#7 – What does it mean to be immortal? Fischer on the nature of immortality.

In this episode, I discuss what Fischer means by 'immortality.' At this point in his book, he has taken himself to have established that death does harm the one who dies, even if the details about when or how it is harmful aren't fully worked out. It is natural then to consider an objection: if all else being equal it is always bad to die, it would then be best to live forever, yet living forever is bad for this immortal, so death must at some point not be so bad. This is why I think Fischer pivots to discussing immortality and why it's not so bad. Before considering whether immortality is worth wanting, Fischer first discusses what immortality means, starting with various myths before focusing on two secular conceptions of life extension: biological longevity prolongation with Aubrey de Grey and non-biological longevity prolongation with Ray Kurzweil. Both only focus on what Fischer calls "medical immortality," which is to be distinguished from "true immortality" in virtue of which sources of harm, if any, one is vulnerable to. I argue that this way of characterizing immortality is problematic and instead favor a reductive analysis in which one is immortal iff one isn't mortal, and one is mortal iff there is some time at which one dies. 

Transcript

Fischer, DIM, ch5

Matthew Jernberg: [00:00:00] Welcome to Mortality Matters, a podcast about conceptual issues in the philosophy of death and the meaning of life. I am your host, Matthew Jernberg.

What does it mean to be immortal? In this episode, I'm covering chapter five of John Martin Fischer's book, death Immortality and Meaning In Life. So far, we've been considering how death can be bad for the one who dies, but presuming for the moment that it is bad, what's the alternative? If it turns out all else being equal, that it's always better to continue living with some decent threshold level of quality of life than wouldn't immortality be desirable.

What is immortality? And is it even worth wanting to begin with in this chapter on the meaning of immortality, Fischer [00:01:00] sets out some more or less realistic scenarios of life extension. Before describing what he means by immortality and the kinds or varieties of immortality that he has in mind, he sets aside the question of whether it would be desirable to be immortal for the next chapter, as one must first have some notion in hand as to what it means to be immortal before assessing whether it would be desirable.

Instead just focuses on the notion of immortality itself and describes different possible scenario. So what does he have in mind? Well, firstly, he means to rule out anything that's not secular. So he gives examples of things like reincarnation or the afterlife. Anything that would be religious in tone is not exactly what he's focused on, at least in this chapter.

So in the first half of the chapter, Fischer focuses on different attempts to radically extend human life and on their feasibility. Yet in the second half he focuses on which version of immortality is worth considering. To [00:02:00] set up the next chapter, which questions whether it would be desirable. So first, let's focus on the first half.

Fischer sets up interest by recounting many different mythological tales or different kinds of stories or works of fiction in which different characters are, IM. Now as works of fiction or as mythology, these tend to not go well for the people who desire immortality. The desire for immortality itself is typically something villains have or something that if a heroic character attempts to seek, this is something they have to learn to cope with.

Or get over. This does not by itself establish that immortality is undesirable or not worth wanting. I think it actually has more to do with teaching us how to cope with our own mortality in real life, which if that were not necessary, we would not need to cope with it. So at the very least, we shouldn't assume right from the outset that immortality is something that only villains or evil people would want, or even that it's something [00:03:00] that's just necessarily impossible depending on what we mean by immortality.

That is, I think this is one of the problematic elements of this chapter with Fischer, where he uses this umbrella. Of immortality to describe a variety of different kinds of scenarios. He doesn't mean by the word immortality just living forever. One way to disambiguate the idea is to just think about radical life extension, or as I like to sometimes describe it as indefinite life extension, indefinite, if only because it doesn't set a definite date in the future.

By which one? It just more or less prolongs one's life, giving more quantity of life, if not also quality of life. So while Fischer describes different mythological tales or different works of fiction, for the most part, those details don't really concern me. I'm much more concerned with the philosophical content.

Likewise, when he references a work on the history of life and death or the prolongation of life by Francis Bacon that was written in the 16 hundreds and [00:04:00] whatever recommendations it would have about how to extend your life, they aren't practical. They're not as scientifically informed as present day, and it's my understanding that recently there's been something of a growing literature on reducing aging or thinking of aging as itself a disease or, or something problematic that should be treated or ameliorated.

So I'm thinking here of works like Lifespan by David Sinclair, or Ageless by Andrew Steele. So while I, myself am not a scientist and I don't have any kind of training in medicine as a observer of this growing industry, it seems actually quite interesting to me. And it's driven by a kind of optimism that there's something good about longevity and prolongation of one's own life.

