Would immortality be a curse of eternal boredom, were it even possible? If so, then you might think that we're better off as mortals and that death is a blessing of a kind that prevents us from being depleted of whatever makes life worth living, as it will eventually run out. Fischer rejects this line of thinking, arguing instead that not only is death unnecessary for life to be meaningful but that immortality would be no worse or much different from mortality. Specifically, he argues against Williams' pessimistic views about immortality and instead opts for what he describes as a more realistic median between pessimism and optimism about immortality.
In this episode, I focus on the first half of the chapter Fischer takes up Williams' pessimism (chapter 7) and enhance some of the reasons for pessimism that I think Fischer underestimates. In particular, Fischer underestimates Parfit's concern that immortality isn't even coherent as in any possible world in which beings like us live sufficiently prolonged lives, our personal identity over time would fail to persist through significant and prolonged psychological transformation. Even putting this worry aside, Fischer talks past the heart of Williams' point that immortality must be boring by interpreting boredom too subjectively. Boredom isn't merely a psychological side-effect that could be medicated away or alleviated with forgetfulness. Williams' point generalizes to the exhaustibility of whatever makes life good, that eventually it will be depleted. I agree that this point doesn't generalize, however, as there are some projects that are unfinishable, but Fischer overestimates how many these are with his examples. Far fewer projects would remain unfinished to true immortals given indefinite amounts of time.
A more promising criticism of Williams is found in Bradley & McDaniel, who argue that no kind of desire can account for all of the roles Williams requires for his argument for immortality pessimism to work. While Williams' argument itself may require much of a certain kind of desires to give meaning to our lives and propel them into the future, dropping some of Williams' auxiliary assumptions allows a reconstruction of his argument that is less objectionable. Fischer hints at this point in his discussion of repeatable pleasures, that whatever is intrinsically valuable cannot have its value exhausted by repetition over an endless life. Intrinsic value may be true strong however as I think this phenomenon generalizes to what I describe as "ampliative goods," though I agree with Fischer that the intrinsic goods are among them. In this regard, at least, an immortal life would still be worth living, though its richness would be deprived of many goods we mortals enjoy.
Would immortality be a curse of eternal boredom, were it even possible? If so, then you might think that we're better off as mortals and that death is a blessing of a kind that prevents us from being depleted of whatever makes life worth living, as it will eventually run out. Fischer rejects this line of thinking, arguing instead that not only is death unnecessary for life to be meaningful but that immortality would be no worse or much different from mortality. Specifically, he argues against Williams' pessimistic views about immortality and instead opts for what he describes as a more realistic median between pessimism and optimism about immortality.
In this episode, I focus on the first half of the chapter Fischer takes up Williams' pessimism (chapter 7) and enhance some of the reasons for pessimism that I think Fischer underestimates. In particular, Fischer underestimates Parfit's concern that immortality isn't even coherent as in any possible world in which beings like us live sufficiently prolonged lives, our personal identity over time would fail to persist through significant and prolonged psychological transformation. Even putting this worry aside, Fischer talks past the heart of Williams' point that immortality must be boring by interpreting boredom too subjectively. Boredom isn't merely a psychological side-effect that could be medicated away or alleviated with forgetfulness. Williams' point generalizes to the exhaustibility of whatever makes life good, that eventually it will be depleted. I agree that this point doesn't generalize, however, as there are some projects that are unfinishable, but Fischer overestimates how many these are with his examples. Far fewer projects would remain unfinished to true immortals given indefinite amounts of time.
A more promising criticism of Williams is found in Bradley & McDaniel, who argue that no kind of desire can account for all of the roles Williams requires for his argument for immortality pessimism to work. While Williams' argument itself may require much of a certain kind of desires to give meaning to our lives and propel them into the future, dropping some of Williams' auxiliary assumptions allows a reconstruction of his argument that is less objectionable. Fischer hints at this point in his discussion of repeatable pleasures, that whatever is intrinsically valuable cannot have its value exhausted by repetition over an endless life. Intrinsic value may be true strong however as I think this phenomenon generalizes to what I describe as "ampliative goods," though I agree with Fischer that the intrinsic goods are among them. In this regard, at least, an immortal life would still be worth living, though its richness would be deprived of many goods we mortals enjoy.
Welcome to Mortality Matters, a podcast about conceptual issues in the philosophy of death and the meaning of life. I am your host, Matthew Sternberg. Is immortality even coherent, and if so, is it better to be mortal? In this episode, I'm covering chapter seven of John Martin Fisher's book, death Immortality and Meaning in Life. Here I'll focus on the first half of the chapter in which Fisher takes up two different conditions that he inherits from Williams on the desirability of immortality. The first being what he calls the identity, condition and the second being what he calls the attractiveness condition. Roughly. These are the ideas that in order for it to be preferable to be immortal, it's necessary that I be the very same person over time, no matter how far into the future we consider. And the further idea, the attractiveness condition is that. As the years pass by, there should still be a reason to continue to live, that it not be in something about the nature of being an immortal, that at some further period of time you would cease to have reasons to continue to live. So Fisher defends the positive view that immortality is desirable, partly because it is so similar to mortality that there's no essential difference between beings who could live forever, like us as persons. Versus beings who are finite and mortal like us. There would be no relevant difference between an immortal being and immortal one, such that there would be any less reason to prefer continuing to live indefinitely. So to maintain his position, Fisher spends the majority of this chapter, defending an optimistic view of immortality is desirability against various arguments as to why it's not possible or why it's not preferable. Focusing on the identity condition first. You might think that this whole debate is pointless because none of us are ever going to be immortal, and so why even discuss this to begin with? And so you may think that immortality is impossible for beings like us in our circumstance. And so we're at best engaging in a kind of science fiction fantasy when we discuss these things. However, I think the obvious counter to that is that, well, we envision all sorts of impossible things in movies, and nevertheless, there's many people who watch the Harry Potter series, for example, and would love to be just like Harry Potter, or at least if not him, like the chosen one. Be someone else who lives in that world and has the capacities of magic or other kinds of cool interactions with potions or interesting beasts and all sorts of fun things. They all seem very fun. That's part of