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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26124 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 11, 2025

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Would it have to loop, repeating the same chain of events forever, or is there an infinite sequence of events which never terminates, but still stays within a certain set of bounds?

If the phase space of events requires a continuum to describe, then this sounds like a classic chaotic system: it never reaches the same state twice, but it also converges to and moves within the "chaotic attractor" subset of that space.

If the events come from a finite set, that's a problem. Even if you make the system stochastic or otherwise somehow set up an infinite sequence with no repeats, does it matter? At some point you'll have reached every point that you're ever going to reach. Personally, if the best utopia we can ever come up with is "you get to experience every bit of goodness possible before you're done, but there's only a googleplex or whatever of those", I'll be happy with that. Others' opinions may differ. When I first read the idea (in Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Time) it was presented as existential horror; that dude is really good at introducing interesting ideas in depressing ways.

That's my whole answer; feel free to ignore the following digression.

The problem of coming up with an infinite utopia also reminds me of the biggest flaw in the excellent television series (spoilers) The Good Place.

(seriously, spoilers)

In the end, they're in paradise (you might say heaven, except the incompetent committee originally running it definitely didn't qualify as "God"), and the last problem they're faced with is that unending paradise is too unending. As the Fandom wiki puts it, "Everyone has become a bunch of unfeeling zombies who've become unbearably bored after having experienced literally everything, with nothing more to do but wait out the rest of eternity." The protagonists' solution is to "set up a new kind of door where when one feels happy and satisfied and complete, and want to leave the Good Place for good, they can just walk through the door and their time in the universe will end, leading to a peaceful rest of indeterminate nature." The conflict in the series finale centers around some of the main characters realizing, however many millennia later, that they're ready to go, leaving the others behind forever.

What if, instead,

the resolution to the problem revolved around the fact that, if a finite human mind can only truly appreciate a finite set of experiences, the only way to go beyond that is to no longer remain the same sort of human, in a way that goes much beyond how each of us is changed by our mere experiences? If your loved ones want to evolve into something that is as beyond humans as humans are beyond mice, repeatedly or continually, you'd still get a good fear of loss vs fear of stagnation conflict, wouldn't you? Do you try to keep up with them, feeling pressured to change yourself so massively? Do you risk losing them in the process regardless, either because your relationship may never be the same or because they are in some fundamental way no longer the same? Do you let yourself lag behind them at the risk of no longer understanding them or being a real peer to them? The story is already a fantasy with characters that are superhuman or become superhuman in various ways; I think giving the ending transhumanist vibes would have fit better than the vaguely assisted-suicide-metaphor vibes we got.

Or maybe I'm just too much of a nerd, because

the obvious way to end a show about heaven is with God, isn't it? I get that there are too many pitfalls to try to give Him seasons worth of dialogue, but you'd think a cameo to wrap up the finale would have been possible. What we got instead has a kind of horseshoe theory vibe - the writer was raised atheistically, and I'm an agnostic myself, but "eternal heaven without God is inconceivable" feels like unavoidable subtext of that finale.

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