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If you could, would you liver forever? and if yes, what would you do? why would you do it?

If not, then why?

Discuss

Depends on the type of immortality.

Immortality in that you can't die no matter what or "lesser" immortality in that you can't just can't die of natural causes?

I was always kind of in the camp that immortality could suck very badly if you didn't have the invincibility to go along with it. I'm thinking if you got yourself horribly mangled to the point where you couldn't do anything anymore yet you couldn't die due to your immortality. Pretty much a nightmare scenario.

Even immortality with a regeneration power would be okay. Though I don't know what the hell you'd do once the sun for this planet starts turning into a red giant. I guess hopefully humanity would have space travel by then.

(it probably would)

Consider it this way, you can only be killed if you want to, you can only die if you wish for it

As for the pain part, Everything heals fairly well with time. but yes, let's say regeneration to a certain degree

Have you played Necromancer yet?

Yes. to an extreme degree. It was the first and I played on this site, 2 years ago, along with death song right after.

I tend to take Immortality as the "lesser" kind, the other is just invulnerability with Immortality in my eyes.

I would not want to live forever.

My answer is simple; I'd get bored. If you look at history, it repeats itself. War, peace, equality movements, etc. It's like watching the same re-runs of a show; appealing the first couple of times, but once you know exactly what's going to happen when and how, you lose interest. Hell, if you look through media, it's the same stories and messages with different names. Assassin's Creed's storyline is actually comparable to the fantasy saga Sword of Truth, and in music, it's all practically the same theme.

I'd love to live long enough to see if the creators of Mass Effect correctly predicted the future, but beyond that...no.

Oh, so so many reasons to say no.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18708_5-reasons-immortality-would-be-worse-than-death.html (I don't count #2-3 as part of immortality.) 

http://akorra.com/2010/08/18/top-10-reasons-you-don%E2%80%99t-want-to-be-immortal/  (#1 is kind of pro-christian but the rest makes sense.)

http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/Across-The-Highlands-lyrics-Kamelot/7B0A9CC0CBEF07C048256C590030D874 (The lyrics fit an immortal's viewpoint quite well.)

and finally: Unless I had some kind of magic I could use then I would just say no. (dnd style or something basic like that.)

So going by that top ten list, basically the closer you are to already having a sociopathic personality, the easier you could deal with the more stressful parts of immortality.

Boredom seems to be the biggest obstacle no matter what, but I imagine if you're a sociopath, you'd find less than moral ways to solve that problem. Still, probably even then you might get bored after several thousand years of mass mayhem.

You'd probably go through a cycle of alternating between doing good deeds and being the worst person ever just to switch it up.

Play god?  I mean, you have all the time in the world to watch bacteria evolve into countless other life forms...

Real-life Spore? Count me in.

We can get started by...

How about spitting into water?  XD

To counteract the species evolving thing, i propose plastic surgery. You could change pretty much everything, you vcould go through incredibly dangerous surgeries with no fear of dying. also, in the far future, i'm pretty sure they will invent advanced weaponry that could be installed into the human body (in fact, some U.S scientists have made great advancements in the field of invisibility, as in, making someone actually invisible), so that could be sustituted for magical powers, no?

No.

If offered the ability to kill myself whenever I chose, then yeah I'd take it, but that's not asking whether or not you'd want to live forever. If I were to live from the start of the universe to the end (or even from this point now onwards) I wouldn't be able to take it. Mostly because I don't take boredom well... at all.

Yes I would but only if I could die when I want to.

My reason is simple

I agree that history repeats itself but with immortality I would simply try to prevent this and have more time to do what I want. Besides we are constantly improving I would improve the world of medicine, science and such.

Meh, if I can die whenever I please I don't see the downside. You're not really immortal, you just get to live for as long as you feel like it.

^

Exactly.

One of the problems with immortality is that it removes all ethical and moral barriers. The longer the time, and the fewer the penalties (death, incarceration, moral turpitude), the possibilities for excitement and new experiences dwindle, and cognizant humans will find some sort of diversion, anything which will stimulate and excite them, which will broach current law and accepted ethics.

Almost all law and acceptable behavior is based around a lifespan of 100+ or - 10 years.

I actually wrote a philosophical essay on this at some point because I found the idea more complicated than I had previously thought.

Imagine what happens to a person who has read every book, listened to every opera, seen every movie, and is inundated with the same, repetitive, cyclical, cultural waste which is laid upon him every decade or so. Nothing will stimulate the same way the first sunset, the first caught fish, the first kiss, the first lay, the first great sleep, the first breakup, will do.

The only thing which will remain is murder, or torture, or relegating other humans to the walking flesh sacks that they are. The interesting aspect would come in with an immortal, already cannibalistic, sociopathic serial killer during his mortality.

What would then give him stimuli to have the will to continue existence?

By the way, if the answer is to "do good," then we must question entirely what his biological makeup is that he would find respite in the exact opposite of the way his neurology is wired, and really, if the questions of "morality and ethics," actually make any sort of logical or biological sense at all.

Why would this not apply to those "wired" the opposite way, that is, to "not do evil" in the first place? The answer is fairly complicated and I do not pretend to know all the facets, but looking anthropologically, people congregate, the loner is an exception rather than the rule. People who are able to "do evil," a meaningless term, generally are missing certain mechanisms in their neurochemistry which prevent such acts. It is difficult to determine if these failsafe switches are instilled environmentally, but based on studies of early man, there is no credible evidence that serial killers were running amok, so environment probably plays a larger role than genetics, although separating the two is foolish, as they are forever interlinked, and a genetic predisposition and multiple environmental hits usually leads to the outcome.

I got the gist of your 2 messages.

Your right about most of that stuff (I assume) and we often go back to the way we were raised for example someone raised with a serial killer would not view murder as wrong. Deep in our pre frontal cortex is how we perceive right or wrong (could be another section of the brain) As such we are constantly influenced on how to perceive it. Through this we would eventually tire of the no consequences of our actions simply because right and wrong have blended together.

That's good work. The pre-frontal cortex has to do with inhibition, so I totally agree.

Thanks the pre frontal cortex is basically the only part of the brain I really know what it does... It also contains you, your personality.

Well...not exactly. The brain is way too complex. Probably the whole brain is "you." We have no idea, really. But the frontal cortex does seem to have "executive functioning," which allows us to do things like pay bills, make decisions on what seems reasonable, etc.

Interestingly, it is not even fully developed until like 25 years old, which is why teenagers tend to do really uninhibited, stupid things. Alcohol affects it, lessening inhibition, etc.

Don't forget smoking kills your brain cells too.

Lol, someone is lost

What? OH A APPLE!!!

yeah completely