And so as a philosopher, we can simply just ask ourselves, well, what's so good about that? Well, at the very minimum, It may be good in the same way that money is good, it's something that is just useful for the realization of other types of values. So money is as good as it is [00:05:00] useful insofar as it's purchasing power is concerned in obtaining other things which are not money.

Things like health or wellness or things perhaps like pleasurable experiences or even the circumstances in which one could live a fulfilling. So it's more or less a means to an end, or what philosophers would describe as a merely instrumental good or something of merely instrumental value. Likewise, you might think of quantity of life in a similar way, where it really has no value in and of itself.

It's only as good as it is useful for the realization of other goods. Things which have non-instrumental value, and I gave a few examples, like health, perhaps even reputation or fame. Celebrity might be something of non-instrumental value, maybe, maybe not, but perhaps pleasure or virtue. These are better examples of certain types of values, which are not merely means to an end, but perhaps should be ends in themselves.

Among those, you might wonder, well, which is the most fundamental, or which is the condition that makes all other good things good? And that's [00:06:00] a question for value. , but nevertheless, whatever that is, it's most likely not mere quantity of life, but some consideration as to what quality of life consists in such as pleasure or what Aristotle would describe as u Damon, which is a kind of blessed condition of a good life or a good living, which is interestingly different from virtue.

Nevertheless, whatever makes longevity or the prolongation of one's life something good. It seems to be as good as it is. So Fischer describes how in the year 1900, the average life expectancy was 47 years, and by the end of the 20th century, we're all the way up to 76 years. I think this is an American context.

I don't think this is talking about average life expectancy over the entire planet. And of course, being American, we tend to presume that the rest of the world doesn't exist for some reason. It's a standard form of myopia. We should be suspicious about these figure. I think what is responsible for a statistic like that is the reduction of infant [00:07:00] mortality and not actual prolongation of life.

Although that too has occurred, but not as dramatically. It's not as if there has been a 29 year increase. Among those people who had made it to age 50 in the year 1900 would live on average, 29 years less than the people who have made it to age 50 by the year 2000. So one needs to be careful about some of the statistics specifically about life expectancy, just because the life of expectancy rates on average for a general population were much, much lower, say a hundred or 200 years.

That doesn't mean that on that basis you can reasonably expect to have a much longer life individually today, although you probably can for other reasons. Infant mortality statistics radically decrease life expectancy averages in a given population. So we do have to be careful about those kinds of stats.

Nevertheless, Fischer gives us a useful kind of definition. Where we can consider whether [00:08:00] immortality is impossible or undesirable. So as he alludes to by some of these stories, such as when he references Christopher Marlow's play Dr. Faustus, there are certain people and certain writers or thinkers who regard immortality as not worth wanting and quite unvirtuous, or it's not worth wanting for some reason or another.

Or they think perhaps they're pessimistic about. Feasibility in any way, shape or form. And so they think, well, it doesn't matter because it's impossible. So you know, it's pointless to even discuss this. Fischer Unhelpfully describes these people as immortality curmudgeons, so he uses the term curmudgeon, but I find that to be an overly pejorative term.

I think it's rather to think of them as immortality, pessimists, or to describe them in this way. I think that would be much better. Consider the proposition which optimists deny while pessimists affirm that human nature is such that immortality is impossible or undesirable. So if you think that immortality is either impossible or [00:09:00] undesirable, then I would describe you as a pessimist about immortality.

Whereas the contrary position, which denies this is optimistic, where you say, well, it's both possible and desirable. That would be the contrary position. But you might consider either of those options. So perhaps you might think like I do that any immortality worth its name is impossible, and yet wouldn't it be better if it were real?

My imagination is not limited to the realm of what's possible with our given laws of physics being as they are and so much fiction. Involves what would be violations of the laws of physics? I mean, just look at Harry Potter or Token or, or so many other works of fantasy or even science fiction like in Star Trek as all sorts of violations of the laws of nature.

And yet, wouldn't it be cool if that was true? Isn't that not preferable or desirable in some way? So just because something isn't possible, at least given the laws of nature being as they are, I think we can desire it and we [00:10:00] can prefer that the laws of nature were otherwise. So as to render those scenarios possible.

So for these folks, Fischer describes them as immortality optimists. These are people who do not think human nature is such that immortality would be impossible or undesirable. So the two main figures that advocate for Radical life extension that Fischer considers in this chapter are Aubrey De Gray and Ray K.

