Mortality Matters: Meaning & Death
A philosopher teaches research into a microphone on the meaning of life and the philosophy of death. Each episode focuses on one article or book chapter from either of these fields of academic philosophy. Emphasis is placed upon making the material accessible to the public and not just for specialists. If you wonder whether we should fear death or what it even means for life to be meaningful, this podcast may be of some interest to you.
Mortality Matters: Meaning & Death
#8 – Is immortality even worth wanting? Fischer on whether immortals would be recognizable.
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You might think that death is part of our nature or that mortality is essential to our nature as human beings. If so, then immortal beings would be radically different than us, so different in fact that they would not be recognizable as beings like us. So if you were offered a Faustian bargain to trade your humanity for the promise and reality of immortality, it wouldn't be worthwhile.
In this episode, I discuss Fischer's defense that immortality is worthwhile against a battery of objections: that the lives of immortals would be shapeless or without form; that certain human goods like friendship, relationships, personal achievements, and virtue are unavailable to immortals; that endings are crucial for a life story; that in a never-ending story one cannot re-evaluate the past; that an infinite life is inconceivable; and that recognizably human lives must have end stages. While Fischer's defense against these objections succeeds in my view, he goes too far and endorses the view that there are no relevant differences between mortal and immortal lives with respect to which goods they can realize, hesitating only on whether marriage would need amendation between immortals. Fischer further adopts a motte-and-bailey approach when responding to these objections, retreating to the desirability of medical immortality when the objections are too strong against true immortality.
Instead, I argue that we should drop Williams' recognizably condition altogether, which becomes more apparent once we see how it is a sufficient similarity condition in disguise. Being recognizably human in the future is equivalent with being sufficiently similar to how one is now in some relevant respect (such as being mortal, or having certain goods or stages, etc.). However, a similarity condition is unnecessary on our future resembling our past and yields a kind of objectionable conservativism against too much change. And so Williams' recognizability condition should simply be rejected.
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. Even were it possible, is immortality worth wanting? In this episode I'm covering Chapter 6 of John Martin Fisher's book Death, Immortality and meaning in life. Suppose that you could make a Faustian bargain with some powerful supernatural entity to trade your humanity. For immortality, in the most favorable conditions, whatever those may be, presuming for the moment that such a trade is even possible.
And as part of this pact, one could specify the conditions to however favorable one prefers. What is so special about retaining one's humanity when doing so would cheat death in fiction? People who make this trade are typically villainous, as there is no way to both be a good person. And not be corrupted by the Fountain of Youth. But is this really necessary?
Is such fiction not just giving us an easy out to cope with the tragedy of our own mortality? Wouldn't it be better to not have to die? In this chapter and the next, Fisher considers many arguments for why immortality indeed is not desirable, and for this reason one shouldn't make this Faustian bargain even if there were no other downsides such as moral decay or corruption. Fisher argues against these objections that immortality. Would not be so bad and under the assumption that true immortality that is in which one never dies is impossible.
He instead favors indefinite life extension, which he calls medical immortality. All else being equal, life is worth extending without any internal limit. But is this Faustian tradeoff even necessary? What if you could have your cake and eat it too? That is, by retaining one's humanity while also becoming immortal.
Is this even possible? Would Immortals be recognizably human? The philosopher Bernard Williams argues no. Immortals would be fundamentally different than us. Partly because they couldn't be recognizably human.
Fisher disagrees. But even if Williams may be mistaken about just how different immortals would be from ordinary mortal human beings, one can think of Williams insight as a kind of constraint that in order for immortality to be desirable, immortals must be recognizably human. Fisher accepts this as a necessary condition. On the desirability of immortality and proceeds for the remainder of this chapter to argue against there being any radical difference between Immortals and mortals that would violate this. Straight that is in order for immortality to be desirable, one must retain one's humanity and further that immortality isn't worth wanting.
If it requires losing one's humanity so Fisher wouldn't take the Faustian bargain I describe. But were there some other way life would still be worth extending? But whatever does Williams mean by his recognizability condition? What does it even mean to recognize someone or something, as human Fisher doesn't explain? But I think the best way to understand what this means is as a similarity condition that is, in order for immortality to be desirable, there can't be too much dissimilarity between our life as we know it now, and whatever it is like to be immortal, we're immortality to take a form that is too.
Million or too transformative to anything like the human condition that it wouldn't be worth wanting to begin with, at least not for us mere mortals. Now you might think that Williams is begging the question against the immortality optimist here. With his recognizability condition, if only because mortality may be essential to human nature and clearly immortality is incompatible with mortality, so therefore US mortal beings could never be immortal, then and at least be human. However, this argument is 2 problems, the first being. The desirable is not bounded by the.
Possible there's many movies we see, like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, where it would be really cool to be in those scenarios or go to Hogwarts Academy or what have you. But the laws of nature would have to be radically different in order for magic as envisioned by those movies to even be possible. If that's the case, then there's at least some sense of possibility. Where we can consider the laws of nature being different than what they actually are, where we nonetheless wish they were different. I think a similar notion of possibility is at work with immortality.
Now of course, in real life, what Fisher describes as true immortality may be impossible. Nevertheless, as long as it would be better were that to be the case, then I think it makes sense for it to be desirable. And even for us to want what is impossible, the second problem is that there doesn't seem to be anything special about being. And human, at least when it comes to radically extending our lives. So, for instance, were it possible to upload ourselves into a robot or into a non local form of cloud storage, or some other interesting sci-fi scenario?
Well, we would no longer be human in that scenario, but it would radically extend our lives. Presuming that we could survive the transfer, Fisher brings up the movie avatar, which seems to be a coherent story, but is 1 in which the main character transforms into an alien species of some kind. So provided that you can survive the transformation. Both of these scenarios potentially extend the life of the person, but into a non human form and the Navi may not be recognizably human, but at least as portrayed in the movie, it seems to be a desirable way to live, and there's something good about it, perhaps even better than the life you left behind. I'm not sure how good life would be in the cloud in a.
Non local form of existence in some sort of computer simulation. Presuming perhaps it would be better. I'm not really sure, but I think what matters in both of these scenarios is that you retain your personhood, which is what fish. Your sets one problem, though, is Fisher more or less drops this condition hereafter, before examining arguments as to why Immortals would be radically different than mortals, such that it would be unrecognizable and so unrecognizable that it's not worth wanting to be immortal. Nevertheless, none of these arguments establish that Immortals would not be people.
They just instead point to certain benefits there are to being mortal and argue on that basis. That one's mortality is worth keeping or not worth disposing of. Presuming there was some choice in the matter. And immortality would not be worth wanting on that basis. Williams considers five kinds of arguments as to why immortality is not worth wanting, or even intelligible in some cases in virtue of different features of mortal existence that would be absent in immortal life.
The first is based on. How the borders of our lives give shape to the overall structure of our lives, that would be absent with Immortals. The second has to do with certain goods that are exclusive to immortal existence. That would be absent in an immortal life. The third has to do with our life.
Story and certain features of the narrative of our lives that would not be present in an immortal life. The 4th has to do with the duration of an infinite life being infinite, and the fifth has to do with the stages of our lives and how an immortal life would lack an ending. So the first objection has to do with borders. Now you may think that a thing. Is what it is in part because of its borders.
Table part of what it is to be a table is for that table to have certain boundaries, and if we were say to imagine the boundaries of the table to radically expand, perhaps by enlarging that table, we might get a bigger table with each expansion. But now imagine taking those expansions to the limit. And for that size of the table to go all the way to Infinity. In that case what you have is no longer a tab. If anything, it would be something like a plane in mathematics.
It would be a surface of some kind, but it would no longer be a table. Tables are finite objects with boundaries. Likewise, you could say the same thing about true immortality, that any finite extension of 1's life would nevertheless have a being who could recognizably be. A person who was human like us, however, if taken to the limit, the shape of whatever life that being would have an immortal life would no longer be the kind of thing that we are. They would no longer be recognizably human.
The form that that life would have. Would be a different kind of thing. So just as a table taken to the limit would cease to be a table, a human taken to the limit would cease to be a human. It would be a different kind of thing and sufficiently different that it would not be desirable for beings like us. We would lose our humanity were we to make the trade of the Faustian bargain.
This is sometimes described as the shapelessness objection, and Fisher cites philosopher Todd. A quote for humans immortal life would be shapeless, it would be Without Borders or contours. Its color would fade. An immortal life would be impossible to make my life or your life, because it would drag on endlessly. It would sooner or later just be a string of events lacking all form and quote.
