耶鲁大学哲学公开课《死亡》19 不朽性（二）生命的价值（一）

这一课接上一课的不朽话题，然后接着讨论生命的价值与态度。
即便是稍有变化、但大致不变的生活，让你“永生”你是否愿意？答案是不愿意，这是大仙的倾向。即便是那些你非常愿意交往的人，即便如上帝这样“伟大”的人，天天与你对话，你会不会感到厌倦，答案很明显。所以，雷同的厌倦是个难题。我的想法是，人生的奇妙以及吸引人之处，在于出人意料的明天，这个非常重要。假如明天都是可以精确推断出的，那还有什么意义，人仅只成为实施一个生活的机器，对于有着很高精神要求的人而言，这样的永生是不能接受的。
以一个被装置了快乐芯片的老鼠实验表明，人类，即便是天天设置为快乐的，依旧会厌倦，这在心理学上是可靠的。事实确实如此，比如《圣经》中那个应有尽有的国王，还是厌倦了一切，并且比普通人更厌倦，生活越优越似乎要求递进，就更“娇气”一些，这是个普遍的社会现象。而现今世界上最常有病的其实并非那些饥寒交迫的人，而是处境舒适的人。所以不难想象，人类的心理，重在寻求刺激、新鲜。所以，社会动不动，就欢迎革命：）幸亏人类社会总是不完美的，这就需要我们动脑筋想办法去革新，否则会很没意思。所以，从某个角度而言，生活在发展中国家是非常幸运的，太落后如非洲不好，太发达如老牌帝国主义也不成，就中国最“好”，跳出来具体作为一个愿意思考社会问题的人而言。
after all, what we've just described, in imagining the cycling with the memory loss. Yeah, there'll be somebody around 100,000 years from now, 500,000 years from now, and maybe they'll be me. I don't care. It doesn't give me what I want when I want to survive. So perhaps we should put the point in the form of a dilemma. Could immortality be something worth having forever? Well, on the one hand, if we make it be me and similar to me, boredom's going to set in. The only way to avoid that is to lobotomize me, and that's not desirable. If we make--If we solve the problem of boredom setting in with progressive memory loss and radical personality changes, maybe boredom won't set in, but it's not anything that I especially want for myself. It just doesn't matter to me that it's me, anymore than it would matter to me if they just tell me, "Oh, there'll be somebody else around there who will like Chinese poetry."
结论：
So, is there a way of living forever that's attractive to me? I can't think of what it would look like. So, I agree with Bernard Williams when he says immortality wouldn't be desirable. It would actually be a nightmare, something you would long to free yourself from.
但这并意味着现在的衰老年龄就是可以接受的，理想的应该是：想活多久就活多久。这可能马上要牵涉到一个话题：自杀。当然，首先是“满意”，满意的标准在哪里？在什么？
分析“本质”之好与“有益”之好，然后推断 the view of hedonism（享乐主义）. So hedonism is a view that many people are attracted to, perhaps some of you believe. It's got a very simple theory of the nature of wellbeing. Being well off is a matter of experiencing pleasure and avoiding or minimizing the experience of pain.
但否享乐主义就很好呢？起码大仙不接受（玩家网友也不接受呵呵），I'm inclined to think it must be wrong. It's not that I think pleasure isn't good and pain isn't bad. Where hedonism goes wrong is when they say it's the only thing that matters. I'm inclined to think there's more to the best kind of life than just having pleasure and avoiding pain.
Why? Because there's more to life than just pleasure and the absence of pain, or so it seems to me.at least when I imagine the rat lever thing, it's a sort of simple, undifferentiated pleasure. So, that really won't do the trick in giving us the best quality pleasures of the kinds that humans most crave--the pleasures of friendship and discussion and sexual intimacy. These pleasures the rat lever machine wasn't giving us.