Aubrey Gray is perhaps most famous for his advocacy of a kind of biological life extension in which he characterizes aging as a kind of damage, more specifically, the accumulation of metabolic waste. Now, I'm not sure if that's the right definition of what aging consists in. I think the best way to characterize what aging is mostly in terms of its biology, so there may be more accurate or precise ways that a biologist could characterize exactly what aging is.

That would be say, common to not only humans, but to non-human animals and mice or [00:11:00] plants or perhaps bacteria. I have no idea how far the concept of aging really should apply in its scope in which organisms we can conceivably say as aging. There seem to be some creatures, perhaps certain kinds of jellyfish or perhaps even lobsters or certain species.

Tortoises or turtles, which we can also say are ageless as to say they do not age. But of course I think that maybe depends on what we mean by aging or age. But not being a biologist, I'm going to kind of set that aside and consider what the ethical or the evaluative implications of aging are. So I think one advantage of agreeing with Abi de Gray that aging is a kind of damage, that aging is damaged, so to speak.

Is, at least on my view of the harm of death, it's much more explicable to understand this sliding scale between when an organism is aging and when it begins the process of dying and [00:12:00] when it eventually dies. So if you think that the best explanation for how death harms the one who dies involves something sui, Janis, something unique for its kind.

Then trying to understand the similarities between the dying process, death itself and the process of aging would seem somewhat mysterious. The kinds of explanations you would give for when does a biological organism age? . And when does that aging mean to an inflection point and turn into dying, say, or when does the dying process complete with death?

These are biological questions, at least partly, but they have a value of implications because we think that death harms the one who dies. Whether that being is a human being or a non-human animal, or squirrel or vice, or whatever the view. I endorse what I call destructivism. Holds that much like any harm.

Mortal harm consists in loss of wellbeing at a time. To put it another way, what makes death [00:13:00] bad for the one who dies is what makes life good for the one who lives, which I regard as actual considerations. So what makes aging so damaging is the deterioration of quality of life for that organism. So again, whatever makes life worth living for that organism, for the given kind of being that it.

The degradation of that, or another way of putting it, the loss of quality of life or wellbeing is another way I might describe that is what constitutes the damage? Insofar as aging has an accumulation of metabolic waste, that waste is only damaging if it contributes to a loss of quality of life for that organism, for the kind of being that it is.

If it did no such thing, it wouldn't matter and it wouldn't actually be. I mean, what would it be damaging after all if it had no effect on one's quality of life? Now, of course, this effect need not be direct. It can have indirect effects, such as making age related diseases much more likely, [00:14:00] such as the propagation of cancers, which in turn themselves may have a more direct effect on one's quality of life by diminishing it.

So I count indirect effects. What Aubrey De Gray advocates for is for a kind of escape velocity for longevity. So the hope is not that there will be some great breakthrough in biomedicine sometime in our life, which would completely obtain agelessness and practical immortality right away. That's desirable and it'd be great if it occurred, but that's not as realistic as something that's rather more incremental, so we achieve what he describes as longevity, escape velocity.

If scientific progress and biomedicine would enable a further prolongation of life at a pace something greater of one year per year. So if our life expectancy were to increase by more than one year for each year that passes, then we will have achieved escape velocity in the sense that we have reason to believe then that we would not [00:15:00] die, at least from age related disease or anything related to aging.

Now, I actually favor a Gray's hopes here as more practical, because that becomes a little more obvious when we contrast that with Ray Kurzweil. Who has a less biological notion of what immortality might be like if it were something, say, realistic into the future. So curse while only considers our biological life extension as something of a first stage to radical life extension.

But in turn, what would be necessary in order for our lives to be radically extended is something more mechanical. Perhaps we become Cy ibo. Of some sort or another. Perhaps we are even able to mingle our brains in with technology somehow in ways that would allow us to tap the computational power of computers in his way of putting it.

We could have a non-biological form of thinking, and perhaps we could even upload our minds to the cloud or to the internet or whatever, some [00:16:00] non-local form of storage . If that were possible, it seems like it would then be, To live forever in a non-biological form. So perhaps the best way we could hope for with a biological form of radical life extension would actually not really be that radical at most.

Perhaps we could hope for 10,000 years if we had some magical way of just eliminating age and any age related form of disease. A lot of things are gonna go by the wayside, but of course, Even if we could just cure cancer immediately, we may not actually extend life expectancy by many years, right?