So Fisher here plays a bit of a Mott-and-Bailey throughout this whole chapter. When responding to these different objections by at first bringing out the desirability of true immortality, and then when the objections are too strong for that, he walks it back a little bit, retreats to. As Mott and instead describes well, what about medical immortality, which if you ask me is really not immortality worth its name? Because what he means by that is simply a fountain of youth scenario where we do not age or die of any kind of natural causes. But what we're imagining in that scenario is just radical life extension.
So it's not so much living forever, because given a sufficiently long period of time, even creatures who do not age would eventually die from other causes by the numbers alone, they may get hit by lightning or kill one another, or die from some other source of harm other than age-related. But I think that's not really immortality at all. I mean clearly. Those beings are mortal beings who just live longer. So when we are debating whether immortality itself would be desirable, I think we should of course acknowledge Fisher's distinction between radical life extension versus immortality in itself.
But first. Establish whether immortality is even worth wanting to begin with, and then provided that that's impossible, what about any kind of life extension? And some of these objections apply not only to impossible scenario of living forever, but even to a possible scenario of just radically extending our lives. Perhaps if aging were possible to cure, then in the future, once there are anti aging treatments which would be sufficiently robust so as to permit. Long life.
Some of these arguments would apply even against that, and saying that those anti-aging treatments would not be worth having. So in a scenario of what Fisher describes as medical mortality, but what I would describe as indefinite life extension. That life has a shape. It's not really any different than just our ordinary lives, just more so. So this shapelessness objection really should be understood as being against true immortality, where one lives forever and never dies.
So earlier I made this analogy with a table. Fisher thinks that our lives are actually more analogous to. An electrocardiogram, something that's two-dimensional, because when we're talking about radical life extension, we're not expanding all borders of our lives. It doesn't change when we. Born and make that earlier right?
It only extends the time of our death indefinitely far into the future, or perhaps infinitely far into the future, so as to eliminate it in the case of true immortality. And that has a definite kind of shape. It's not a finite shape, but to avoid begging the question against the optimist. Something with infinite magnitude. It still has a shape.
Fisher also likens it to the natural numbers. These are the numbers like 1234 and so on. And they have a definite kind of form. You might call it, and they extend infinitely forward into the future. So the strength of this objection has to do with what kind of analogy would be best suited.
To think about the shape or the form. Of human life and of course, if by human we simply substitute person into that, I doubt that may would reject that Immortals would be persons. And so I think there's something about the notion of human nature where we think to be human is to be mortal, and that mortality is essential to our nature as humans. That may or may not be true. But it does beg the question against the optimist to build in the concept of mortality into our notion of what it is to be human.
And then on that basis argue that immortality is so radically unlike what it is to be human, that it's not even worth. So if instead we think well, our Immortals persons and as persons do they live lives which have a definite form or shape. And the answer is clearly yes, they do. So there's really no objection to this. I think Shapelessness ceases to be objectionable once one simply expands the examples.
One may use by analogy thinking of natural numbers or electrocardiograms. Instead of thinking of tables that cease to be tables when expanded to Infinity. So on this objection, I think Fisher wins the next series of objections has to do with. Certain goods that are unique to immortal life that would be absent were we to be immortal. So mortality brings with it a kind of finitude that makes life scarce.
And with scarcity comes value. In fact, the more scarce one's life is, in some ways the value of 1's life increases. If only because of this scarcity, or so the objection would go. However, there's no scarcity of quantity of life when it comes to an immortal existence. And so an immortal life would lose that value.
It may still retain some positive value, but not nearly as much, so as to be as preferable as a mortal life. Perhaps its value is vanishingly small in the limit, so it doesn't add up to as much. Fisher really doesn't respond to this objection, which I've expanded from the text. Nevertheless, I think it is premised on the mistake of thinking that mere longevity or quantity of life has a kind of non instrumental value in itself, which I don't think. That does.
I think it's smuggling in a notion of quality of life into the notion of quantity of life by suggesting that mere longevity has some non 0 value, some positive value that would make life worth living. Don't think this is true, I think instead. We have certain quality of life considerations, such as being good people, being virtuous, having knowledge or experiencing pleasure, or having our desires satisfied. There's many. Mandates of what makes life worth living?
None of them are mere quantity of life considerations. Mere existence alone seems to be neutral, and whatever value mere existence has, it does have some value, but its value is only as good as it is useful. Much like money insofar as living longer is useful for the realization. Of other goods then it's good itself, but merely as a tool or as an instrument for the sake of those other goods, and as such has no real value in and of itself. Now, there's still a concern about what you might describe as the utility.
Function between immortal life and immortal lives, by comparison, presuming that goodness is even quantifiable, which I think is itself objectionable or at least somewhat suspect, we nevertheless could think of different heuristics by which we could compare the lifetime value. If there is such a thing of mortal lives. With the lifetime value of immortal lives now, it seems as long as we're comparing apples to apples, an immortal life would always be. So I think there's something going haywire with these comparisons because all one need do is take any given mortal life and then continue it forever. So as long as the tail is never sufficiently negative, if it remains overall net positive, no matter how positive that is, the lifetime well-being or the lifetime value of the immortal existence would be strictly better than the lifetime value of mortal existence.
So. As long as we're engaging in a fair apples to apples comparison for every mortal life, there could be a counterpart, an immortal life, which would be at least as valuable as the mortal life and then some. And of course, if the kinds of immortality we're envisioning is not. Like being tortured in hell for eternity, but rather a favorable condition than for any mortal life, there exists some possible immortal life which is strictly better than it, and as such, at least those lives would be desirable and in fact preferable to its mortal counterpart. So I don't think this argument works.
At all. I think it only works either by not comparing apples to apples mortal to immortal lives, so there's something unsuitable about the basis of the comparison, or alternatively. By only imagining an immortal counterpart where the extension of 1's mortal into immortal life would go sufficiently negative to make the immortal life less preferable. But that's unnecessary. It's not as if the only possible way to be immortal were to be in hell and being tortured for eternity.
Presuming any of this is possible to begin with. And I think in the widest, most unrestricted sense of possibility, I think that's right. All of these are possible, or at least some things are possible. Whether other things may. Not be, but we can imagine something like the show the good place, where one continues in some alternative dimension in a form that looks very quite similar to our ordinary human like.
Existence, except without decay or without other features, that the laws of nature constrain us. By one need not imagine hell to be immortal. So I don't think that argument really works at all. The argument based on scarcity of comparisons. However, there may be other certain goods like loving relationships or friendships, certain personal projects, or even certain moral virtues like courage, which require us to be mortal.
It requires that there be some vulnerability to death that we have in order for us to enjoy or benefit from. These sources of well-being in our lives, however, one must consider the counterpart to this. So supposing we're imagining the most favorable immortality scenario, we could imagine, why can't immortals have friendships or be in love? Or pursue certain projects like playing a piano or writing a book. Why can't immortal beings be courageous?
Fisher concedes that immortal beings couldn't be courageous in their confrontations with the possibility of death, because if they were truly immortal, then for them death would not be possible. But there are many other ways to be courageous. And just death. And Fisher makes this point quite convincing. Only.
Whereas these immortality pessimists at best, as represented in Fisher's book, only have metaphors like death being a kind of ubiquitous background noise that is ever present, and we are somewhat aware of which makes these other goods possible to enjoy. Again, I agree with Fisher on this. I don't see even if it's true. Even if we grant. The pessimist premise that it's in the recognition of the scarcity of life and its finitude.
And how death is a kind of background wave beneath the enjoyment of all of these other goods. That that's what heightens our enjoyment of them. That very well may just be a coping mechanism with our own mortality that once unconstrained by an immortal life, we could enjoy all of these things far more. If anything that we can derive a certain kind of coping value to how we deal with our love affairs or friendships, or how we experience a certain pleasure. In the knowledge that it's finite has no implication whatsoever for the kind of enjoyments or the kind of relationships or the kind of projects immortal beings could have in an unconstrained life.
So the way Fisher puts this is, well, how does just adding more time remove any of these enjoyments? You may not be able to enjoy them in quite the same way. They're not going to be as scarce as they otherwise would be in a mortal life, but so far, there's no reason to think that an unconstrained immortal life could not have all of the same features that mortal lives have. So this opens an interesting question to me because it seems as if Fisher does not think there's any unique benefits to being mortal, right? That mortality is a circumstance of our condition, which is bad for us because death is bad for us and it would be better if we were to be immortal.
And This is why immortality is not only not bad, it's actually good at least instrumentally. So the question I might have for someone like Fisher. Is are there any goods that can only be enjoyed by mortals? Sometimes they're called mortality benefits. It still remains an open question.