the attraction of science fiction or even high fantasy. Is that there's something cool about those alternative worlds that is attractive and interesting and would be fun to kind of live in yourself. But that's conceding that given how our laws of nature work and our history, magic is impossible. You may argue that it is possible, but suppose for the sake of the argument that magic of the sort that occurs in Harry Potter really is impossible given the laws of nature for beings like us in our circumstances, right? There can never be a technology into the future. That could violate the laws of nature. And in order for magic to be like that, you would have to violate the laws of nature at least, and still be magical, or else it wouldn't be magic. However, laws of nature cannot be violated, and hence it's impossible. That's not the kind of possibility we're considering here. That's what you might call a nomin logical possibility, cuz it's based on what is possible under the conditions that the laws of nature would be in variant, where the nomos, so to speak, is just a Greek term for law. I think the thought here is that some things are possible if the laws of nature were different. Perhaps magic would be possible if the laws of nature are different. The identity condition when it comes to immortality is so much stronger than that. It's saying something. That's much stronger than, well, the laws of nature would have to be different in order for us to be immortal. There's arguments that challenge the possibility of immortality in a much stronger sense of possibility and in terms of conceptual possibility as to say, and I think it's equivalent to say that it's not even coherent. That when you're imagining what it would be like to be immortal and for time to kind of pass by endlessly, What you're imagining is effectively a finite life. You're imagining different snippets of a finite life, and it's a bit like trying to imagine the entirety of all numbers at once. It's an inconceivable thing. Now, Fisher responds to this objection, the conceivable objection in the prior chapter in which he argues that, of course we can conceive of the positive integers, but the way we do so is not extensionally. We don't have before our minds. All the natural numbers, cuz there's infinitely many of them. Instead what we do is we conceive of it intentionally, or that has to say in virtue of like a procedure you would use to generate them. So we start with number one. Which is a natural number, and then we just say, well, what's the next number? And that would be the number two, and so on. And so for any natural number, we know that the next one is also a natural number. And so that's how we generate the natural numbers in our minds. That's how we can conceive of them at least. I'm not sure if the natural numbers are constructed by a mental process, but at least they can be conceived of algorithmically. And that's what Fisher would say. And he says the situation is parallel when trying to conceive of what it would be like to be immortal. Instead of talking about numbers, we would be talking about years. What's a finite life like? And just add onto that. And that's how we could conceive of what it would be like to be immortal, truly immortal as to say, a scenario where the person never dies. However, you may think that in this kind of scenario, it might be conceivable, at least algorithmically, but there's another reason to think that it's incoherent. Because it wouldn't be the same person over time. So you may think, for instance, that there's some core element to your personality or to your psychology, or perhaps your memories that are what are fundamental and necessary to preserve your identity over time. And if this were the case, then you may think that over a sufficiently long duration, we're talking not just thousands, but millions or billions or trillions of years, whatever period of time you would have immortality would be longer than that. True immortality would be much longer. It's infinite in duration, so for any finite magnitude of duration, it would be longer than that. And so you might think there's something about living forever where it's incompatible with the preservation of our identities over time. What would happen is you'd have phases. Perhaps your psychology has enough integrity to persist through a thousand years, maybe 10,000 years, but there's going to be some finite number at which the continuity of your own psychology would fray to the point where it would no longer be right to say that you're one and the same person. It's more or less different phases inhabiting a continuing body of some kind. Think about like a house for instance, that has renters. So a renter may abide in a house for 10 years, but eventually they move out and some other family moves in and you might think it's a different home at that point and has a different family. And a family could continue through a divorce perhaps, or having the kids move out, but eventually they're leaving the house and it's no longer the same home over time. So you would have different phases. So one in the same body would house different people over the millions of millions of years, but you would have at most a kind of ancestral relationship that would obtain between these people. So unlike the house analogy I just came up with, with different renters and families kind of moving in one in the same house, making for a different home, where the home would be analogous to being a person and different homes being different people, but inhabiting the same house or structure through all these changes over a long period of time. It would be something similar to that, except for an immortal being who would have different people inhabiting the body, so to speak, because of how radically different the personalities and the psychologies. And the memories. I mean, I can barely remember what it was like to be two. If at all. But I'm pretty sure that when I was six years old, I could remember my two-year-old experiences a lot better. I was much closer to that time in my life when I was six than now, when I'm 39. So there are some proximity that we may have that by stretching out the duration of one's life into the trillions of trillions of years, that just phrase our psychological connectedness to the point where there's a kind of discontinuity in our psychologies that would render us different persons. So this is a challenge from Derek Parit. So what Parit reminds us is that what it is that we care about, when we care about ourselves is not just the continuation of the bare particular thing that we are. This is what Fisher calls the thin self. He calls that earlier, but rather our thick selves that has to say we care about our psychology, we care about our memory, we care about our personalities. The things that we would think about when we think about ourselves that are things that are changeable. Or contingent. Contingent on our histories or our personal idiosyncrasies. So Fisher agrees with that, but he also thinks that we care about our thin selves. We do care about the particular thing that we are. Even if we had a different history or a different thick self, so to speak. But he agrees with many of these critics by saying that we do have a kind of distinctive self concern, which is critical in understanding how it is that we do and should care about ourselves in a ways that we don't care about anyone else. So for instance, think about hearing about somebody winning the lottery. Sounds pretty cool right now. Imagine you hear that the winner is you. Much more exciting or now think about, you hear about somebody who's gonna be tortured tomorrow, and then you later find out that the person torturing you is you. So before you find out that it's you who will be the victim of the torture, you might have a kind of reaction to that which is disapproving. Or you think there's something problematic about that. You wish there was more civility in society, but when you find that it's you, there's an extra kind of oomph to that. Now, Fisher doesn't bring this