Because there's dementia, there's heart attacks, stroke, there's so many other causes of death or shortening of life, which would themselves be problematic. However, if we had this kind of technology or this pill of some kind where we could maintain eternal youth and even turn back the clock, so to speak, then people could still die of accidents getting hit by lightning war.[00:17:00] 

Crime, any form of death that's not related to age, but of course, even perhaps by pandemics or certain types of cancers, they even affect the youth. And presumably they could affect people who are ageless as well. So agelessness would not make one immune to any form of disease. Which in turn would shorten average life expectancy, even if it's for thousands and thousands of years.

So perhaps with a Ray Kurzweil style thing, if that were possible to continue our existence into a non-biological form, then hopefully we could live for tens of thousands or or millions of years, perhaps it would be as long lasting as the technology would. And perhaps given that parts of machines could be replaced without change in functionality, then it could be a lot longer than you might otherwise expect.

The problem with uploading oneself to a machine of some kind or some sort of non-biological form of existence, perhaps a very [00:18:00] complicated machine. Perhaps we have a silicone based brain or of some kind, who knows? Of course, I could look into more of the details, but at this point, I think we're edging into the realm of just straight science fiction.

Nevertheless, even in a science fiction scenario, there are still conceptual limits as to our persistence conditions. As individual entities as to say as persons, it's questionable whether a non-biological form of transference would in fact maintain our persistence as individual people or as the very same person as to say the numerically identical person would it preserve are identities.

So it may instead just create a d. That has all of the same inputs and outputs in terms of perceptions and actions and responses, but may in fact not be phenomenally conscious. There may be nothing. It is like to be this type of being. It may just pretend or [00:19:00] be a, something of a psychological duplicate of you minus your phenomenal or the feeling of what it is like to be.

And if indeed it turns out that it's impossible for any kind of machine to have phenomenal, to be conscious as we are conscious, then uploading would be itself impossible. Cuz the most you would be able to create would be some Android of some kind that just simulates you and is a duplicate of you and behaves as you do, but is not you.

And so when the person dies, then you just die. You're not transferred into anything. And further, You might consider an uploading scenario where you attempt to upload yourself, but something goes wrong in the process and your biological self doesn't die. In that scenario, are there two of you? Or rather, is the Android creature just a duplicate of you that behaves like you but is not you?

So this would not be a way of preserving our lives. It would be a way [00:20:00] of creating things that resemble us, but are not. So Ksw seems to be making some pretty strong assumptions about the nature of personal identity and the nature of consciousness, which are probably false Fischer. Points this out and considers whether embodiment might be essential to our nature as persons, but I don't think embodiment is really the relevant relation here because I just described Androids, for instance.

Well, those can be embodied and they can have a local form of computational ability. It need to be in the cloud, and yet even in that scenario, a transference may be impossible where one preserves oneself by becoming the Android. Now one explanation for this might be this view of personal identity called Animalism by Eric Olson.

I'm not entirely convinced that Animalism is even a theory of personal identity at all, although in the literature on personal identity in the metaphysics, it's certainly treated as such. However, Olson's primary question that he attempts to answer is, [00:21:00] what are we and not how do we persist over time, which is a very different kind of question, and they yield very different kinds of answers.

For instance, I'm not sure that what we are is itself a question of personal identity and instead not a question of categorization. Now Olson puts it in terms of what we are most fundamentally as if there was a fundamental fact about our personal identity, which his theory is attempting to answer. He gives a argument that we are animals based on how many things are sitting in their chair.

I find the argument quite unpersuasive. And in fact, when attempting to formulate different versions of it, I ended up giving multiple incompatible versions of the same arguments. So I'm not sure he is even giving a theory of personal identity to begin with and not just a theory of categorization of what we are fundamentally, if there is a such a fundamental fact about us.

And further the arguments he gives. I perhaps shouldn't go into too much detail on that. I'm not covering his work, but let me [00:22:00] just say that I found them unpersuasive. Nevertheless, there are other theories of personal identity and on none that I'm familiar with. Would it be altogether that plausible that something like uploading to a non-local form of storage in a cloud would be a way of preserving one's personal identity?

I gave some problematic cases. Perhaps there are versions of personal identity, perhaps more psychological versions paired with some kind of reductive view of our psychology, which would make sense of Ks wild's statements about uploading our minds as a means of preserving ourselves. But on any body theory, that's just gonna be false as to say if what we are most fundamentally are bodies, such that what it takes for us to preserve ourselves over time is just the identity conditions for when one body is the.

