I take Bernard Williams to make a disjunctive argument - *either* one would get bored, *or* one would change so much over the centuries that one isn’t really the same person any more, so it’s not true immortality. I suspect something like the second is right, but I don’t think that’s such a problem. There are already plenty of ways that I’m not the same person that I was as a ten year old, but that’s fine. None of the persons that have shared this body ever had to go through the pain of dying, or have their plans for the next five years interrupted by death. And it would be great if none of the future continuants do either, even if none of them ever get to see through a 400 year plan to completion either.
Arguments on the other side (eg, Bernard Williams) have always struck me as pure cope. Do whatever you gotta do to reconcile yourself to mortality, I guess.
I did not realize until the footnote that your premise is that only YOU are going to be immortal (or only ME, which sounds even better). In that case, I suppose one other counter argument is that you are accumulating the regrets and sadnesses of multiple lifetimes. All your friends and lovers will die, and you won't. Of course it's also true that the hedonic treadmill probably means that pretty quickly you won't feel so bad, plus you have infinite do-overs. Just wondering...
Lets assume that the Flynn effect is a persistent phenomenon and continues for centuries in to the future. Do you really want to live in a world where you would be considered a simple 21st century savage :-)
I'm surprised that the argument of sorrow was not there. Not only will everyone you love die but you will also fear attaching to people since they keep dying.
Immortality sounds like a high class problem. Sure there are all the arguments against, boredom, lassitude yada yada.
But
There is so much to do and learn it could take a 1,000 years. The books, movies, music, nature, learning about, well everything. The ability to have more ex-wives. I am not in a rush.
Fascinating reflection, whose tentative conclusion I interpreted as partly written tongue in cheek. Am I wrong? Since I'm about your same age (a year older, I believe, but who's counting?), I too have been thinking about this question, but landing pretty clearly on the side of being glad I won't be around forever. To the extent I've thought about it in any rigorous way, I'm trying to be "realistic" (a word that sounds odd in this context.) What would life "really" be like if you lived forever? Would you get to choose the self in time that becomes eternal; i.e., eternal youth and vibrancy and curiosity, with its sense of energy and newness and discovery? I assume you wouldn't choose life as a Struldbrug, the immortal race that Gulliver discovers on the island of Luggnag, who live forever as decrepit elderly people? But speaking realistically, would you get to choose?
In the final decade of his career in medical science, my father turned to the study of aging (true to family values, before there was any money in it). Some years before he died at what retrospectively seems the young age of 71, he edited a book on the ethics of life-span extension. By far the best essay in it was by the philosopher @Peter Singer, who weighs in on the question with a predictably brilliant thought experiment that breaks the question into three parts--is it good for 1) individuals alive today; 2) individuals yet to be born; and 3) the species. To cut to the chase, he dismisses species as not having interests and argues that current individuals have a clear interest in extending their lifespans as long as they remain more or less able to enjoy it. The impact on future individuals is what tips the scales for Singer in the other direction, however.
Several years ago, I reached out to Singer with a quibble. Was he so sure about individuals alive today? (For the purposes of transparency, i had just watched my mother, a wonderfully vibrant person, spend her final 5+ years in a memory care facility descending ever-deeper into dementia. She finally died, thank god, at 94). To my surprise, Singer responded and said yes, reaffirming the point that it had to be under pretty good circumstances. I'll conclude by saying there is such a thing as being "condemned to life". I have seen it from afar, and hope it doesn't happen to me. Besides that, the point about future individuals is germane. Imagine a tree, not an evergreen, that doesn't shed its leaves, with the withering ones on the branches blocking the young fresh ones from bursting forth anew upon the world. Human progress is fueled by youth; eternal life, realistically speaking, would block progress at the root. My two cents on an important topic.
I think my horror at the prospect of immortality broadly falls under your second category: mortality makes our lives finite, creating the situation whereby you can only hope to accomplish or experience a handful of the useful, interesting or pleasurable things there potentially are to do in the world, and you engage in life by making choices under this constraint – choices that only have any stakes at all because you can't just do everything. For an immortal the answer to the question "should I do X or Y?", provided that they were both justifiable ways to spend one's time in other senses, would always be "who cares? there's always tomorrow."
I guess it's the same as, or analogous to, the argument that preciousness requires scarcity?
Does it make a difference for you that, even if you’re immortal, there are all sorts of other constraints that force you to act now—most notably, the fact that others are mortal? You have limited time to repair a relationship, to see your favorite band perform live, to spend time with your child before they grow up and leave the house. When I think of all the things on my “todo” list and imagine knowing that I will live forever … I still feel pressure to do them, just because of the feelings and opinions of other people. (I admit that the situation is different if everyone were immortal.)