up, but this is a topic which is debated and he's well aware of the debate in ethics as to whether partial concern is a kind of ethical mistake. So you might think that that's because we're selfish. We have these reactions when we learn that we are the one who wins the lottery or we are the one who will be tortured. But that's because we're imperfect and narrow-minded beings that if we were fully virtuous people, we should care about other people being tortured to the exact same extent that we would care about ourselves being tortured. We would have a kind of universal love of humanity or some other kind of more enlightened attitude that would not exhibit this kind of partiality to our own circumstance. And so many of the great ethical theories over time, not just with Christianity, but also with cons, ethical theory, as well as utilitarianism, even regard partiality to be a mistake. But fortunately, This is something that Fisher and the other disputes to this debate tend to agree on. So the main author that Fisher's responding to is Bernard Williams, who is actually quite famous for criticizing Kant as well as utilitarianism for regarding ethics to be impartial. To think that the special concern we have for ourselves, or that we have for those who are near and dear to us, must in the limit be impartial. So I think that we can endorse this notion that there's something special about my obligations, commitments, or reasons that are unique to me, or that I should have a kind of partial concern for not only myself, but also perhaps for those whom my significant other. I have a special concern for her in a way that I wouldn't have for anyone else. That's unique and distinctive to her, so we could endorse the view that even an ideal person would have partial commitments and concerns to his own personal projects. To his own life and its continuance to himself, but also to his family or his children or his spouse, while still revising this identity condition. Because at the beginning of the chapter here, Fisher means to distinguish what it is that we care about, when we care about ourselves, to be inclusive to our thick selves and not just our thin selves. So when we ask the question, what would it be like to be in immortal being who lives forever and that we worry, oh my God, am I going to be the same person over time? Will the being a trillion years from now be me? Fisher means to qualify that term, me to indicate me in this special sense in which I care about myself. I don't think that qualification is necessary at all. All that matters is whether you would be the same person over time, because if you were not the same person over time, you would be like that house I talked about earlier. Eventually you would be moving out. That's equivalent to saying that you would die, you would cease to exist at some period of time, and what would replace you would be some kind of psychological descendant of you, but there would be such significant drift in your personality, in your history and your attitudes, in your experiences as they continue to accumulate over the trillions of years that the person who started out no longer exists. And we have a word for that. It's called death. When you cease to exist, you die, and there may be no definitive time, no particular point in time, or no moment in time in which that occurs. Perhaps you simply fade out like a severe case of dementia where the person fades out, but eventually it will happen given a sufficient period of time. You might think. So this caveat. That what matters is whether I care about myself in the right kind of way, and when I'm thinking about whether I have a kind of prudential reason to continue my life. Should I continue to take this immortality medicine or this fountain of youth, or whatever the magic pill is that's keeping you alive forever. If this was like a periodic re-up that you could opt out on or something, right? Why should I continue to take the medicine, the elixir of eternal youth that will keep me alive, whether I care about myself, especially in this kind of first personal sense, will just come along for the right, in my view. Prudential self concern, even if it were special, even if it should be special, so that you should treat yourself in a way you don't treat others in a way that's ethical. I don't think that caveat adds anything to the identity condition. All that matters is whether you are the same person. The same particular individual. That's it. Because if that's not the case, you would die. Whether there would be reason to care about yourself or care about your future self, that's already settled by what he calls the attractiveness condition. That is to say if Immortals would have reason to continue to live. If there would be no special reasons to living forever that would render it undesirable, then that would be itself a reason to care about your own future, that you could continue to enjoy the benefits of being alive indefinitely and forever. So again, I don't think this caveat is adding anything, and I think the text would've been better without it. It also muddies the waters between the identity condition and the recognizability condition that I spoke about in the last chapter. Part of this is because there must be a sufficient degree of similarity between one's future self and the far distant future, perhaps trillions of years from now, and one's presence self. In order for me to have a kind of first personal Prudential concern for myself, That Prudential first personal concern must be grounded in something. Whatever those properties are about, our personhood that are grounding. Our first personal special concern are things that may resemble one another over a period of time as one continues to persist over trillions of years, right? And if that degree of similarity is part of what it means to be recognizable. As a person or as the same person that's already accounted for by other conditions. I already argued that I think the recognizability condition should not be a necessary condition at all on whether immortality is desirable or not. Whether you recognize your future self as irrelevant as to whether it would be preferable to die, you're not better off dead because you can't recognize your future self. We can't recognize our presence selves in the virtue of our past. We already go through radical changes, even over the duration of a very short mortal existence of perhaps 80 to a hundred years. It doesn't give us reason to be suicidal. And further it doesn't deprive us of a reason to live. So it may not give a positive reason to die, but it also doesn't deprive us of positive reason to live either. So it's just a total non-sequitur, and that's the theme of Fisher's writing here, where he draws similarities between ordinary changes in our lives. And the kind of extraordinary change that immortality would grant. And he argues that immortality would not be that extraordinary of a change. It's basically like mortal life, just more so. And I think it's partly for that reason that I think he underestimates just how radical a change endless life would be in comparison to our finite existence. As finite beings, we become infinite beings in some ways, at least in terms of our longevity. Fisher describes that as a double standard, though he thinks that we shouldn't adopt. One standard for mortals and another for Immortals that would be kind of unfair or undue to explain why one is desirable and the other is not. I agree with that, of course. So at least at this stage of the argument, there doesn't seem to be any reason to think that were we to take a potion that would make us immortal, that we would no longer have reasons to care about our future selves, at least not on its own. However, Fisher doesn't really give a rebuttal to this initial argument I gave from Derek Parit, partly cuz he doesn't consider it in the reading. Just to be fair to Fisher, he doesn't consider some of par fit's objections and reasons and persons about the durations of immortal beings, that there's something about human psychology, which phrase