As another body at two different times. Well, under those kinds of theories or any kind of non psychological theory, it seems like that wouldn't work. [00:23:00] Perhaps if what we most fundamentally are, are souls. If we have souls, and it's not that we have souls, that we are souls that have bodies, right? So that's the soul theory.

If we have a soul and that's what preserves ourselves over time, such that if you're wonder. In any kind of body swap case, whether it's the same person or not, if you could have a way of detecting the soul, where did the soul go? That's where the person would. So under that kind of soul theory, you might think it could be possible to upload yourself, but even then it's unclear what the attachment conditions for the soul are.

Does it require a body that's biological in order to attach itself to a body such that you have the body that's not clear? Depends on the theory as oppose, but I think a embodiment would be necessary in some sort of local form. So on a sole theory of personal identity, it may be possible to live on as an Android.

But I don't think you could live in the cloud. I'm not sure how you could even be an individual. It's like a water drop returning to the ocean. It de individuates you. [00:24:00] Nevertheless, supposing that was even possible. There are some other problematic scenarios such as episodes of Black Mirror or something similarly dystopian, where some evil genius takes over the computer and can just trap you.

Presumably, if we had vast populations, Of digital people existing purely in the cloud, they would have to have some sort of rights so they couldn't be abused or tortured or cast aside. Of course, those rights may need to be balanced with the costs for maintenance and other kinds of expense necessary to preserve them if that were even possible.

Fischer's point here is just because your life would be simulated doesn't mean that it would be desirable, even if it were endless in this simulated. The last version of Radical life extension that Fischer considers is cryogenic preservation, although he doesn't spend very much time on it, this in prior literature has been considered and I think [00:25:00] rejected as a means of preserving one's life.

Cuz I think the freezing process kills you. It destroys yourselves, so you're not able to be hawed. Even by future technology, presuming that was possible, nevertheless, suppose it's not cryogenic, but some other modes of preservation. I'm not sure how perhaps chemical or there was some unknown means of more or less just putting you in stasis for some prolonged period of time.

Well, if that were the case, I'm not sure that's a form of radical life extension insofar as well, when you're in stasis, you're neither alive nor dead. Whatever vital processes are keeping you alive are active phenomenon that are going on like your heartbeat or your aspiration system. Whatever vital processes are going on need to actually be doing things in order to live.

Living is an active condition. It requires more than just nothing. At best, a state of stasis should be considered a third condition between life and death. And further that it's a way of [00:26:00] not extending one's life, but it's a way of putting a gap in one's life, more or less. Where you might spend the first half of your life now, and then you go into stasis, and then the second half of your life would occur much further on.

It's just the total duration of your life didn't really change. There was just a gap. Now it's a gap in which you continued to exist. It's not a gap of inexistence, it's a gap of life. You just really weren't living while you're in a condition of stasis. Okay, so in the second half of the chapter, Fischer describes what he means by immortality, by making a distinction between what he describes as medical immortality versus true immortality.

Now, I don't think this is the right way of putting it, and in fact, Fischer is thinking in terms of how we're vulnerable or invulnerable. So in ordinary life, in real life, we are vulnerable to all sorts of things. Heart attacks, stroke, aging, death from violence, or getting hit by a car or lightning or whatever.

So there's many ways we can [00:27:00] die. Unnatural. Causes of death are those brought about by human agency, and natural causes are those which are not brought about by human. So what Fischer describes as medical immortality, it would be those who would be invulnerable to the natural causes of death, which may be related to age, but also include other kinds of diseases like leukemia or perhaps other types of cancers which occur even in the young, and may be unrelated to age, I'm not sure, but like a heart attack or a stroke or other kinds of catastrophic.

Biological events. And so Fischer's thought is that if you are invulnerable to the natural causes of death, then you have what he describes as medical immortality. And this is to be distinguished from those who just can't die at all because they're invulnerable to death in any way, shape or form. And these people are truly immortal.

So even if they get nuked by nuclear bomb or something, they're gonna somehow [00:28:00] survive. Maybe they'll survive like Superman or maybe. They'll be pulverized into a million pieces that eventually come back together and reform the person in a later time. Who knows exactly how it works. It just depends on the scenario one has in mind.

