Looping and eternal pleasure

Scenario 1: You experience a day of deeply meaningful bliss and then are annihilated.

Scenario 2: You experience a day of deeply meaningful bliss and then travel back in time, with memories reset, to restart that very same day of an internally looping life.

Scenario 3: You experience a day of deeply meaningful bliss, over and over infinitely many times, with memories reset.

Here are some initial intuitions I have:

1. Scenario 3 is much better than Scenario 1.

2. Scenario 3 is at most a little better than Scenario 2.

But the following can be argued for:

3. Scenario 2 is no better than Scenario 1.

After all, you experience exactly the same period of bliss in Scenarios 1 and 2. Granted, in Scenario 1 you are annihilated, but (a) that doesn’t hurt, and (b) the only harm from the annihilation is that your existence is limited to a single day, which is also the case in Scenario 2. Time travel is admittedly cool, but because of the memory reset in Scenario 2, you don’t get the satisfaction of knowing you’re a time-traveler.

This is a paradox. How to get out of it? I see two options:

4. Deny the possibility of internal time loops.

5. Affirm that Scenario 3 is much better than Scenario 2.

Regarding 4, one would also have to deny the possibility of external time loops. After all, it wouldn’t be significantly all that different for you if everybody’s time looped together in the same way, and so external time loops can be used to construct a variant on Scenario 2.

I personally like both 4 and 5.

Objection: On psychological theories of personal identity, memory reset is death and hence in Scenario 3 you only live one day.

Response 1: Psychological theories of personal identity are false.

Response 2: Modify Scenario 3. Before that day of bliss, you have a completely neutral day. On each of the days of deeply meaningful bliss, you remember that neutral day, but then have amnesia with respect to the last 24-hour period once each blissful day ends. By psychological theories, there is identity between the person on each blissful day and the neutral day, and hence by symmetry and transitivity of identity, there is identity between the person over all the blissful days.

Note: Scenario 1 is inspired by a question by user “Red”.

Circular lives and time travel

1. Necessarily, having the same kind of genuine bliss for an infinite amount of time is intrinsically better for one than having it for a finite amount of time. (Premise)
2. Leading a genuinely blissful life over a temporal circle that wraps around from t₀ to t₁ (you have a blissful life from t₀ to t₁, and time wraps around so that t₁ is actually the same as t₀) would be intrinsically just as good as living out an eternal recurrence of a genuinely blissful life of the same kind and length as the temporally circular life. (Premise)
3. If both of the scenarios in (2) are possible, then (1) is violated. (Premise)
4. The scenario of an eternal recurrence of a blissful life is possible. (Premise)
5. The scenario of a life arranged on a temporal circle is impossible. (By (1)-(4))
6. If a circular life is possible, so is a blissful circular life. (Premise)
7. Therefore, a circular life is impossible. (By (5) and (6))
8. If circular time is possible, so is a circular life. (Premise)
9. Therefore, circular time is impossible. (By (7) and (8))
10. If time travel is possible, so is a circular life. (Premise)
11. Therefore, time travel is impossible. (By (7) and (10))

In (2), the life of infinite recurrence is the circular life "unwrapped". I am open to the possibility that (2) in the argument is false, and that it is due to the "infinitely many times around" misapprehension of what circular time would be. It could also be that experiencing the same kind of bliss twice is no better than experiencing it once. I am also open the possibility that (8) is false—maybe there can be circular time, but lives of persons might not be circularly arrangeable. Likewise, I am not that sure of (10).

In any case, the thought experiment embodied in (2) seems worth thinking about. As you approach t₁, you become more and more like you were at t₀, and then, lo and behold, t₁ is t₀. If I lived on a circular time, I would never be facing death. Yet my life would be finite. It would not only be finite in the objective way of a life of someone whose functions got faster and faster, thereby ensuring that over a finite span of objective time he accomplished a life that was of infinite subjective span (i.e., a super-task life), but the circular life would be a life that has only a finite subjective span, though no beginning or end.