at the limit in that, that we're not the kinds of beings who are psychologically composed so as to allow for that to even be possible. But it's something that Bernard Williams does consider in the McCropolis case. And since Fisher is not only responding to Parit who's in the background, he's predominantly responding to Williams. That is an omission. I think that Fisher really should have considered. What is it about par fit's view of psychology such that in the limit, the connections would fray and there would be discontinuity over time? Because I think it's an interesting discontinuity because it's something gradual. It's like the sun setting into the sunset, except it would take perhaps thousands of years. There may be no point in time at which the individual fades out of the existence, but it may happen. So Fishers committed to the view that no, the sun would always shine, the person would never fade out of existence due to radical psychological change over the duration of trillions of years. But is that plausible? I'm not sure. Fisher seems to be committed to the view that if one has a certain physical or bodily continuity as well as a certain psychological continuity between one's future self and one's past self, then that would be sufficient for personal identity over time. That's to say it would be sufficient for us to be one in the same person and that for our sameness of personhood to be something that's preserved through these changes as long as we have a certain kind of continuity. So here, I think he's drawing directly upon Derek Parit. But instead of just focusing on psychological continuity, which is what Parit focuses on, he includes bodily continuity, which is what Williams focused on. So in some ways, when it comes to personal identity over time, Fisher seems to kind of help himself to both standards. Both the continuity of the mind as well as the continuity of the body. So the best metaphor I'd like to use to describe psychological continuity at the least, is that of a rope. So ropes are composed of fibers. Right. But each fiber of a rope may be relatively short, but when the fibers come together, they compose a rope that is much longer than any of the individual fibers. So imagine a rope like that. That's exactly what our psychological continuity would be like. Right? So you might have a certain memory of something that occurred to you when you were 10, and your 10 year old self may have a certain memory that occurred to you when you were five or when you were two. But you at 39 no longer have that memory that your 10 year old self had. So each of those memories would be a kind of connection that you would have to your past. You can't remember your future after all, but you can have certain expectations, hopes, or desires, or certain personal projects that do connect you to your future self should those materialize. So we have these kinds of psychological associations that link our future and our past with our present. And the links may be overlapping, but there may be no single link that spans the duration of our lives, right? There may be no memory you have, that's from your first moment of existence. However, there's a chain that together forms the hole that would be sufficient for grounding your identity over time. So this is a view, and you may include bodily connections as well, but instead of the links being made out of memories or out of experiences or personality traits or other psychological phenomenon, they would be composed perhaps of cells or certain organs. You may have body parts, these sorts of things, and your cells, like your hair cells may be replaced. I'm not exactly sure, 14 days or whatever the period of time would be, and perhaps your brain cells. Maybe replaced slower than that, or perhaps certain cells in the heart, but there would be a certain duration of each cell that composed your body, and they also can be thought of as like a little chain or a little thread in the rope or what have you. That together forms a kind of continuity. So Fisher seems to endorse the view, though he doesn't explicitly come out and say it, that bodily and psychological continuity are sufficient for the preservation of personal identity over time. So I'm not going to object to that view. I mean, that's a very popular view. Usually people are body theorists or psychological theorists, and they side more with either Williams or Parit. But the issue of personal identity is pretty thorny because there's all sorts of strange counterexample cases of people splitting like ameba or seemingly possible cases that are well described that are very unintuitive. But Fisher's not really bringing anything up that Williams and Parit were not aware of. In that way, he doesn't really respond to par fit's kind of objections. And Williams considers very similar cases too, where you have these immortal beings, where you have successions of different people living in the same body over a sufficient, prolonged period of time, partly because the psychological connections fray, whereas the bodily connections don't. So Fisher is committed to the view that there's no necessary discontinuity with immortal beings. For that reason, I suppose he would have the default of those views by saying, well, until we have a reason to believe that there's some necessary discontinuity, we should presume for the sake of the argument that Immortals would preserve their identities. But I think that section could have been expanded perhaps into a whole chapter with more arguments as to why there must be discontinuities that would be sufficient for killing people. Or having people fade out of existence and such, even though they look like the same people, they're so radically different that they would no longer be the same person. They would no longer be numerically identical with their past self. Okay. Suppose for the argument that fisher's right. And indefinite life extension or true immortality are scenarios where there's nothing that forces the individual to fade out of existence. They can continue to be the same person over time forever, perhaps under very favorable conditions in the good place, or in some other IIC scenario where they're not gonna be floating around in space forever. So you might think that even under the most ideal conditions, whatever heaven is like, or whatever it would be like to be in a good place or in a world with alternative physics, so that we could just have a earth-like continuance forever. So you have the laws of nature be similar, but not so similar. They would allow for the world existing eternally. This is something certain ancient Greek thinkers might have thought about our world, that it existed forever and will exist forever into the future. And suppose that we're real. So I'm gonna save the discussion of heaven or religious conceptions of immortality or the afterlife for the next episode that's in the second half of chapter seven here, and just focus on, Secular conceptions of what an immortal life would be like where there may not be an afterlife at all. Death is not a transition to anything cuz if you were to die, you would cease to exist. But we're thinking about non-religious contexts where perhaps the laws of nature were different and we would live in how the ancient Greeks may have thought the world was like, where you don't have a beginning to the world, you just have a world that exists eternally in that kind of scenario. What would be so bad about just having a life that goes on forever after all? By this point in the book, Fisher has already argued that death does harm the one who dies. Mortal Harm doesn't have an expiration date on it. Fisher didn't give us an explanation for the conditions or circumstances in which death would no longer be harmful. He gave us this combination view where, for the most part, the harm of death consists in missing out on the goods of life. He gave a kind of deprivation is explanation that death deprives us of good possible activities and experiences that we couldn't enjoy due to our death. And because death takes those good