I don't think this is a good way of describing what we mean by immortality. On the one hand, we might be thinking about radical life extension, and that's the more practical way of thinking about something, perhaps more desirable or worth wanting. It's just the prolongation of our lives, so that's worth wanting as long.

Life is worth living, and if you have more life, we have some good reason to continue it. This isn't to say though, that life is always worth wanting. It's just a dispositive value that may be overridden by other values, but is nevertheless good. So life extension, whether modest or radical is one form that I don't even think we should even use the term immortality to describe that.

I think when we think about immortality, the relevant contrast is with. Mortality. So what does it mean [00:29:00] to be a mortal some way? Say that human beings are essentially mortal, or perhaps all biological species are essentially mortal. What does that mean? Well, you might define mortality in terms of death by saying that something as mortal if and only if there is some time at which it dies, perhaps in the future.

And if this is not the case, then well, one is Im. , but perhaps you might imagine a scenario in which somebody is vulnerable to death, but just as a matter of luck never in fact dies. Now, I don't think this would be in our physical universe. Perhaps if you've seen the show The Good Place, those people were human who died and they somehow survived their death and are now alive in this other place.

It looks just like ordinary. Except with more yogurt and they can continue living indefinitely there. There's no end to the number of days. They, it has a day, night cycle. Time appears to continue in this [00:30:00] other place, and yet they don't age. I'm not entirely sure if they could be killed again or what the conditions of their new neo biological existence would be.

I'm not sure if their flesh is composed of atoms of the periodic table. Perhaps we can assume. , could they hurt each other? Could they cause tissue damage? Maybe what would happen? Who knows? Would they just wake up the next day perfectly healthy again? I have no idea. But the thought is if that's the mortality scenario we have in mind where it's just like ordinary life except the sun won't go Neva, there won't be heat, death of the universe, and it'll just kind of continue forever.

If that was the case, then that's a pretty favorable condition. Right. And if we're trying to think about, well, what version of immortality is worth wanting, if any? Well, clearly if the conditions would be the heat death of the universe, you just floating around individually by yourself in isolation in which your body somehow has the Superman like invincibility.

and yet the rest of the universe doesn't, and so the rest [00:31:00] of the universe decays and withers away to nothing, or at least withers away so that there's no more heat and no more physical interactions that are at least detectable by you. You're just floating around in the void. That really would not be a desirable way to live.

I mean, the hope would be if they'd ever came to that, then you could have a button to kind of kill yourself or something. It might actually be worth doing at that. Or perhaps even sooner, but not that soon. We want to extend our lives at least while the living is good, right? We can maintain some threshold level of quality of life with our relationships with other humans, for instance, or in our time on earth.

However, the people in the good place don't have a time at which they die. That's to say at which they cease to exist. I mean, I don't wanna spoil the ending, so perhaps just by saying that I spoiled the ending, I'm not sure, but this is a scenario in which people could continue to exist indefinitely. . They don't age.

I don't know if they're invincible or not, but suppose just as a matter of accident, nobody [00:32:00] attempts to kill anyone else. In that scenario. You might ask yourself if immortality is worth wanting like that. According to Fischer's definitions, the people in the good place would be truly immortal. They wouldn't just have medical immortality because I mean, the demons talk about doing certain acts of torture, which if they were ordinary humans, they would just die.

It's kind of absurd, some of the extent of torture; there are things that would just kill ordinary humans, but apparently in this world that doesn't happen. They can continue to exist and be tortured some more. So the people of the Good Place are truly immortal. They're not just medically immortal, but Fischer wants to focus on medical immortality, which I don't think of as mortality at all.

I just think of it as agelessness, or it's agelessness plus some immunities to certain diseases and other things that would cause death. It's not quite mere agelessness. Medical immortality requires an invulnerability to any natural cause of death, so I'm not sure if the hate death of the [00:33:00] universe or even the supernova of the sun would count as a natural cause of death. I think it should, but under his definition, perhaps medically immortal, people could fall down cliffs and the sun could go Nova and they would still survive somehow. So I'm not sure exactly what they're invulnerable to, but I don't think invulnerability is the right way of characterizing immortality at all, because invulnerabilities is itself something of a modal notion.

It's saying, that there are certain conditions that one is not vulnerable to. That is to say, in certain counterfactual scenarios, if one were to fall down a cliff or get in a car crash or be shot by a gun, one would not be hurt by any of those things if one is invulnerable to those things. So I don't like to describe things in purely mortal notions without further analysis.