Even if there were certain benefits to being mortal, there would still be the open question as to whether those benefits would outweigh the harm of death. Because when we're doing these comparisons. You can't just only look at one side of the Ledger here in order to have a fair comparison. If you were presented with a Faustian bargain and you think there are certain benefits that can only be enjoyed in a mortal life, are those worth dying for? That's the question that these authors seem to avoid.
They avoid the comparisons with the harm of death by which we can assess whether, on balance, it would be worth. Dying for in order to enjoy these benefits, and given that it seems quite implausible that if there were such beings. Or they just couldn't have friendships, or they couldn't be in love. I don't see any reason to believe that. I don't see any reason to believe that an immortal couldn't write a novel or a poem, or couldn't engage in just about any project that immortal could engage in.
So in order to make this argument, the pessimist would have to argue that there are certain benefits that are exclusive to a mortal existence, and on that basis further argue they have to 1st argue that point. And the second point, they have to argue is that the value of those mortality benefits outweighs the harm of death. Presuming that it is a harm. So that may be one way to go. They could just deny that death is harmful.
So a Fisher is right then. There are no exclusively mortal goods that could not also be enjoyed in a truly immortal life. Now the structure of Fisher's argument doesn't quite work so well because he continues to play the Mountain Bailey game between the distinction between true immortality and medical immortality by responding to many of these objections by suggesting that. By adding more time, one could still enjoy these benefits, but the best that gives you is indefinite life extension. It does not give you true immortal.
So the question is, are any of these goods excluded from a truly immortal life? And I don't see any reason to believe that they are. And the last objection in the section has to do with meaning in life. So if being fraught with certain challenges like death, anxiety, or the acknowledgement of 1's own finitude is necessary. For life to be meaningful and an immortal life would lack these challenges or this death anxiety, then you might think that an immortal life would not be meaningful.
However, the problem with this argument is it's based on almost this Becker like notion. And that death anxiety is at the root of all of the challenges of life that make life meaningful, that there's some struggle to a mortal existence or a mortal life that is rooted in fear of death, or the finitude of life and the reality of death itself. Fisher rejects that premise, instead thinking that there's no radical difference here between Immortals and mortals. So as to validate this argument. Instead it an immortal life can be just as meaningful.
Perhaps the sources of meaning would be slightly different. For instance, an immortal would not be able to have a more meaningful life in virtue of his finitude, or in virtue of his mortality. But there's other sources of meaning than just that. In fact, loving relationships, friendship. Personal projects and moral virtue could all be sources of meaning that would not require death.
So the third set of objections has to do with the notion of a life narrative or a life story. So think for instance, if an omniscient person were to write a biography of your life, that would be a kind of life story that would be complete that story. That have a certain narrative structure. It would have a beginning, a middle and an end. And in that regard would be different than just a mere chronicle.
As you say, it is a mere accounting or recounting of the events that. Curse and the difference between a mere accounting for events and something with a narrative is that narratives have a kind of structure. They have a kind of engagement with our emotions. They have a kind of meaning to them, which is not reducible to the individual moments that make up our lives, but they have a kind of non reductive meaning where the. Pull of the story means something more than just the individual parts that compose it, and furthermore, narratives have arcs in which prior events acquire new meanings in virtue of future things that occur so far.
Instance, say your hard work is vindicated by a subsequent success, like admission to Graduate School. Then those past events would have a bit of a different meaning than if all the medical schools rejected you, and then your hard work would not be vindicated as it would result in failure. And you might look back in hindsight and realize that you wasted your time. Now, in this section, Fisher. Is more or less responding and adopting some of the views of David Velleman from his very influential essay on narrative explanation.
However, in Fisher's rendition, I'm not sure he quite gets Velleman right because I don't think that the meaning of past events actually changes. If we were to think. About the reevaluation of the past and our ability to do that that more or less isn't about the past. It's about us. We acquire a new outlook on our past when we get more information.
That puts it into context, right? The value of properties of past don't change whether our outlook about the past. Changes and it changes in the press. So there's no time travel involved. The past is fixed.
The past cannot be changed. It's not as if the value of qualities of what a certain past event, like studying hard for a biology test or a biochemistry test, or something that doesn't change from being a waste of time to being a good use of time. Once one's admission. Is granted to a certain medical school in the future. Rather, I think the better way of thinking about that is that evaluative profile of those past events of hard work extends into the future.
So it's not as if the past changes, it's rather that it's a process that has yet to be. Completed and it's completed upon one's admission to Graduate School. In the present or one's failure. So even if the individual sessions of study are discrete events which occurred in the past, what they mean and what I call their evaluative profile is something that extends. Overtime up into the present, much like a marathon, it's like you're running a very long marathon when you're studying as a pre Med to try to get into medical school, and that process only completes upon the admission or rejection from medical schools and even with rejection, there's always next year that one could reapply.
But at some point the process terminates. In success or failure and its meaning is determined in the present, just like the meaning of everything is determined in the present, I think that's the better way of thinking. About it. Not sure if that's exactly how Velleman thinks about it, but I think that's a better way of thinking about it then. Thinking about time travel, however, as stories narratives have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but an immortal life would not have an end, there's no ending to an immortal life, at least not a truly immortal life.
And do you think? There could be something missing out on. That so this would be one of those mortality benefits, that is to say, in a normal mortal life. There's a beginning, a middle and an end, and the end gives you, or perhaps not really gives you, but it gives others a kind of understanding in which the ending puts a context on everything that happened before to give you a better understanding of the whole of someone's life that you wouldn't have had before they died, and you might get this impression from biographies. So think about how Julius Caesar died.
Where he was assassinated by the senators that he was ruling over as dictator for life. So the death of Julius Caesar gave a certain context on the totality of his life that allows us third parties to better understand the man as a whole instead of just as a part. If instead, Julius Caesar were immortal and he would be invulnerable to death in some way or another, then we wouldn't be able to understand the other parts of his life as well, because he has no ending. And so this is one of those mortality benefits, certain benefits there is to being mortal, which would be absent from an immortal life. And instead of just leaving it there, we have to ask ourselves, OK, but does that worth dying for?
It could very well be true. And I think Fisher concedes this point as well. That immortal lives would lack. This interesting feature they have no end, and if you were to write a story about an immortal, it would be a never ending story and in virtue of being never ending, it would lack a certain kind of narrative cohesion that mortal lives. Half, but So what?
Fisher argues that an immortal life can be just as it gripping or as engaging emotionally. And in fact, it still features this interesting real valued of property where by bringing new context to the past it changes the meaning of past events. So that phenomenon would likewise apply to an immortal life. You don't need to have an ending to your life in order for that phenomenon to occur. So what value does an ending have?
Does that value outweigh death itself? I don't think it does. And Fisher doesn't either. However, one point I would note about this is that Bernard Williams argues that immortality would be boring. This is the focus of the next chapter of Fisher's book.
But if Williams is right and immortal lives would be boring, then likewise a story about. An immortal life, as long as it's accurately reflecting the entirety of that life, would be similarly boring and tedious. And so it would not be emotionally engaging in a way that mortal lives would be, and that velamen points out about the value of certain life narratives. However, there's two problems with this objection. The first is that there can be interesting stories about characters who are themselves bored.
Think about the character Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. He's an interesting character, but he seems to be bored much of the time, and similarly, Williams cites a play. By Janicek in his essay on the Makropulos case, in which there is an immortal character who herself is quite bored with on we. And yet the play is interesting enough to watch. So the fact that an immortal would himself or herself be bored doesn't imply that the life story would be boring.
The second problem is. Who count. And this is also a problem I think for VELAMEN as well. So when evaluating one's life story from who's perspective are we doing the evaluation? And this comes up with the play.
So if we're adopting the perspective of the immortal being when evaluating one's life as a whole, one's immortal life as a whole, then yes, it is. Quite boring, but when adopting the perspective of the audience, the story of an immortal having anxiety about whether to continue her immortality is quite interesting and not so boy. So this isn't so much an objection to this argument, insofar as it is a question of clarification as to identify from whose perspective are we making these evaluations about one's life as a whole, whose emotions count when we're saying that a certain life story engages the emotions? It's not altogether clear who we're talking about. It's more or less described in the abstract.
About whether a certain story is emotionally gripping, but of course, when authors, especially fictional author. Write stories. They always have a demographic and some public in mind as their readership, and in fact different genres of writing, are sometimes individuated by which demographics they are appealing to, whether it's young adult or middle-aged women, or likewise. So it's not altogether clear whose perspective predominates, but it seems to matter. In order to assess whether a life story is sufficiently emotionally engaging as to be not too dissimilar from our ordinary mortal lives so as to render immortality desirable, Fisher will talk about this more when responding to Williams objection that an immortal life would be.
