We've already reached the point where new stuff is created faster than any of us can keep up. Last number I remember from Youtube was upwards of 24 hours uploaded every minute, and that's been quite a while. So there are about 10 years of constant media uploaded every day. After just a week + a day or two, most of us would never be able to run out of the old stuff. *This doesn't account for duplicate content, written content, short and long form, full-length features, static visual media, and audio. - Jimminy IS Everybody from twhirl

Sorry my math was wrong, used number of seconds in an hour. Of course, that doesn't change my math much, considering according to their press release they've reached 72hr./min., which is about ~12 years a day. http://www.youtube.com/t... - Jimminy IS Everybody from twhirl

I think we crossed the threshold where it's impossible for an individual to consume the entirety of human-generated media in a lifetime centuries ago. And there's definitely enough of a backlog that it's almost impossible to create something entirely original and dissimilar to everything that came before it. - Victor Ganata

So we could freeze and clone the world right now and let them run in a simulation and they would never get bored? - Todd Hoff

"never get bored"? I don't know about that, but they would never run out of old stuff assuming a current lifespan. - Jimminy IS Everybody from twhirl

It seems rather perverse, doesn't it, that there are multiple lifetimes worth of original entertainment out there, and yet somehow everything we encounter seems like a copy of something else we've already seen…. - Victor Ganata

That's why I think, especially if we get longer life spans, we'll need techniques to edit our novelty systems so we can still feel pleasure in life. Hedonic adaptation is a real buzz kill. - Todd Hoff

Well, I think that's what Ecstasy (and its precursor LSD) is for ;) - Victor Ganata

But then if you look at life, there are relatively few dramatic jumps into something altogether new. We continue to recreate the same mistakes, often because of generational or cultural ignorance/blindness. Systems of war, commerce, and culture have been repeatedly re-established over and over again for millenia. There seem to be very few general premises in life, and many many ways to achieve some symblance of them. Media tends to occur and refresh on the more frequent generational scale, and is thus more noticable, to the general population. - Jimminy IS Everybody from twhirl

The only thing we're apparently good at is extending our lifespans individually, and those of our cultures. Nonetheless, all remain forever mortal. - Jimminy IS Everybody from twhirl

Someone (probably Joseph Campbell, but I'm too lazy to look it up) pointed out that there are probably only at most five archetypal stories. Western music is almost entirely dependent on the I-IV-V progression. It's really no wonder we've run out of completely novel things that can please us. The big potential difference is that the Web can remember everything, for a very, very long time. (Although, agreed, this premise has yet to be proven.) - Victor Ganata

What's the point of keeping everything for a longer period, when the value of everything is getting every closer to 0. If we add 3days worth of information, every day, and only a few minutes are worth seeing 3 days from now what is the point of keeping everything. Even with our current tools, this is an immanageable proposition. - Jimminy IS Everybody from twhirl

How effective are drugs like extasy victor? Can they make your love feel like a first love again? - Todd Hoff

We may get to a point where actively seeking and destroying/deleting something costs more money/energy than it would be to just let it sit somewhere on some random hard drive. I mean, does YouTube actively cull uploaded videos? (Aside from those targeted by DMCA complaints?) - Victor Ganata

I don't really know how well E can simulate such things, but, presumably, the sensation of first love *is* a (highly complex) electrochemical reaction in your brain. For all we know, someone is experimenting a pharmaceutical agent that causes this on lab rodents as we speak. - Victor Ganata

Not simulate, but cleanse so those real feeling can be experience again. - Todd Hoff

Ah, well, most likely the Arrow of Time precludes such things. You never step in the same river twice. Although some people think of ECT as a very crude reset button for the brain…. - Victor Ganata

And "Eterrnal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" is a lot less science fictional than it used to be "Pill could erase painful memories, study shows" http://bodyodd.msnbc.msn.com/_news... - Victor Ganata

Since the river at t(1) looks and works like t(2) such that they are indistinguishable, I've never thought much of that saying. - Todd Hoff

And yet, we don't have the ability to re-experience things naively (at least, as of yet.) The metaphor may not be that illuminating, but state does matter in a lot of scenarios. - Victor Ganata

The state is in the being, not the river. - Todd Hoff

State is everywhere. Despite quantum mechanics, I'm not convinced we live in a purely solipsistic universe, where something only exists when we observe it. Even though it may not matter to me at all that the literal river is always a different collection of water molecules with different concentrations of solutes or even that the flow is possibly of different width/breadth/depth and moving at a different velocity, it still has state that is independent on my being. - Victor Ganata

There is only one plot love, obstacle, conflict and its variations of quest and improvement so repetition is inevitable though lately it seems everything is a straight up copy of something that was trite banal from "before" and hardly worth the effort ie Munsters 2.0 - WarLord

If I can detrain your experience of the river then when you step into it the second time it will be as the first time. We need a qualia editor. I don't think it's a QM issue. - Todd Hoff

Yes, we can definitely erase memories (and probably with better and better precision as time goes on) but then you have nothing to compare it with. You can't step into the same river twice if you've never even done it once. But the fact of the matter is that you're always in the metaphoric river, as long as you're alive and sentient, so you're always comparing moment-to-moment, and both you and the river change with time. So even if you think it's your first time, unless you erase your memory all the way, to re-create the exact state of mind you were in, it's still not going to be like the first time. (And even if you do burn down your memory all the way back, it's still not the same river.) - Victor Ganata