So the type of immortality I have in mind is not a magical one where death is strictly impossible. But it is the practical removal of death’s certainty. Biological immortals would no longer expect to die within any relevant time frame.
What is distinctive...is that death becomes only a possibility, an option, not an inevitability on a fixed timetable. This sort of immortality, I would think, is definitely not a curse. To have the option of living healthily a very long time, possibly for as long as one could want (but no longer), seems like an unmitigated blessing.--Regina Rini. "The last mortals" TLS: The Times Literary Supplement.
It used to be necessary that all of us die. Descartes's and Bacon's shared dream was to change that by refounding the science of body and, thereby, re-invent medicine and technology. Rini focuses on the effects of biological mortality; a "biologically immortal organism does not die from illness or ageing – though they may still die in a plane crash."* In particular she focuses on the effects of immortality on those like us (!) "left stranded on the dock as the ship to the Undying Lands fades in the distance?" That's a fascinating question, and I warmly recommend you read the essay by Rini.
I suspect it's pretty clear that if they can avoid the bad physical effects of eternal aging, a significant number of people probably agree with Rini that eternal life is worth having. (There is a lot of revealed preference that can be interpreted to support this.) Rini recognizes that there have been artists and philosophers who thought otherwise and she has insightful things to say about them. But she thinks their arguments are irrelevant, so that "to have the option of living healthily a very long time, possibly for as long as one could want (but no longer), seems like an unmitigated blessing." She does not say much to justify this claim, but it seems to presuppose a notion of autonomy or freedom focused on our individual agency. And, for somebody like me, who thinks these are self-justifying ends, there wouldn't be much to complain about here.
Even so, I am not so sure indefinite life is a blessing. I am also not sure why I think this. But let me try out this thought, inspired by my reflections on Elizabeth Barnes's important book, Minority Body (recall here and here), I have come to think that (a) to be alive is to face some hard constraints due to our embodiment, and (b) the (embodied) constraints we face shape our preferences; and (c) these constraints and preferences shape our lives worth living (or, if you are a Rawlsian, our life-plans).** While this is not the focus of Barnes's book, death is the central, hard constraint due to our embodiment.+
The thought I have is that by turning the most fundamental hard constraint on our embodiment (death) into an optional and much softer constraint one also effects how lives worth living are conceived. To make that concrete: currently, with hard constraints on the duration of our lives, time is one of scarcest goods on quite a few activities. But scarcity drives individual ingenuity and experimentation; and it drives the development of social and economic institutions. It is notable that abundance of resources (in the economic sphere) is often (not always!) associated with stagnation. Such a so-called paradox of plenty may also exist in temporal sphere. (This idea informs, in fact, some of the critics of immortality Rini discusses.)
I don't mean to suggest all worthy lives are informed by a sense of urgency. I am open to the idea one can find in certain mystical traditions that, in fact, such urgency is a (existential) mistake. But such traditions also pull against the idea that it is obvious we should wish for the open-ended extension of embodied existence. And I am also open to the idea (due to Adam Smith) that such urgency may rest on a mistake, even though (Smith adds) such a mistake can be very fruitful.
I also don't mean to suggest we should resign ourselves to given constraints. Worthy lives and social projects tend to involve the overcoming of many rather hard seeming constraints. And this helps me see that I think the reasonable determinate finality of our lives (ca four to six scores), provides a necessary impulse to the various projects and commitments of our lives that make them worth living.
I should think more about my own claim of the previous paragraph(s) some time (see what I did there?). But for now I need to turn to some urgent commitments.
*So, strictly speaking, she is interested in the effects of indefinitely long lives. Let me quote a bit more:
"If humans acquired biological immortality, our expected lifespans would jump to enormous lengths. Almost everyone would still eventually die; statistics dictate that if you fly on planes every few weeks for eternity, eventually one will crash. If not that, there’s nuclear apocalypse or the heat death of the Sun. So the type of immortality I have in mind is not a magical one where death is strictly impossible. But it is the practical removal of death’s certainty. Biological immortals would no longer expect to die within any relevant time frame."
**My criticism of Rawlsian life-plans involves the idea (recall) that they are too constrained. So, perhaps my position is unstable.
+It's possible that the future we are entering, our mental deterioration will be harder to prevent and cure than physical ailments.
++I do think there can be problematic cases, and I would welcome a political culture where these could be discussed without being seen as attacking the institution as such.
I like this post, and immortality becomes real after being discovered by Allen Omton and Serge Dobrow.
Posted by: John Logger | 10/28/2019 at 08:46 PM