As I see this example is a special case of that that an immortal life which is not sufficiently emotionally engaging would not be desirable on that basis. So however, Fisher responds to the tedium, objection would be likewise the best way to respond to this objection that immortal life would not be emotionally engaging. So the 4th objection has to do with. Conceiving of an infinite life, so Fisher quotes philosopher Michael Burley, there is nothing that could count as an infinite series that has reached its completion for an infinite series is precisely a series that never reaches a point of completion. It just goes on and on forever.
So if one agrees that a necessary condition of being able to assess the desirability of a life. Is that the life can be conceivable as a whole. Then it looks as though such an assessment cannot be made in the case of a putative immortal life End Quote. So there are at least 2 problems with this argument. The first problem that Fisher does not.
Notify, but I would object is that it does not seem to be giving us a reason to believe that immortality is itself undesirable, or that a mortal life is preferable to an immortal life. Instead, it's giving us a reason to think that we cannot assess this claim, a reason to perhaps. The agnostic about the question, but agnosticism in this regard simply does not answer the question as to whether mortality is preferable to immortality or not. Nevertheless, Fisher seems to extrapolate from this quote the conclusion that immortality is not desired. And likewise, mortality is more preferable, but it is a kind of argument for agnosticism, I think.
And so in that regard, I think Fisher, Miss Reeds, burly. Nevertheless, Fisher rightly identifies that this objection is falsely premised on the notion that one must conceive of something as a whole to be able to assess. There are properties. It has, but we don't employ the same standard when thinking about natural numbers. How do we conceive of the whole of the natural numbers?
These are the numbers like 1234 and so on. Of course I have to say and so on, because there's infinitely many of them. I would not be able to finish the count. Nevertheless, Fisher is right that we think of these numbers recursively. We say, OK, well, one is a natural number and for any natural number +1 is itself a natural number.
And so that's how we think of all the natural numbers and that's why I'm able to generate the number two or the number 3 and so on, because two is just the next number after one, it's just one plus one and then so on for all the others. And likewise, Fisher argues. That we can conceive of an immortal life and thinking in terms of the days, say where an immortal life is just like a mortal life, but more so for any day of a life. There's the next day, day plus one, and I think that analogy between the continuation of an immortal existence into Infinity and the continuation of the natural numbers into it. Unity would be analogous, so unless there's some special reason to think that we must conceive of something as a whole, say extensionally, by thinking about the entirety of the extension of the set of natural numbers, in order to assess whether an immortal life is desirable or preferable to immortal life, then I think of thinking of it.
Recursively is much better, and that's how we do. I mean, I put it using the jargon of recursion, but when we think about what it would be like to be an immortal, we basically just think about what it's like to be mortal and extend it and just say and it's like this and so on and so on, just like I say with. The numbers, so I don't think that fishers analogy is inappropriate here. I actually think it works quite well. So the fifth and last kind of objection has to do with stages and says that well in ordinary mortal life we have different stages of life.
You have your childhood, you have your adulthood, and then you have the elderly years in which we deteriorate. And eventually die. However, an immortal life would lack the stages that characterize ordinary human life, and thus an immortal life would not be recognizably human, says Fisher as he's extrapolating this objection from philosopher Samuel. Scheffler, I think it is a bit uncharitable to read Scheffler in this fashion, if only because the context that Fisher was talking about has to do with how can accommodate ourselves to our own mortality and as a simple matter of practical rationality, we do have to fit our goals and whatever goods we are able to realize in our life. Into the stages of our life.
So, for instance, at 39 years of age, it is a bit late for me to aspire to go into the Olympics, say with swimming or something. Now, that may have been an unrealistic goal, even when I was young, if only because of my talents or capabilities. But that was. A little bit less certain when I was. At this point I could be much more confident that just in virtue of my age, this is no longer a realistic goal, and I think we engage in all sorts of adjustments to our goals and in our projects so as to fit them into a moral life.
And there's something irrational about attempting to pursue long term projects beyond the amount of time we are reasonably expected to have. However, the problem with this style of objection is it completely misses the point about immortality. So just because we have to cope with the finitude of our own existence as mortals, this tells us nothing about what it would be like in an unconstrained scenario where we're no longer mortal, but immortal. Is there something especially important about having the end stage of 1's life again, whatever reasons applied to the notion of a narrative ending likewise apply to the notion of the end stage of life. Yes, Immortals don't have an end stage of life because their lives are endless.
So what? Why is that a bad thing? And in fact, why is that so bad that the absence of an ending is worse than death? Why is it better to be? Mortal and die than to be immortal without dying.
This comparative question is just not present in any of these authors. I looked through some of the primary sources. I wasn't able to find these kinds of comparisons with Velleman or in Scheffler either. Perhaps they do have an answer to this question, I just don't know what that is. But insofar as we extrapolate what they say to try to form arguments as to why mortality is preferable to immortality, the structure of all of these arguments seems to be that they identify something good about being mortal and then leave it at that, as if this good thing is worth dying.
More and of course, it never is, so as soon as we start thinking about the comparisons. But is it worth dying for? We just ask that question for every single one of these goods. Is that so good that it's worth dying for? Is that so good that it's worth dying for?
None of these compare and so immortality just wins by default, especially with some of the more crucial. Goods like a loving relationship. Or a moral virtue. It might be less clear that if we really had to give up these elements of our humanity in order to be immortal, of course, maybe it's better to die and have a true love affair with moral virtue and excellence and other things than it would be to have none of those things and just continue on. There would be nothing worth living for or something but that trade off is not unnecessary.
Requirement it's not as if Immortals could never be in love, or Immortals couldn't be virtuous. There's no good reason to think they couldn't. And so is it worth dying for it if there's no difference, then the answer is clearly no. And regarding the stages argument, how we have to fit our projects into the stages of our life. Now, of course, as mortal beings, we do have to cope.
We do have to do this as a matter of practical rationality. However, were we to become immortal, that would no longer be required. So Fisher likens it to the seasons of the year, fall, Winter, spring, summer. So in the course of our ordinary lives, we have our childhood. We have our young adulthood, we have our middle-aged, we have our elderly years and.
Go on. These are like the seasons of the year. We might call it spring, summer, fall, winter, right. That might be the procession of the seasons. That would be roughly analogous to the stages of our lives, where it ends with winter.
However, living an immortal life might be something like Southern California, where you just have one long season. Which is the summer, and it can seem strange. You might have to get used to it, but it seems better. There's a reason why so many people move to. Los Angeles for.
The weather, and that's a conceivable and coherent scenario. And there doesn't seem to be any good reason to think that it's worse, and so it's preferable and desirable, which responds to the argument. Now, Scheffler may respond to Fischer’s objection by saying that the notion of a season loses coherence entirely in Southern California, right? So if all you have is one season, which is just the summer. All the time.
This is something similar to having a table that's expanded to. It's no longer a table you don't have summer in order for there to be a summer, it's necessary that there be a winter or that there be a season that's not summer. But why does seasonality matter? As long as one can retain sufficient similarity so as to ground the desirability of continued existence? Then seasons are worth giving up.
If what you are left with is something that's better, what's so great about suffering the coldness of winter? Or other sorts of things you know, there doesn't seem to be any reason to prefer immortal life to an immortal life. In this scenario, provided that there was options, so if anything in this chapter, I think Fisher has underestimated some of the benefits to being mortal, arguing that immortal lives are very much in parallel with mortal lives. I'm not sure that's entirely true, however, I think his conclusion. That immortality is preferable to mortality still applies, because, however different immortal life is, it's never worth dying for by comparison to an immortal life, the only exclusively mortal benefits I could think of which come close to being worth dying for would be moral virtue or loving relationships.
But at least for both of those, there's no reason to believe that Immortals couldn't be in love or couldn't be virtuous. All right. So in this episode, we considered the recognizability condition on the desirability of immortality that Fisher acquired from Bernard Williams. I instead think of this condition not as a matter of whether one is human. But whether there's a sufficient dissimilarity between an immortal and mortal life so as to render the former less preferable to the latter, at least for beings like us, in order to motivate this conclusion, we considered five different kinds of objections.
To mortality that instead pick out some sort of benefit to what it is to be immortal. They describe certain benefits to our finitude, to having the inevitability of our own death, and argue on that basis that it's not so bad to be mortal. Unfortunately, they all make the mistake of not doing an adequate comparison. Between immortal life and an immortal life, such that whatever benefits there are to mortality that they are worth dying for. Likewise, if Fisher.
