Seinfeld.

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The Immortal

The punchline to any story about immortality is the endless, impossible boredom of it all. How everything is somehow still the same yet mildly different, the same stale bread for dinner with a stale spice cupboard to remix for eternity.

Take heaven as depicted in "The Good Place". People trapped in an endless nothing are either too endorphin eroded to do anything, or spend their days prompting a machine for combinations of things to experience before quickly moving on to the next thing.

We are quickly moving towards this "solved game" of culture and entertainment. The solution was once to just import it from overseas - countries traded cultures to add a new flash of life into the mundane, but with global homogenisation there are fewer and fewer places to mine this creativity from. Writers have dried up their inspiration and our media has become formulaic and dull, and the step into machine learning will only exacerbate the issue as it draws from existing media.

Accellerated media consumption is quickly ensuring that we are seeing multiple lifetimes of media in our year. In the 1970s, a person may have seen five new films a year at most. Nowadays it's not impossible for someone to consume a whole film a night.

As we see and consume more and more, there's a casual apathy to being all-knowing of a topic. We already know this story.

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There is a solution for the individual - to explore and search for new inputs, to reduce consumption speed and to savour and engage thoughtfully and carefully with anything new. To enjoy the experiences of climbing the hill and not just the standing on the top of it.

This is an obvious, base-level "wake up, sheeple" piece of advice - but even knowing it I can't pull my eyes away from the latest generic mumble of colours flashing before my eyes.

 

[stonehead]

Wow, interesting ideas, super high quality post. Hopefully the boredom of immortality is the type of problem we get to face.

Ever since I watched this video, I've been a bit terrified of Short-Short memories.

I do wonder if there are more solutions though.

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Solution 1: More complicated games

The first thing to come to my mind is complexity creep. You mention how Tic-Tac-Toe is a solved game, but despite that, lots of children still play and enjoy it. It's only after we gain more experience that it becomes too simple to be fun. Chess is a much more complicated game, and because of that almost everyone who hasn't actually taken classes on it can have fun playing chess with each other. With infinite time though, as you point out, an Immortal could master chess to the point where it loses all engagement, just like Tic Tac Toe.

At such a point though, couldn't such a being create a new game, one much more complicated than chess? Nothing about Tic Tac Toe being solved makes Chess less fun, so hypothetically, "super-chess" should still be fun, even if normal chess becomes solved. This may just be postponing the innevitable, because eventually super-chess will be solved, but I don't think so.

First of all, the time it takes to "solve" games seems to rise faster than their complexity. Tic Tac Toe is solved by most children in a few years. I remember when I was like 8, I actually graphed out all possible games of Tic Tac Toe to see if there was a strategy I could use to beat my friends (there wasn't, obviously). But chess, in some form or another, has been around for over a thousand years, and still hasn't quite been solved. So I think it's reasonable to assume that super-chess would take even longer than chess to solve.

More importantly though, I don't think there's a ceiling to game complexity. Eventually our immortal will solve super-chess, but then they can just make super-duper-chess. And once that's solved they can create ultra-mega-4-dimmensional-chess. These games become less and less approachable to normal human beings, but even if it takes years to even learn the rules, our Immortal has infinite time so they will eventually learn them.

You can say "for every game, it will eventually be solved" but due to the nature of infinity, you can also say, "for every solved game, there exists a more complicated game that hasn't yet been solved."

Unfortunately, this solution only works if there are multiple, cooperative Immortals.

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Solution 2: Deconstructions

Another idea is basically the same as solution 1, but applied to stories. Meta-commentaries and deconstructions become pretty popular when a particular genre becomes over saturated. When childish wilderness survival books become too popular, we get Lord of the Flies, tearing down all of their assumptions. They can kind of work in cyclical chains too. When cheesy superheroes became too popular, we got a flood of dark, edgy anti-heroes. And now that those are over saturated, we're currently flooded in old-school but self-aware super hero stories. There hasn't really been enough time to see if these types of stories can keep deconstructing each other indefinitely, or if there's a limit to how meta it can get.

I personally don't really like "meta" shows, so I'm not the best spokesperson for it, but the people who are really into film are usually into the meta films.

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Solution 3: Detoxing

You mentioned slowing down media intake in the OP, but that is just delaying the onset of infinite boredom, not a solution to it. Using a similar strategy though, I think it would be possible to potentially exist indefinitely.