I think a better way of putting it: well, if we're immortal, that has to say we're not mortal. And what is it that makes [00:34:00] us mortal is death. That is to say if there is some time t, perhaps into the future at which one dies. Now, of course, mere prolongation of life. Is not exactly what we want. We want some threshold, decent quality of life to be in place such that if we were to continue to live, but also to continue to age.

If we just have aging without dying, that would be quite horrible. That's the scenario that Fischer describes of the Strulgbrugs from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. So clearly we don't want that, but that's neither here nor there because it's pretty clear how the kinds of immortality scenarios. That are described in many of these works of fiction or mythology are things that are not really worth wanting.

So the question isn't whether there could be certain versions of immortality that are undesirable. Clearly the answer is yes. The question is, could there be any version of immortality, which is desirable, even if in the most [00:35:00] favorable condit. So suppose we had an elixir of eternal youth where it would prevent aging and perhaps would even grant a certain immunity to certain kinds of diseases.

That would be something similar to medical immortality. Well, even with that, that wouldn't guarantee any of the external circumstances. I mean, what would you do after the sun went Nova? Or in the extreme case, once the universe has heat death or something. So in either of those cases, , that's not really all that desirable.

So if we're going to think about the most favorable of circumstances, I think we need to have alternative laws of nature. It has to be something like the good place if we're going to really think about a condition of immortality that is worth wanting, and perhaps that goes too far for some because we have vacated the more practical discussion about how to extend your life with pharmacological substances, or perhaps even more outlandish scenarios of uploading one's mind to the cloud.

Or engaged in non-biological forms of [00:36:00] existence. That is much more plausible, perhaps at this point, than something in the philosophy of religion where we're transcending to some third realm with alternative laws of physics. But I don't think our standards of preference or desirability should be bounded only by our current laws of physics, I suppose.

I mean, shouldn't they be different? If we can imagine a world in which they are different, well, that would be more desirable. So the question is, is there any version of immortality that's worth wanting in any possible scenario where possibility here includes having different laws of nature? I'm not gonna answer that question quite yet because in the next podcast we're gonna cover chapter six in which Fischer takes up this question more explicitly with an argument to the contrary that any version of immortality is not worth wanting.

It doesn't matter how favorable the conditions or whether it's heaven or any kind of scenario, none of 'em are worth wanting, and it's actually good that will die and cease to exist. It's good that there's no [00:37:00] heaven. Because that would be bad for us. So that's what we'll cover in the next chapter.

Although it's, uh, philosopher the name of Bernard Williams, he doesn't explicitly take up the question of heaven. I think it's a pretty obvious implication of his views.

All right. So in this episode, I discussed what Fischer means by immortality insofar as he distinguishes between medical and true immortality, both of which he conceives as kinds of invulnerability to causes of death. Whether those causes are natural causes, which yields medical immortality. Or whether they're just any old cause such that one cannot die no matter what.

And that would be true immortality. I don't think those definitions work. I offered my own as defining our condition of mortality in terms of there being a time at which we do die and in the actual sequence of events I might add and not merely possible sequences of events. [00:38:00] And we are immortal if that's not the.

I think this is a better definition because it means everything is either mortal or not than to say everything that could die or any kind of biological being, to which the concept would have application. So we briefly touched upon different advocates of life extension in the form of Aubrey de Gray and his advocacy of a biological form of life extension and Ray Kurzweil with his efficacy of a non-biological form of life.

I skipped over most of the mythology and fiction from this chapter as, although fun to read, it does not have so much philosophical content in it. And I might add, if anything, I think this chapter should have been written with the second part first and the first part second by first laying out what he means by immortality, giving some definit.

Defending those definitions and then describing it with more detail. The advocacy of life extension, which I don't regard as a kind of immortality at all, [00:39:00] because people who even radically extend their lives into a non-biological form, perhaps say with a Ray Kurzweil scenario, these beings are still mortals.

There is still some time tea perhaps in the far distant future, even if it's millions of. At which they cease to exist. And so whether it's in a biological form or not, either of those beings I would describe as ageless beings, they're still mortal. So to get to immortality while the only kind of immortality worth its name is what Fischer calls true immortality, which is a different subject.

This in turn gives us two questions. The first is whether life is worth extending, and if so, for how long and under what conditions and when. While, the second question is whether a condition in which one never ceases to exist is even worth wanting at all. That is to say whether true immortality is ever worth wanting.