Then all of these benefits can be enjoyed in an immortal life as well. Now I remain somewhat skeptical that every single one of these benefits could also be enjoyed, at least the benefits that matter. Of course, I should note that Fisher does concede that there are certain features to an immortal life which would be absent from immortal life like Immortals wouldn't have an ending. Our Immortals wouldn't have the final stage. Life, but Fisher argues that those don't ultimately matter very much as to whether an immortal life is desirable, that the things that do matter, such as emotional engagement, or what he describes as meaning holism this real evaluative way of recontextualizing the past and the virtue of future considerations that change their meaning.
Mortal lives also have narratives, and they have all of the good things of life that make life worth living. Absent some minor details, I think Fisher is way too optimistic about that. I think there may be certain elements to a mortal life which makes a mortal life worth living, but which would not make. An immortal life worth living, but ultimately it gets washed out by the comparison, because that's just how harmful death is. So at the end of the day, I agree with Fisher that immortality is preferable to mortality, and that an immortal life would be sufficiently recognizable so as to be desirable, which is another way of saying that the premise to the Faustian bargain is false.
One need not give up on the elements of our humanity, which matter for us, which make life worth living in order for immortality to be possible, at least conceptually.
I am your host, Matthew Jernberg. Even were it possible, is immortality worth wanting? In this episode I'm covering Chapter 6 of John Martin Fisher's book Death, Immortality and meaning in life. Suppose that you could make a Faustian bargain with some powerful supernatural entity to trade your humanity. For immortality, in the most favorable conditions, whatever those may be, presuming for the moment that such a trade is even possible.
And as part of this pact, one could specify the conditions to however favorable one prefers. What is so special about retaining one's humanity when doing so would cheat death in fiction? People who make this trade are typically villainous, as there is no way to both be a good person. And not be corrupted by the Fountain of Youth. But is this really necessary?
Is such fiction not just giving us an easy out to cope with the tragedy of our own mortality? Wouldn't it be better to not have to die? In this chapter and the next, Fisher considers many arguments for why immortality indeed is not desirable, and for this reason one shouldn't make this Faustian bargain even if there were no other downsides such as moral decay or corruption. Fisher argues against these objections that immortality. Would not be so bad and under the assumption that true immortality that is in which one never dies is impossible.
He instead favors indefinite life extension, which he calls medical immortality. All else being equal, life is worth extending without any internal limit. But is this Faustian tradeoff even necessary? What if you could have your cake and eat it too? That is, by retaining one's humanity while also becoming immortal.
Is this even possible? Would Immortals be recognizably human? The philosopher Bernard Williams argues no. Immortals would be fundamentally different than us. Partly because they couldn't be recognizably human.
Fisher disagrees. But even if Williams may be mistaken about just how different immortals would be from ordinary mortal human beings, one can think of Williams insight as a kind of constraint that in order for immortality to be desirable, immortals must be recognizably human. Fisher accepts this as a necessary condition. On the desirability of immortality and proceeds for the remainder of this chapter to argue against there being any radical difference between Immortals and mortals that would violate this. Straight that is in order for immortality to be desirable, one must retain one's humanity and further that immortality isn't worth wanting.
If it requires losing one's humanity so Fisher wouldn't take the Faustian bargain I describe. But were there some other way life would still be worth extending? But whatever does Williams mean by his recognizability condition? What does it even mean to recognize someone or something, as human Fisher doesn't explain? But I think the best way to understand what this means is as a similarity condition that is, in order for immortality to be desirable, there can't be too much dissimilarity between our life as we know it now, and whatever it is like to be immortal, we're immortality to take a form that is too.
Million or too transformative to anything like the human condition that it wouldn't be worth wanting to begin with, at least not for us mere mortals. Now you might think that Williams is begging the question against the immortality optimist here. With his recognizability condition, if only because mortality may be essential to human nature and clearly immortality is incompatible with mortality, so therefore US mortal beings could never be immortal, then and at least be human. However, this argument is 2 problems, the first being. The desirable is not bounded by the.
Possible there's many movies we see, like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, where it would be really cool to be in those scenarios or go to Hogwarts Academy or what have you. But the laws of nature would have to be radically different in order for magic as envisioned by those movies to even be possible. If that's the case, then there's at least some sense of possibility. Where we can consider the laws of nature being different than what they actually are, where we nonetheless wish they were different. I think a similar notion of possibility is at work with immortality.
Now of course, in real life, what Fisher describes as true immortality may be impossible. Nevertheless, as long as it would be better were that to be the case, then I think it makes sense for it to be desirable. And even for us to want what is impossible, the second problem is that there doesn't seem to be anything special about being. And human, at least when it comes to radically extending our lives. So, for instance, were it possible to upload ourselves into a robot or into a non local form of cloud storage, or some other interesting sci-fi scenario?
Well, we would no longer be human in that scenario, but it would radically extend our lives. Presuming that we could survive the transfer, Fisher brings up the movie avatar, which seems to be a coherent story, but is 1 in which the main character transforms into an alien species of some kind. So provided that you can survive the transformation. Both of these scenarios potentially extend the life of the person, but into a non human form and the Navi may not be recognizably human, but at least as portrayed in the movie, it seems to be a desirable way to live, and there's something good about it, perhaps even better than the life you left behind. I'm not sure how good life would be in the cloud in a.
Non local form of existence in some sort of computer simulation. Presuming perhaps it would be better. I'm not really sure, but I think what matters in both of these scenarios is that you retain your personhood, which is what fish. Your sets one problem, though, is Fisher more or less drops this condition hereafter, before examining arguments as to why Immortals would be radically different than mortals, such that it would be unrecognizable and so unrecognizable that it's not worth wanting to be immortal. Nevertheless, none of these arguments establish that Immortals would not be people.
They just instead point to certain benefits there are to being mortal and argue on that basis. That one's mortality is worth keeping or not worth disposing of. Presuming there was some choice in the matter. And immortality would not be worth wanting on that basis. Williams considers five kinds of arguments as to why immortality is not worth wanting, or even intelligible in some cases in virtue of different features of mortal existence that would be absent in immortal life.
The first is based on. How the borders of our lives give shape to the overall structure of our lives, that would be absent with Immortals. The second has to do with certain goods that are exclusive to immortal existence. That would be absent in an immortal life. The third has to do with our life.
Story and certain features of the narrative of our lives that would not be present in an immortal life. The 4th has to do with the duration of an infinite life being infinite, and the fifth has to do with the stages of our lives and how an immortal life would lack an ending. So the first objection has to do with borders. Now you may think that a thing. Is what it is in part because of its borders.
Table part of what it is to be a table is for that table to have certain boundaries, and if we were say to imagine the boundaries of the table to radically expand, perhaps by enlarging that table, we might get a bigger table with each expansion. But now imagine taking those expansions to the limit. And for that size of the table to go all the way to Infinity. In that case what you have is no longer a tab. If anything, it would be something like a plane in mathematics.
It would be a surface of some kind, but it would no longer be a table. Tables are finite objects with boundaries. Likewise, you could say the same thing about true immortality, that any finite extension of 1's life would nevertheless have a being who could recognizably be. A person who was human like us, however, if taken to the limit, the shape of whatever life that being would have an immortal life would no longer be the kind of thing that we are. They would no longer be recognizably human.
The form that that life would have. Would be a different kind of thing. So just as a table taken to the limit would cease to be a table, a human taken to the limit would cease to be a human. It would be a different kind of thing and sufficiently different that it would not be desirable for beings like us. We would lose our humanity were we to make the trade of the Faustian bargain.
This is sometimes described as the shapelessness objection, and Fisher cites philosopher Todd. A quote for humans immortal life would be shapeless, it would be Without Borders or contours. Its color would fade. An immortal life would be impossible to make my life or your life, because it would drag on endlessly. It would sooner or later just be a string of events lacking all form and quote.
So Fisher here plays a bit of a Mott-and-Bailey throughout this whole chapter. When responding to these different objections by at first bringing out the desirability of true immortality, and then when the objections are too strong for that, he walks it back a little bit, retreats to. As Mott and instead describes well, what about medical immortality, which if you ask me is really not immortality worth its name? Because what he means by that is simply a fountain of youth scenario where we do not age or die of any kind of natural causes. But what we're imagining in that scenario is just radical life extension.
So it's not so much living forever, because given a sufficiently long period of time, even creatures who do not age would eventually die from other causes by the numbers alone, they may get hit by lightning or kill one another, or die from some other source of harm other than age-related. But I think that's not really immortality at all. I mean clearly. Those beings are mortal beings who just live longer. So when we are debating whether immortality itself would be desirable, I think we should of course acknowledge Fisher's distinction between radical life extension versus immortality in itself.
But first. Establish whether immortality is even worth wanting to begin with, and then provided that that's impossible, what about any kind of life extension? And some of these objections apply not only to impossible scenario of living forever, but even to a possible scenario of just radically extending our lives. Perhaps if aging were possible to cure, then in the future, once there are anti aging treatments which would be sufficiently robust so as to permit. Long life.