things away from us, that's what makes it bad. But he also gave William's explanation that death is harmful because it thwarts our categorical desires. That's how you might think of it, is thwarts certain kinds of preferences, the object of which are certain personal projects that give us reason to live and propel us into the future. And death would thwart those and frustrate those desires, and that's what makes it bad. So notice under either of those explanations, under the kind of Williams esque preference, thwarting explanation of the harm of death, and under the deprivation explanation of the harm of death, there's no time limit. There's no expiration date. So if you had a potion of eternal youth and could live forever, there would never be a time in which it would make sense to stop taking that potion to let yourself age and eventually die. So this is why I think it's helpful to think about whether immortality is desirable. It helps us better understand the conditions for when death is bad or ceases to be bad. Cuz if you think there's something off about living forever, there's something horrific about that. And suppose it wasn't a potion that you could stop taking. Suppose you had no exit, no escape, that you were condemned to live forever. You might think of that as a curse, even if you were condemned by Zeus and the other ancient Greek gods. You don't have to roll rock up the hill forever, but suppose you're just living in a garden and you could hang out with your friends who are also there and you could eat whatever you wanted and you can watch whatever movies you had, or you could create art poetry. Music for as long as you want. Eventually, you might think it's gonna get boring, that no matter how good any of those things are, their goodness isn't gonna last. It's gonna get old. Tiresome. There's something about the goodness of any of those things that's depletable and given enough time would be depleted. If so, you might think, Hey, you know, I've done everything there is to do. There's nothing new under the sun for me. I've lived for trillions of years. I've done everything one could ever do or even hope to do. That's possible. Why keep living? And just to spoil the ending to the good place for a moment, this is exactly what the characters in the good place do. They discover a portal which will annihilate them, make them cease to exist, which is really a suicide machine if you ask me. And they eventually step through that gate and one at a time once. There's no reason to continue living cuz they've done everything they possibly could do as many times as they could ever want to do it with as many iterations. We're not told how many years pass. It could be trillions of years. Who knows? There's something about our psychology as beings that we're finite beings. That even if you extend the duration of years that we could ever live indefinitely and far to the future as long as we want. There's something about what we care about and what we value, which is finite and depletable. Think of it using tokens, metaphor of how the ring extends bilbo's life, and now it only extends his life by a few decades. But even that, he says he feels thin. It feels like butter scraped over too much bread as the size of that bread gets bigger and bigger and goes to infinity. You only got so much butter to butter your bread with. So that's the thought. There's some quality of life that we have that when we increase the quantity of our lives with radical longevity indefinitely into the future, perhaps infinitely far into the future, there would no longer be anything worth living for. That's William's Point. It's not merely that you just get bored, right? This is sometimes misunderstood in the literature where people think that Williams is making this point that immortality would be boring. Subjectively, you would have the subjective feeling of boredom. That may or may not be true, but it's also irrelevant. I mean, you'd imagine there could be something similar to an S S R I where you have like an instead of an antidepressant medication, you'd have an Antib boredom medication and you just take the boredom pills and you won't be bored anymore. Then you can continue on happily living your immortal life. That's not William's Point. Williams isn't merely talking about a subjective feeling of boredom that you would have. He's saying that there would be no reason to continue to live. So I think Fisher gets that point, but sometimes he seems to lapse into the language of talking about boredom though. So it's a little messy. So if those an altogether clear, I'm sorry, I didn't initially describe Williams case cuz Williams wrote the essay on the McCropolis case in response to a play about a woman with a elixir of life, which basically grants her agelessness. It doesn't grant her youth. So apparently she appears to be 42, but it turns out she's 342 cuz she's been taking this elixir of agelessness. Now in the story, this character who goes by the initials, em, although her name changes, she always sticks with those initials, so EM or Ms. McCropolis is alienated and depressed and bored and lonely. However, those conditions are not necessary concomitants of taking an ocion of Elixir of life. I think Fisher Underestimates William's argument, one point that Fisher makes is that immortality itself is not inevitably boring. Rather, it's because Ms. McCropolis is depressed, that she's bored. And because she was treated as a Guinea pig by her father in order to test this elixir experimentally, it's just a feature of her personality, or she has a certain kind of depression, which is the reason for her boredom, and it's not because immortality itself necessarily boring. I think this is a gross underestimation of William's argument. Williams does defend what Fisher calls the necessary boredom thesis that immortality would inevitably be boring, but it's boring in an objective sense, boring in the sense that there's no reason to continue to live, and the thought is premised on a kind of controversial assumption. So Williams is presuming that whatever is good for you is getting what you want, and it's not just getting anything you want. It's being the object of a certain kind of categorical desire. This is what fulfills three roles. So Ben Bradley and Chris McDaniel have a chapter on death and desires in the metaphysics and ethics of death, edited by James Stacey Taylor, which I think responds to Williams in a very powerful and persuasive fashion. So in that chapter, Bradley and McDaniel argue that there's three roles that categorical desires are filling in William's argument in the McCropolis case. There's a kind of psychological role in which these are the kinds of desires that motivate the continuation of one's life by propelling them into the future. There's a kind of motivational role or a psychological role. There's a kind of normative role where these give you reason to live so that you have reason to live just in case. Let's say a personal project of yours or a kind of relationship or what have you, would be the object of a categorical desire, the satisfaction of which would give you reason to live, right? So there's a normative role, and then there's a kind of axi logical role. Where this explains what makes death so bad for you. So the frustration of your categorical desires are what make death harmful for the one who dies under Williams view. So that's to say it frustrates certain desires we have because it would cut short our personal projects or it would no longer be the case that we would be able to satisfy these desires. So they get frustrated and that's what makes death bad for you. So Williams argues in the McCropolis case that there's a single concept, or actually doesn't even argue more or less presumes, that there's a single kind of desire that can satisfy each of these three roles. And what Bradley and McDaniel do is they persuasively argue, in my view, that no single kind of desire can do all three roles. That you can have certain kinds of desires that can motivate you into the future. But they're not