When someone drinks alcohol every day, they eventually become numb to its effects. The change doesn't have to be permanent though, if they go through a detox period of consuming no alcohol, eventually their tolerance will revert back to normal. The effects of alcohol might not be quite as strong as they were before the addiction, but they're far stronger than they were before the detox. A lot of people, mostly online, have argued that you can do a similar thing for dopamine in general.

I haven't really seen any convincing evidence that "dopamine detoxes" actually work as claimed, but I also haven't seen any hard evidence that they don't. So, it's possible that our immortal isn't doomed to perpetual boredom forever. Instead they're faced with increasingly long stretches of detoxing, between increasingly small spikes of entertainment. Not the perfect eternity, but just because happiness decreases doesn't mean it has to disappear entirely.

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Solution 4: Forgetting

Finally, everyone naturally forgets things over time. I'm sure most of us have the experience of finding a movie you used to love as a child, or picking up a game you haven't played in years, only to think "This is fun. Why did I stop playing this?" You weren't actively avoiding dopamine in between each play through of the game, you just had other things to do. Still though, one's ability to enjoy it resets. Sometimes, the enjoyment is even greater than it was before.

So the most optimistic outcome for our Immortal, is to be in a perpetual state of changing interests, while gradually enjoying more and more complex media.

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Obviously your original advice of simply slowing down media consumption is still important, and this optimistic future is probably completely impossible without it. Still though, I just wanted to share my thoughts that maybe the future isn't as bleak as it could be. I apologize if this is too much of a stream-of-consciousness for anyone to read, it was just a really interesting topic.

 

[Ross_Я]

Solution 4: Forgetting

The ultimate one. Just wait 30 years and you can watch all your favorite movies and read all your favorite books again. With the exception of but a few especially memorable scenes/lines.
For better or worse, humans are not perfect machines, and our memory is far from infallible. Therefore immortality is not as scary as it sounds.

However, I have one thing to add, and that thing is: some stuff is just fun. I mean, you might know all the tropes and themes, but do you really watch action movies for some... special twists or deeps thoughts? No, you watch action movies precisely because they have all those tropes and signatures! Like, it's an action movie! Men shooting each other dead with badass one-liners, fucking soulful!
Or, like, racing games. Surely, some arcade games try new ideas - or at least tried them every now and then - but ultimately it always boils down to driving laps and being first. And it's awesome, because there's a car, it makes vroom and brain goes happy.
There's a reason why people actually re-playing their favorite games, re-watching their favorite movies and re-reading their favorite books even when they haven't forgotten them yet.

Personally I do not see a single reason slowing down my consumption of artworks. If anything, that's the best thing I have in my life, the best opportunity the modern life gave to me - to enjoy another movie, or a book or a game every day if I have the time. And maybe it's just me, but I do not feel myself anyhow overloaded by it. Maybe it's just me. Maybe it's because I'm picky and I go for things that I actually like. Maybe it's because I actually "evolve" overtime, to quote myself from another thread:

First it was "just driving something fun", then it was "just driving a muscle car or a hot-rod", and now it is "oh, this game has muscle cars! I hope it has an option to install a supercharger, a 4-speed transmission, and, boy, if the sound of the engine will have turbocharger huff, I'm gonna be so mad".
On the other hand, it made me appreciate many fine detailes I haven't noticed earlier. Like, in Midnight Club 3 turns out the size of a supercharger on your car visually increases as you install higher level superchargers in performance. Frankly, it's bonkers.

As it says in the quote, with time I'm getting more nuanced approach, and I'm able to see new sides, new details in same old works I've already tried - but with old views I wasn't able to notice them. Who knows what I will be able to notice in yet another 20 years? My views and approaches change, making even repeating old experiences rather enjoyable again.

Therefore, I won't completely deny that I probably became quite a bit more knowledgeable in tropes, themes and whatever else, and therefore, perhaps, I get a bit less kick out of the art - or, rather, I get a different kind of kick out of it - but I still get it and I really see no reason to stop. With every artwork I see something new, and by seeing something new, I can see new angles in the old works. I feel like this is complex enough to keep you occupied literally forever.

I'm not even approaching the fact that if I'll be immortal - I'll have all the time in the world to make my own works, where the approaches are truly infinite. Or just make me immortal and supply me with my own car shop and infinite amout of vintage cars and various engines. Surely I can spend at least three lifetimes just building all the insane machines with all kinds of powerplants.