Some of these arguments would apply even against that, and saying that those anti-aging treatments would not be worth having. So in a scenario of what Fisher describes as medical mortality, but what I would describe as indefinite life extension. That life has a shape. It's not really any different than just our ordinary lives, just more so. So this shapelessness objection really should be understood as being against true immortality, where one lives forever and never dies.
So earlier I made this analogy with a table. Fisher thinks that our lives are actually more analogous to. An electrocardiogram, something that's two-dimensional, because when we're talking about radical life extension, we're not expanding all borders of our lives. It doesn't change when we. Born and make that earlier right?
It only extends the time of our death indefinitely far into the future, or perhaps infinitely far into the future, so as to eliminate it in the case of true immortality. And that has a definite kind of shape. It's not a finite shape, but to avoid begging the question against the optimist. Something with infinite magnitude. It still has a shape.
Fisher also likens it to the natural numbers. These are the numbers like 1234 and so on. And they have a definite kind of form. You might call it, and they extend infinitely forward into the future. So the strength of this objection has to do with what kind of analogy would be best suited.
To think about the shape or the form. Of human life and of course, if by human we simply substitute person into that, I doubt that may would reject that Immortals would be persons. And so I think there's something about the notion of human nature where we think to be human is to be mortal, and that mortality is essential to our nature as humans. That may or may not be true. But it does beg the question against the optimist to build in the concept of mortality into our notion of what it is to be human.
And then on that basis argue that immortality is so radically unlike what it is to be human, that it's not even worth. So if instead we think well, our Immortals persons and as persons do they live lives which have a definite form or shape. And the answer is clearly yes, they do. So there's really no objection to this. I think Shapelessness ceases to be objectionable once one simply expands the examples.
One may use by analogy thinking of natural numbers or electrocardiograms. Instead of thinking of tables that cease to be tables when expanded to Infinity. So on this objection, I think Fisher wins the next series of objections has to do with. Certain goods that are unique to immortal life that would be absent were we to be immortal. So mortality brings with it a kind of finitude that makes life scarce.
And with scarcity comes value. In fact, the more scarce one's life is, in some ways the value of 1's life increases. If only because of this scarcity, or so the objection would go. However, there's no scarcity of quantity of life when it comes to an immortal existence. And so an immortal life would lose that value.
It may still retain some positive value, but not nearly as much, so as to be as preferable as a mortal life. Perhaps its value is vanishingly small in the limit, so it doesn't add up to as much. Fisher really doesn't respond to this objection, which I've expanded from the text. Nevertheless, I think it is premised on the mistake of thinking that mere longevity or quantity of life has a kind of non instrumental value in itself, which I don't think. That does.
I think it's smuggling in a notion of quality of life into the notion of quantity of life by suggesting that mere longevity has some non 0 value, some positive value that would make life worth living. Don't think this is true, I think instead. We have certain quality of life considerations, such as being good people, being virtuous, having knowledge or experiencing pleasure, or having our desires satisfied. There's many. Mandates of what makes life worth living?
None of them are mere quantity of life considerations. Mere existence alone seems to be neutral, and whatever value mere existence has, it does have some value, but its value is only as good as it is useful. Much like money insofar as living longer is useful for the realization. Of other goods then it's good itself, but merely as a tool or as an instrument for the sake of those other goods, and as such has no real value in and of itself. Now, there's still a concern about what you might describe as the utility.
Function between immortal life and immortal lives, by comparison, presuming that goodness is even quantifiable, which I think is itself objectionable or at least somewhat suspect, we nevertheless could think of different heuristics by which we could compare the lifetime value. If there is such a thing of mortal lives. With the lifetime value of immortal lives now, it seems as long as we're comparing apples to apples, an immortal life would always be. So I think there's something going haywire with these comparisons because all one need do is take any given mortal life and then continue it forever. So as long as the tail is never sufficiently negative, if it remains overall net positive, no matter how positive that is, the lifetime well-being or the lifetime value of the immortal existence would be strictly better than the lifetime value of mortal existence.
So. As long as we're engaging in a fair apples to apples comparison for every mortal life, there could be a counterpart, an immortal life, which would be at least as valuable as the mortal life and then some. And of course, if the kinds of immortality we're envisioning is not. Like being tortured in hell for eternity, but rather a favorable condition than for any mortal life, there exists some possible immortal life which is strictly better than it, and as such, at least those lives would be desirable and in fact preferable to its mortal counterpart. So I don't think this argument works.
At all. I think it only works either by not comparing apples to apples mortal to immortal lives, so there's something unsuitable about the basis of the comparison, or alternatively. By only imagining an immortal counterpart where the extension of 1's mortal into immortal life would go sufficiently negative to make the immortal life less preferable. But that's unnecessary. It's not as if the only possible way to be immortal were to be in hell and being tortured for eternity.
Presuming any of this is possible to begin with. And I think in the widest, most unrestricted sense of possibility, I think that's right. All of these are possible, or at least some things are possible. Whether other things may. Not be, but we can imagine something like the show the good place, where one continues in some alternative dimension in a form that looks very quite similar to our ordinary human like.
Existence, except without decay or without other features, that the laws of nature constrain us. By one need not imagine hell to be immortal. So I don't think that argument really works at all. The argument based on scarcity of comparisons. However, there may be other certain goods like loving relationships or friendships, certain personal projects, or even certain moral virtues like courage, which require us to be mortal.
It requires that there be some vulnerability to death that we have in order for us to enjoy or benefit from. These sources of well-being in our lives, however, one must consider the counterpart to this. So supposing we're imagining the most favorable immortality scenario, we could imagine, why can't immortals have friendships or be in love? Or pursue certain projects like playing a piano or writing a book. Why can't immortal beings be courageous?
Fisher concedes that immortal beings couldn't be courageous in their confrontations with the possibility of death, because if they were truly immortal, then for them death would not be possible. But there are many other ways to be courageous. And just death. And Fisher makes this point quite convincing. Only.
Whereas these immortality pessimists at best, as represented in Fisher's book, only have metaphors like death being a kind of ubiquitous background noise that is ever present, and we are somewhat aware of which makes these other goods possible to enjoy. Again, I agree with Fisher on this. I don't see even if it's true. Even if we grant. The pessimist premise that it's in the recognition of the scarcity of life and its finitude.
And how death is a kind of background wave beneath the enjoyment of all of these other goods. That that's what heightens our enjoyment of them. That very well may just be a coping mechanism with our own mortality that once unconstrained by an immortal life, we could enjoy all of these things far more. If anything that we can derive a certain kind of coping value to how we deal with our love affairs or friendships, or how we experience a certain pleasure. In the knowledge that it's finite has no implication whatsoever for the kind of enjoyments or the kind of relationships or the kind of projects immortal beings could have in an unconstrained life.
So the way Fisher puts this is, well, how does just adding more time remove any of these enjoyments? You may not be able to enjoy them in quite the same way. They're not going to be as scarce as they otherwise would be in a mortal life, but so far, there's no reason to think that an unconstrained immortal life could not have all of the same features that mortal lives have. So this opens an interesting question to me because it seems as if Fisher does not think there's any unique benefits to being mortal, right? That mortality is a circumstance of our condition, which is bad for us because death is bad for us and it would be better if we were to be immortal.
And This is why immortality is not only not bad, it's actually good at least instrumentally. So the question I might have for someone like Fisher. Is are there any goods that can only be enjoyed by mortals? Sometimes they're called mortality benefits. It still remains an open question.
Even if there were certain benefits to being mortal, there would still be the open question as to whether those benefits would outweigh the harm of death. Because when we're doing these comparisons. You can't just only look at one side of the Ledger here in order to have a fair comparison. If you were presented with a Faustian bargain and you think there are certain benefits that can only be enjoyed in a mortal life, are those worth dying for? That's the question that these authors seem to avoid.
They avoid the comparisons with the harm of death by which we can assess whether, on balance, it would be worth. Dying for in order to enjoy these benefits, and given that it seems quite implausible that if there were such beings. Or they just couldn't have friendships, or they couldn't be in love. I don't see any reason to believe that. I don't see any reason to believe that an immortal couldn't write a novel or a poem, or couldn't engage in just about any project that immortal could engage in.
So in order to make this argument, the pessimist would have to argue that there are certain benefits that are exclusive to a mortal existence, and on that basis further argue they have to 1st argue that point. And the second point, they have to argue is that the value of those mortality benefits outweighs the harm of death. Presuming that it is a harm. So that may be one way to go. They could just deny that death is harmful.