necessarily the ones that give you reason to live, or the ones that give you reason to live are not necessarily the ones that would make death harmful or would be the condition for life to be good. I think the better way of trying to reformulate William's argument is in terms of conditional and unconditional desires, and I think there's a way of reformulating it, which is different than what Bradley McDaniel give, which makes William's argument much more powerful. At the end of the day, I think Williams is still mistaken, but I think he's vastly underestimated, at least by Fisher. And so what Fisher will do is he will kind of misconstrue William's argument over and over and over again in this chapter as well as, This chapter is based on a prior essay that he wrote on why immortality is not so bad, which was a direct response to Williams. So notice that if Williams is right, and things like personal projects or even relationships or love are the things that are what make life worth living, but they're also the kinds of things that are depletable and eventually get depleted. So you might say, there's only so many mountains to climb. I mean, if personal projects are what give you reason to live putting aside relationships for the moment, then you can only climb so many mountains or write so many books until you've been there and done that, and then you're left with nothing but yourself. So that's the thought. Perhaps you might have non prudential reasons to live. You might have reasons to live for the sake of fixing the injustice of society or for the sake of other human beings, but at least Prudential, you'd have no reason to continue. But that's already a mistake. I think the question is how, so Fisher gives a couple of responses. The first is a kind of point about memory and forgetfulness. So as an immortal being would continue to live, if they just forgot significant chunks of their past, then they would be able to repeat their prior projects and get as much meaning and significance as to be necessary to propel them into the future. However, I'm not sure that's a desirable mode of existence. The mistake that Fisher, I think Misinterprets Williams over and over and over on is it's not that immortal being couldn't enjoy food or have their thirst quenched or have sex or do other kinds of pleasurable things, or write a book and then forget about it, and then write the same book later and then forget about it again, and continue to kind of do these things. It's rather that those activities would no longer bring value to their lives. They've already been there, they've already done that, and there's no reason to believe that any of those things would enhance their lives, enrich their lives, even if they're unaware of it. The problem is, I think that Williams is being read too subjectively, not just when it comes to boredom as a kind of subjective feeling, but also in terms of his point about the value contributions that actions, experiences, or activities would be making to one's life as a whole. So William's pessimism is that there's a kind of. Depletion to the value contributions that any good thing would bring to one's life as a whole. That when repeated over and over and over diminish, even if one forgets about it, even if one takes a pill or changes one's mind, or no longer remembers engaging in any of those things, it becomes a farce. So, Whether you forget your past accomplishments or projects doesn't render the value of their repetition any greater. If anything, it's more depleted because you've already done that. It's already occurred to you. You've already written that book. Now you're writing the book again for the second or third or fifth or hundredth time because you've lived trillions of years and you've forgotten what it was like to do it before. Your life is not made better off by repetition. So that's William's point, and I think Fisher mis construes that point over and over again. You would be an immortal equivalent of like a Leonard Shelby like character, but instead of forgetting what happened 15 minutes ago, you would be forgetting what happened a thousand years or a million years ago or what have you. That's not the most favorable of conditions. And it was one of the methodological principles that Fisher started off by trying to consider what would be immortality in the most favorable of conditions. And having a memory problem would not be the one of those. And that's a reference to the movie Memento. Great movie. Although it's not about immortal being. So El Microbus herself may be depressed, but she has reason for her depression, so that's not it. Immortals could be forgetful, but again, that's not the most favorable condition, and further forgetfulness does not refresh the value. The fulfilling of a personal project would bring to one's life with repetition. The value would deplete under William's view. So you might think about certain pleasures. This is the essence of Fisher's response. Now we're getting to the meat of Fisher's argument against Williams where he defends immortality and saying it's not so bad because he distinguishes between two different kinds of pleasures. Fisher puts it in terms of pleasure, although I think he has argument is done a disservice by it. It's just the most obvious cases that come to mind. However, Fisher himself denies that he's a hedonist. He doesn't think that the only thing good in itself is pleasure, or that the only reason to continue to live is to accumulate more pleasure or anything like that. It just gives you some reason, perhaps even sufficient reason to live. And to continue living even as an immortal, but it doesn't exhaust. Whatever makes good things good or whatever makes life meaningful. There may be other things that make life good or meaningful than just pleasure. However, this is a recapitulation of the argument he gave in his essay before the book, of course. So think of it in terms of not just pleasure, but just anything good. So you might think there are certain good types of things that are, what do you call, self exhausting. These are the things that can just be done. Once, or not just necessarily once, but things that diminish where they have a kind of their value contribution to your life as a whole, depletes in virtue of its accumulation and virtue of accomplishing these good things whenever they are. So he gives the example of climbing Mount Whitney for the first time. Well, it's the first time, so it can only be done once. You can only have your first time once a virtue of what that means, and that would be self exhausting accomplishment. And there would be a certain pleasure to that, which could not be repeated. Think about like watching a movie might be more relatable if you're not a mountain climber. So there are some good things which are not repeatable, but there are other good things which are repeatable. So for instance, he gets this example from Corless Lamont drinking water. No matter how much water you drink, it's amazing. Or it's good, or you might love it, or at least it doesn't go to neutral. There's always some good thing. It may not be the best at all. Circumstances or times the drinking of water may not be the best experience you ever had, especially when you're super thirsty. The value it brings to your life doesn't diminish with its repetition. No matter how much water you drink, you could drink more and it'd be fine as long as you don't overdose. So water would be a kind of repeatable experience or repeatable good that would be good for you no matter how many times you repeat it. Same with hunger, perhaps even with sex. No matter how much sex you experience, it's good to get more. Now, of course, it wouldn't be good to do only that one thing, and this is the mistake that fisher attributes to Williams, this kind of monotony objection that of course a life of nothing but sex or nothing, but drinking of water. Or food, especially the same type of food or the same type of sex or anything. It would all just be monotonous. But William's argument is not committed to only doing one in the same