So a Fisher is right then. There are no exclusively mortal goods that could not also be enjoyed in a truly immortal life. Now the structure of Fisher's argument doesn't quite work so well because he continues to play the Mountain Bailey game between the distinction between true immortality and medical immortality by responding to many of these objections by suggesting that. By adding more time, one could still enjoy these benefits, but the best that gives you is indefinite life extension. It does not give you true immortal.
So the question is, are any of these goods excluded from a truly immortal life? And I don't see any reason to believe that they are. And the last objection in the section has to do with meaning in life. So if being fraught with certain challenges like death, anxiety, or the acknowledgement of 1's own finitude is necessary. For life to be meaningful and an immortal life would lack these challenges or this death anxiety, then you might think that an immortal life would not be meaningful.
However, the problem with this argument is it's based on almost this Becker like notion. And that death anxiety is at the root of all of the challenges of life that make life meaningful, that there's some struggle to a mortal existence or a mortal life that is rooted in fear of death, or the finitude of life and the reality of death itself. Fisher rejects that premise, instead thinking that there's no radical difference here between Immortals and mortals. So as to validate this argument. Instead it an immortal life can be just as meaningful.
Perhaps the sources of meaning would be slightly different. For instance, an immortal would not be able to have a more meaningful life in virtue of his finitude, or in virtue of his mortality. But there's other sources of meaning than just that. In fact, loving relationships, friendship. Personal projects and moral virtue could all be sources of meaning that would not require death.
So the third set of objections has to do with the notion of a life narrative or a life story. So think for instance, if an omniscient person were to write a biography of your life, that would be a kind of life story that would be complete that story. That have a certain narrative structure. It would have a beginning, a middle and an end. And in that regard would be different than just a mere chronicle.
As you say, it is a mere accounting or recounting of the events that. Curse and the difference between a mere accounting for events and something with a narrative is that narratives have a kind of structure. They have a kind of engagement with our emotions. They have a kind of meaning to them, which is not reducible to the individual moments that make up our lives, but they have a kind of non reductive meaning where the. Pull of the story means something more than just the individual parts that compose it, and furthermore, narratives have arcs in which prior events acquire new meanings in virtue of future things that occur so far.
Instance, say your hard work is vindicated by a subsequent success, like admission to Graduate School. Then those past events would have a bit of a different meaning than if all the medical schools rejected you, and then your hard work would not be vindicated as it would result in failure. And you might look back in hindsight and realize that you wasted your time. Now, in this section, Fisher. Is more or less responding and adopting some of the views of David Velleman from his very influential essay on narrative explanation.
However, in Fisher's rendition, I'm not sure he quite gets Velleman right because I don't think that the meaning of past events actually changes. If we were to think. About the reevaluation of the past and our ability to do that that more or less isn't about the past. It's about us. We acquire a new outlook on our past when we get more information.
That puts it into context, right? The value of properties of past don't change whether our outlook about the past. Changes and it changes in the press. So there's no time travel involved. The past is fixed.
The past cannot be changed. It's not as if the value of qualities of what a certain past event, like studying hard for a biology test or a biochemistry test, or something that doesn't change from being a waste of time to being a good use of time. Once one's admission. Is granted to a certain medical school in the future. Rather, I think the better way of thinking about that is that evaluative profile of those past events of hard work extends into the future.
So it's not as if the past changes, it's rather that it's a process that has yet to be. Completed and it's completed upon one's admission to Graduate School. In the present or one's failure. So even if the individual sessions of study are discrete events which occurred in the past, what they mean and what I call their evaluative profile is something that extends. Overtime up into the present, much like a marathon, it's like you're running a very long marathon when you're studying as a pre Med to try to get into medical school, and that process only completes upon the admission or rejection from medical schools and even with rejection, there's always next year that one could reapply.
But at some point the process terminates. In success or failure and its meaning is determined in the present, just like the meaning of everything is determined in the present, I think that's the better way of thinking. About it. Not sure if that's exactly how Velleman thinks about it, but I think that's a better way of thinking about it then. Thinking about time travel, however, as stories narratives have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but an immortal life would not have an end, there's no ending to an immortal life, at least not a truly immortal life.
And do you think? There could be something missing out on. That so this would be one of those mortality benefits, that is to say, in a normal mortal life. There's a beginning, a middle and an end, and the end gives you, or perhaps not really gives you, but it gives others a kind of understanding in which the ending puts a context on everything that happened before to give you a better understanding of the whole of someone's life that you wouldn't have had before they died, and you might get this impression from biographies. So think about how Julius Caesar died.
Where he was assassinated by the senators that he was ruling over as dictator for life. So the death of Julius Caesar gave a certain context on the totality of his life that allows us third parties to better understand the man as a whole instead of just as a part. If instead, Julius Caesar were immortal and he would be invulnerable to death in some way or another, then we wouldn't be able to understand the other parts of his life as well, because he has no ending. And so this is one of those mortality benefits, certain benefits there is to being mortal, which would be absent from an immortal life. And instead of just leaving it there, we have to ask ourselves, OK, but does that worth dying for?
It could very well be true. And I think Fisher concedes this point as well. That immortal lives would lack. This interesting feature they have no end, and if you were to write a story about an immortal, it would be a never ending story and in virtue of being never ending, it would lack a certain kind of narrative cohesion that mortal lives. Half, but So what?
Fisher argues that an immortal life can be just as it gripping or as engaging emotionally. And in fact, it still features this interesting real valued of property where by bringing new context to the past it changes the meaning of past events. So that phenomenon would likewise apply to an immortal life. You don't need to have an ending to your life in order for that phenomenon to occur. So what value does an ending have?
Does that value outweigh death itself? I don't think it does. And Fisher doesn't either. However, one point I would note about this is that Bernard Williams argues that immortality would be boring. This is the focus of the next chapter of Fisher's book.
But if Williams is right and immortal lives would be boring, then likewise a story about. An immortal life, as long as it's accurately reflecting the entirety of that life, would be similarly boring and tedious. And so it would not be emotionally engaging in a way that mortal lives would be, and that velamen points out about the value of certain life narratives. However, there's two problems with this objection. The first is that there can be interesting stories about characters who are themselves bored.
Think about the character Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh. He's an interesting character, but he seems to be bored much of the time, and similarly, Williams cites a play. By Janicek in his essay on the Makropulos case, in which there is an immortal character who herself is quite bored with on we. And yet the play is interesting enough to watch. So the fact that an immortal would himself or herself be bored doesn't imply that the life story would be boring.
The second problem is. Who count. And this is also a problem I think for VELAMEN as well. So when evaluating one's life story from who's perspective are we doing the evaluation? And this comes up with the play.
So if we're adopting the perspective of the immortal being when evaluating one's life as a whole, one's immortal life as a whole, then yes, it is. Quite boring, but when adopting the perspective of the audience, the story of an immortal having anxiety about whether to continue her immortality is quite interesting and not so boy. So this isn't so much an objection to this argument, insofar as it is a question of clarification as to identify from whose perspective are we making these evaluations about one's life as a whole, whose emotions count when we're saying that a certain life story engages the emotions? It's not altogether clear who we're talking about. It's more or less described in the abstract.
About whether a certain story is emotionally gripping, but of course, when authors, especially fictional author. Write stories. They always have a demographic and some public in mind as their readership, and in fact different genres of writing, are sometimes individuated by which demographics they are appealing to, whether it's young adult or middle-aged women, or likewise. So it's not altogether clear whose perspective predominates, but it seems to matter. In order to assess whether a life story is sufficiently emotionally engaging as to be not too dissimilar from our ordinary mortal lives so as to render immortality desirable, Fisher will talk about this more when responding to Williams objection that an immortal life would be.
As I see this example is a special case of that that an immortal life which is not sufficiently emotionally engaging would not be desirable on that basis. So however, Fisher responds to the tedium, objection would be likewise the best way to respond to this objection that immortal life would not be emotionally engaging. So the 4th objection has to do with. Conceiving of an infinite life, so Fisher quotes philosopher Michael Burley, there is nothing that could count as an infinite series that has reached its completion for an infinite series is precisely a series that never reaches a point of completion. It just goes on and on forever.
So if one agrees that a necessary condition of being able to assess the desirability of a life. Is that the life can be conceivable as a whole. Then it looks as though such an assessment cannot be made in the case of a putative immortal life End Quote. So there are at least 2 problems with this argument. The first problem that Fisher does not.
Notify, but I would object is that it does not seem to be giving us a reason to believe that immortality is itself undesirable, or that a mortal life is preferable to an immortal life. Instead, it's giving us a reason to think that we cannot assess this claim, a reason to perhaps. The agnostic about the question, but agnosticism in this regard simply does not answer the question as to whether mortality is preferable to immortality or not. Nevertheless, Fisher seems to extrapolate from this quote the conclusion that immortality is not desired. And likewise, mortality is more preferable, but it is a kind of argument for agnosticism, I think.
And so in that regard, I think Fisher, Miss Reeds, burly. Nevertheless, Fisher rightly identifies that this objection is falsely premised on the notion that one must conceive of something as a whole to be able to assess. There are properties. It has, but we don't employ the same standard when thinking about natural numbers. How do we conceive of the whole of the natural numbers?
These are the numbers like 1234 and so on. Of course I have to say and so on, because there's infinitely many of them. I would not be able to finish the count. Nevertheless, Fisher is right that we think of these numbers recursively. We say, OK, well, one is a natural number and for any natural number +1 is itself a natural number.
And so that's how we think of all the natural numbers and that's why I'm able to generate the number two or the number 3 and so on, because two is just the next number after one, it's just one plus one and then so on for all the others. And likewise, Fisher argues. That we can conceive of an immortal life and thinking in terms of the days, say where an immortal life is just like a mortal life, but more so for any day of a life. There's the next day, day plus one, and I think that analogy between the continuation of an immortal existence into Infinity and the continuation of the natural numbers into it. Unity would be analogous, so unless there's some special reason to think that we must conceive of something as a whole, say extensionally, by thinking about the entirety of the extension of the set of natural numbers, in order to assess whether an immortal life is desirable or preferable to immortal life, then I think of thinking of it.
Recursively is much better, and that's how we do. I mean, I put it using the jargon of recursion, but when we think about what it would be like to be an immortal, we basically just think about what it's like to be mortal and extend it and just say and it's like this and so on and so on, just like I say with. The numbers, so I don't think that fishers analogy is inappropriate here. I actually think it works quite well. So the fifth and last kind of objection has to do with stages and says that well in ordinary mortal life we have different stages of life.
You have your childhood, you have your adulthood, and then you have the elderly years in which we deteriorate. And eventually die. However, an immortal life would lack the stages that characterize ordinary human life, and thus an immortal life would not be recognizably human, says Fisher as he's extrapolating this objection from philosopher Samuel. Scheffler, I think it is a bit uncharitable to read Scheffler in this fashion, if only because the context that Fisher was talking about has to do with how can accommodate ourselves to our own mortality and as a simple matter of practical rationality, we do have to fit our goals and whatever goods we are able to realize in our life. Into the stages of our life.
So, for instance, at 39 years of age, it is a bit late for me to aspire to go into the Olympics, say with swimming or something. Now, that may have been an unrealistic goal, even when I was young, if only because of my talents or capabilities. But that was. A little bit less certain when I was. At this point I could be much more confident that just in virtue of my age, this is no longer a realistic goal, and I think we engage in all sorts of adjustments to our goals and in our projects so as to fit them into a moral life.
And there's something irrational about attempting to pursue long term projects beyond the amount of time we are reasonably expected to have. However, the problem with this style of objection is it completely misses the point about immortality. So just because we have to cope with the finitude of our own existence as mortals, this tells us nothing about what it would be like in an unconstrained scenario where we're no longer mortal, but immortal. Is there something especially important about having the end stage of 1's life again, whatever reasons applied to the notion of a narrative ending likewise apply to the notion of the end stage of life. Yes, Immortals don't have an end stage of life because their lives are endless.
So what? Why is that a bad thing? And in fact, why is that so bad that the absence of an ending is worse than death? Why is it better to be? Mortal and die than to be immortal without dying.
This comparative question is just not present in any of these authors. I looked through some of the primary sources. I wasn't able to find these kinds of comparisons with Velleman or in Scheffler either. Perhaps they do have an answer to this question, I just don't know what that is. But insofar as we extrapolate what they say to try to form arguments as to why mortality is preferable to immortality, the structure of all of these arguments seems to be that they identify something good about being mortal and then leave it at that, as if this good thing is worth dying.
More and of course, it never is, so as soon as we start thinking about the comparisons. But is it worth dying for? We just ask that question for every single one of these goods. Is that so good that it's worth dying for? Is that so good that it's worth dying for?
None of these compare and so immortality just wins by default, especially with some of the more crucial. Goods like a loving relationship. Or a moral virtue. It might be less clear that if we really had to give up these elements of our humanity in order to be immortal, of course, maybe it's better to die and have a true love affair with moral virtue and excellence and other things than it would be to have none of those things and just continue on. There would be nothing worth living for or something but that trade off is not unnecessary.
Requirement it's not as if Immortals could never be in love, or Immortals couldn't be virtuous. There's no good reason to think they couldn't. And so is it worth dying for it if there's no difference, then the answer is clearly no. And regarding the stages argument, how we have to fit our projects into the stages of our life. Now, of course, as mortal beings, we do have to cope.
We do have to do this as a matter of practical rationality. However, were we to become immortal, that would no longer be required. So Fisher likens it to the seasons of the year, fall, Winter, spring, summer. So in the course of our ordinary lives, we have our childhood. We have our young adulthood, we have our middle-aged, we have our elderly years and.
Go on. These are like the seasons of the year. We might call it spring, summer, fall, winter, right. That might be the procession of the seasons. That would be roughly analogous to the stages of our lives, where it ends with winter.
However, living an immortal life might be something like Southern California, where you just have one long season. Which is the summer, and it can seem strange. You might have to get used to it, but it seems better. There's a reason why so many people move to. Los Angeles for.
The weather, and that's a conceivable and coherent scenario. And there doesn't seem to be any good reason to think that it's worse, and so it's preferable and desirable, which responds to the argument. Now, Scheffler may respond to Fischer’s objection by saying that the notion of a season loses coherence entirely in Southern California, right? So if all you have is one season, which is just the summer. All the time.
This is something similar to having a table that's expanded to. It's no longer a table you don't have summer in order for there to be a summer, it's necessary that there be a winter or that there be a season that's not summer. But why does seasonality matter? As long as one can retain sufficient similarity so as to ground the desirability of continued existence? Then seasons are worth giving up.
If what you are left with is something that's better, what's so great about suffering the coldness of winter? Or other sorts of things you know, there doesn't seem to be any reason to prefer immortal life to an immortal life. In this scenario, provided that there was options, so if anything in this chapter, I think Fisher has underestimated some of the benefits to being mortal, arguing that immortal lives are very much in parallel with mortal lives. I'm not sure that's entirely true, however, I think his conclusion. That immortality is preferable to mortality still applies, because, however different immortal life is, it's never worth dying for by comparison to an immortal life, the only exclusively mortal benefits I could think of which come close to being worth dying for would be moral virtue or loving relationships.
But at least for both of those, there's no reason to believe that Immortals couldn't be in love or couldn't be virtuous. All right. So in this episode, we considered the recognizability condition on the desirability of immortality that Fisher acquired from Bernard Williams. I instead think of this condition not as a matter of whether one is human. But whether there's a sufficient dissimilarity between an immortal and mortal life so as to render the former less preferable to the latter, at least for beings like us, in order to motivate this conclusion, we considered five different kinds of objections.
To mortality that instead pick out some sort of benefit to what it is to be immortal. They describe certain benefits to our finitude, to having the inevitability of our own death, and argue on that basis that it's not so bad to be mortal. Unfortunately, they all make the mistake of not doing an adequate comparison. Between immortal life and an immortal life, such that whatever benefits there are to mortality that they are worth dying for. Likewise, if Fisher.
Then all of these benefits can be enjoyed in an immortal life as well. Now I remain somewhat skeptical that every single one of these benefits could also be enjoyed, at least the benefits that matter. Of course, I should note that Fisher does concede that there are certain features to an immortal life which would be absent from immortal life like Immortals wouldn't have an ending. Our Immortals wouldn't have the final stage. Life, but Fisher argues that those don't ultimately matter very much as to whether an immortal life is desirable, that the things that do matter, such as emotional engagement, or what he describes as meaning holism this real evaluative way of recontextualizing the past and the virtue of future considerations that change their meaning.
Mortal lives also have narratives, and they have all of the good things of life that make life worth living. Absent some minor details, I think Fisher is way too optimistic about that. I think there may be certain elements to a mortal life which makes a mortal life worth living, but which would not make. An immortal life worth living, but ultimately it gets washed out by the comparison, because that's just how harmful death is. So at the end of the day, I agree with Fisher that immortality is preferable to mortality, and that an immortal life would be sufficiently recognizable so as to be desirable, which is another way of saying that the premise to the Faustian bargain is false.
One need not give up on the elements of our humanity, which matter for us, which make life worth living in order for immortality to be possible, at least conceptually.