thing forever. Now, Williams uses language in the McCropolis essay where he speaks as if there must be some single activity that would be endlessly fascinating perhaps thinking of mathematics or certain thoughts. A section of his essay is devoted to responding to this very point, but I think. His argument doesn't require that there must be some singular, endlessly fascinating activity in order for immortality to be worth wanting in order for an immortal being to still have reason to continue to live in virtue of this one singular, endlessly fascinating thing. And so this is why Fisher in multiple publications has emphasized the importance of the distribution of different goods in your life. Yeah, okay. Sex all the time. Every moment gets old and it's not interesting, and it ceases to give you reason to live. I suppose if it gave you a reason to live to begin with. However, when you rotate your pleasures or you rotate your goods in your life such that perhaps you eat and then you watch a movie, then you have sex or do other kinds of things, then that brings more novelty and having a variation in your experience and your activities is what gives you reason to continue living indefinitely into the future. There's a couple of problems with this argument. The first problem is by focusing on the appetites, I'm not even convinced that the satisfaction of an appetite. Objectively improves your life as a whole. It's more or less a precondition for the possibility of having a good life, right? You shouldn't die from thirst, hunger, that kind of thing, and at least with thirst and hunger. I'm not sure about sex, but thirst and hunger. It's more or less the absence of harm. Now, of course, there are certain tastes. You can be a foodie. There may be certain tastes which have certain aesthetic value to them, which enhance the value of your life as a whole. But if you're just eating to satisfy hunger, that's the absence of a harm that's not so much the contribution of a good. And I think that's common to all of our appetites. There's certain higher order goods, certain better things to the human condition than just ensuring that we don't die. And of course Fisher is aware of that, and so he does discuss certain spiritual practices like meditation or prayer, and he thinks, okay, an immortal life of endless prayer is gonna get boring and there would be good reason, and the value of your life is depleted at that point because this is the one and only thing you're doing. The mistake with that is this is the one and only thing you're doing if you perhaps bury it up a little bit. And have a variety of different experiences and activities, then you wouldn't be bored and you would have reason to continue to live or with certain intellectual projects such as physics or social science or philosophy. These are certain projects that we really wouldn't run out of, certainly over 6,000 years, if not forever. So, When it comes to the sciences, there's a debate as to what extent science is finishable. I think if we're talking on the order of trillions of years in a idyllic earth-like place a semi paradise, if you will, and there were a community of people. It's not just you there by yourself. I don't see why certain sciences wouldn't be finishable where there's really no more discoveries to be made. We just. Finish them. It's kind of like how AI can solve checkers, right? So that under any legal configuration of a checkers board, an AI can figure out the best solution to win the game every time. You might think there would be something similar about science, where any possible discovery that could be made within that scientific field. Would be made in a sufficient amount of time by a sufficient number of reasonably intelligent people, and so they'd be able to finish science. I'm not sure that math could be finished like that, or philosophy for that matter. So there may be certain intellectual projects which are unfinishable, and no matter how much progress could be made, there could be more progress. To be made and they're more or less infinite. And nevertheless, those projects would be good and fun and immortal beings could in under idyllic circumstances and as a quasi paradise like scenario, do mathematics and do philosophy forever, and they never run out. And so at least for those two reasons, they would give them at least the project of math and the project of philosophy would give you reason to live. So I do think that's an effective response to Williams, but you have to sharpen up the objection by providing additional support as to why something like math and philosophy are unfinishable. But something like physics or chemistry are finishable. And then one of the social sciences. So I'm not sure what economics would be like or political science would be like in a semi paradise like state where everyone were immortal. Seems to me the abundance, there would be a lack of scarcity so that we would have to reexamine economic theory under this scenario, but potentially it could be done whether it could be finished. I'm not sure. Harvard, there's another possible response to William's argument. Which considers certain kinds of good things. So if you're sympathetic with my view of appetites that the satisfaction of an appetite doesn't really improve your life, it more or less enables your life. If you die from hunger, you die, and you're not alive anymore. So if you're sympathetic with that, which you may not be, you might be more sympathetic with hedonism or some other view, then you might think there are certain good things where their value contribution increases with repetition. So I like to call these ampl of goods. But the important point is there's something that's not depletable about the repeatable goods, so to speak, that their value contribution to our life as a whole doesn't diminish. Now, fisher's examples are somewhat hedonistic in tone. He described a different pleasures, describes the taste of food, or he describes the pleasure of sex and these kinds of things. I think whatever pleasure you're talking about, it's not gonna be sufficient, and Fisher makes this point. When responding to Shelly Kagan's argument, so Shelly Kagan is aware of this problem of variation as well as this problem of tedium. So he writes, quote, essentially, the problem with immortality seems to be one of inevitable boredom. The problem is tedium. You get tired of doing math after a while. After a hundred years, a thousand years, a million years, whatever it is, eventually you are going to say, yes, here's a math problem I haven't solved before. But so what? I've just done so much math, it holds no appeal for me anymore. Or you go through all the great art museums in the world and you say, yes, I've seen dozens of Picassos remnants, van goghs, and more. I've seen thousands, millions and billions of incredible works of art. I've gotten what there is to get out of them. Isn't there anything new? And the problem is that there isn't. There are of course things that you haven't seen before. But they are not new in a way that can still engage you afresh. So Fisher responds by arguing that Kagan's characterization is thinking of these various goods instrumentally, where what you would get out of the work of art would be something of a byproduct of an experience. Which devalues the experience itself. So there's a certain value that the experience of the appreciation of the artwork has, which is repeatable. You can get new things, more interesting things, things that enhance the value of your life through even the repetition of watching that movie, or if it's a good movie or a great movie, or all the greatest artwork of all time, which would continue to enhance your life, even if you're not learning anything new from the experience. Just as long as you don't wear it out, presuming by varying it up, you're not only watching that one movie forever, you watch a variety of movies and then come back to the old ones. And even if you watch them many times, you won't get bored of them. So Fisher makes this distinction between the byproducts of an experience and the experience itself, but it's not critical that it be an experience that is under discussion here. The relevant distinction is between what is instrumentally valuable, does to say valuable as a means to some further end. And what is a final value? That is to say what is valuable as an end in itself. The problem is there are certain good things in life which are worth pursuing for their own sake, but have their value derivatively or extrinsically. That is to say they are not valuable in and of themselves, and yet they are worth pursuing for their own sake. So these would be examples of like health, wealth, fame, you may have reason to pursue your own health at the very least. The other two examples are a little bit more controversial, but at least when it comes to your own health, you need not have some further thought about how being healthy would make you a more virtuous person or allow you to accumulate more experiences of pleasure or satisfy more of your categorical desires or whatever the condition is. Which all good things are good. That condition may not be before your mind as a goal or an end in your pursuit of this value. And so at least for that reason, it may be worth pursuing for its own sake, and yet because its value is derivative upon whatever that condition is, the condition upon which all good things are good. I don't think that these final values are repeatable and their value contributions to your overall life. There's something that can saturate you. You can only be so healthy. You can only have so much money, or you can only be so famous that it saturates you and, and it no longer enhances your life. It no longer improves your quality of life. So my point is that the only good things that are reliably repeatable, infinitely in a immortal life would be what's intrinsically valuable. Which is valuable in and of itself. That is the condition upon which all good things are good, and which can only be rationally pursued as an end and never as a means in ethics. This is sometimes called the sum bonum, or at other times it's called the ultimate end. But I think there is such a thing, although it doesn't matter right now as to what that is, what matters. Is how that would fit into an immortal life. So I think Fisher alludes to this in his response to Kagan when he criticizes Kagan for only focusing on instrumental values, and he repeats something he said. So for instance, could you imagine saying, well, I've loved so many people, many people at this point, I've gotten what there is to get out of love. There's nothing more to get. Isn't there anything new? The reason he focuses on love is because there's something special about her commitment to an individual, particular person, which renders the value one obtains, so to speak, infinitely refreshing, or as I would say, amplitude, it's one of the markers of a good kind of loving relationship that it improves you as a human being and continues to do so without saturation. No matter how good you could be as a human being, you could always be a little better, and that would be true for immortal beings as well. So I think fisher underestimates just how many goods would actually be repeatable. I don't think it would be water or food or even sex, or at least sex deprived of love, loveless sex. I think that would just be like any other kind of pleasure and eventually gets old and you would be varying it up, like varying up your food. It wouldn't really enhance your life very much, if at all, and in the limit of an infinite life, it would just go away. There would be no reason to continue doing it, but that's not true for all good things. And so the question of whether immortality is preferable to mortality becomes a question of values, becomes a question of what is the basic condition for any good life and would that continue to persist? Were life endless, and I think it would. And so a fisher ends this section by imagining a hypothetical where you've managed to extend your life by thousands of years, perhaps 4,000 years, and you have an Alexa of eternal youth and you can opt to continue your life. Or you just don't take the life extending medicine of some kind or the potion or whatever, and you would fade away or perhaps die painlessly. And so a pessimist about immortality would say there would be no reason to continue your life. Anything that made life worth living had long since lapsed and there'd be nothing new that would give you reason to continue. Fisher disagrees with us, and I think he's right. But not for the reasons that he gives. Alright. So in this episode we covered two different kinds of objections to why immortality is less preferable to immortality, and why there's no good reason to want to be immortal. The first being that, well, immortality is impossible. It's not just impossible given the laws of nature we actually have, cuz presumably those could be different like in the movies. But rather it's not even coherent, that there's no reason to desire immortality because the whole concept is itself misguided. No matter what kind of variation there could be in the laws of nature, no matter what kind of possible world there could be, there is no possible world in which there are immortals because it's strictly conceptually impossible. Primary argument in favor of that had to do with personal identity over time. Namely that any counterpart to us human beings would have a psychology such that there would be a necessary or inevitable discontinuity that would cause us to fade out of existence or even just kill us at a particular time. There's something about the butter that is our minds that when spread out over too much bread would cause us to cease to exist. Fisher doesn't really respond very well to that point. He doesn't consider that point, but instead argues that there's no necessary difference between mortals and Immortals that would render immortality impossible. And as long as we had a certain kind of bodily and psychological continuity, then that would suffice to preserve or identity over time, even over tremendously long periods of time. So that was the first part of the chapter and the second part. Fisher argues that immortality is not boring, not necessarily he argues against Williams'. Necessary boredom thesis by arguing that there are certain kinds of projects that are unfinishable, such as the projects of mathematics or philosophy, and perhaps even certain sciences, although his arguments for that are less persuasive and further, even if we have perfect memories. And even if all of our projects were depleted, there would be still certain activities or pursuits or experiences that would be worth having for their own sake. They would be intrinsically valuable. Now, the examples Fisher gives for that are things like satisfying your thirst, hunger, or having sex. And what matters is that we have an appropriate distribution of these various intrinsically valuable activities. But I don't think those activities are intrinsically valuable. But I agree with him that whatever is of intrinsic value and is the condition the summon bonum, and the ultimate end. Is something repeatable. Yes, those activities or those experiences would be worth pursuing and would not have an expiration date on them. And so immortality would still be worth continuing. Even after trillions of years and all the art we've seen, all the science has been finished, all the pleasures have been experienced. There would still be reason to continue to live, and I think it would be to make yourself a better person, cuz I don't think that that has a limit virtue in particular. Is an unbounded good. Think of it asymptotically like, even though it's a finite thing, cuz we're somewhat finite beings, when taken into a limit, it never quite gets to the finish line. You could always improve yourself a little bit better, even if the magnitudes of the improvements are diminishingly smaller. With each instance, the refinements are a little bit smaller each time they're still making positive progress and so there's always reason to continue to live.