I think if it was just me (I hadn't properly realized that this was your scenario) then the situation would be worse! I'd be in exactly the same condition of meaninglessness about which relationships or experiences to choose over others, but with the added sadness of having to deal with them ending once I'd chosen them and invested in them. But… I don't think the point I'm making is about feeling pressure. I think it's about the sacrifice of alternatives being what gives choices their meaning.
If you think that immortality will lead inevitably to all outcomes, then you're right. However I think you will miss out on experiences just by being finite, you can't be everywhere at once. You either explore space or stay on this planet, read a book, stargaze or party like it's 1999 or 9999. Moments that will only occur once will only occur that once. You don't become omnipotent in this scenario.
That's an important point. It also bears on the issue of boredom. Even if I lived until the end of the universe, it's extremely unlikely that I'll win the Academy Award for Best Actor or an Olympic gold medal in the triathlon. There will be all sorts of things I can strive for and most likely not get, which is part of what makes life interesting.
The rate of cultural change within the last ten years has already been a bit overwhelming. I imagine technological and cultural growth will continue to be rapid, and I think that does counteract, to at least a significant degree, the intuition that life will get boring.
I enjoyed reading this, especially the urgency argument. That meaning isn't downstream of death, I agree wholeheartedly. But I think the boredom argument is weak. Your rebuttal is that faded memory keeps experience fresh: the 1060-year-old feels much like a 60-year-old because the centuries have blurred. Grant that, and Bernard Williams' other horn closes around you, the one Kenny Easwaran calls out. If my memories have faded so much that a 500-year-old delight feels new, the being savouring it isn't quite me. Growth seems to require forgetting; we become ourselves partly by not carrying the three-year-old intact. Extend that indefinitely and you haven't won immortality for a self. You've run a relay race of strangers through one body, none of whom had to die, none of whom quite persisted either. Which may be fine! But it's no longer obviously me getting the extra innings.
I'd add one friendly needle: the footnote bracketing "a world otherwise unchanged" is where the hard questions went to hide. I wrote recently about a 122-year-old who managed the whole business on port wine and chocolate, and about an old Indian tale (https://rajeshachanta.substack.com/p/live-and-let-die?utm_source=publication-search). The question that interests me isn't whether more life is good. Of course it is, if it's a good life. It's what we'd actually do with the extra centuries and whether a self thin enough to survive them is still the one who wanted them.
“You've run a relay race of strangers through one body, none of whom had to die, none of whom quite persisted either. …It it's no longer obviously me getting the extra innings.”
… is how many philosophers (such as Parfit) see a normal lifespan. A 30-year-old might wish to live past 80 even if, when he is 80, the memories of being 30 will be very dim. If the 80 year old does something he did once before, as a 30-year-old, it will certainly feel new. Does this mean that he’s not the same person as the 30-year-old and that the 30 year old s irrational to hope that he—the same person—will live to 80?
Personally (!), I don’t share this intuition about personal identity. If I live to 1000, and at any point only remember the last 100 years, I feel that it’s still me making this journey. But I accept that some don’t see it this way.
You've sent me to Parfit, for which thanks; I've not read him. On the first point I'll concede: the relay race runs through an ordinary life too, only at a gentler gradient, and the bright line I drew is really a slope.
On personal identity I won't pretend to a settled view. That's your territory, not mine, and I'd only be renting opinions.
But .. even if I agreed that it's unmistakably you making the thousand-year trip, the question I was actually asking still stands, unanswered: what would you do with the time? This isn't metaphysical. Jeanne Calment answered it without a theory of the self—port, chocolate, the afternoon light in Arles, the company of people she liked—and my hunch is she'd have answered it the same way at 122 or 1,022. The folktale I share worries about the same thing from the other end: man wins his extra decades and spends them living like the cow, then the dog, then the owl. Not whose years they are. What they're for.
Happy to leave the self to the philosophers. I'm still stuck on the afternoons.
"If you're bored then you're boring" -Harvey Danger
I do worry what the psychological effects would be. To watch my friends, children, grandchildren, countries, civilizations, grow old and die, while I remain. I fear I would become Dr. Manhattan-esq, detached from humanity, from my humanity.
But I don't think it's anything some time volunteering at an animal shelter couldn't fix.
I want to agree with you. I almost do. So let me make the case for the one thing you wave away.
You say mortality isn’t what drives you. The house still needs cleaning, the paper still needs finishing, guests still arrive Thursday. Fair enough. But those are chores. The real discipline of a good life isn’t getting things done — it’s choosing what’s worth doing at all. And choice only matters when you can’t have everything.
In my book The Input Effect, I say it straight:
“If you live 80 years, you get about 4,000 weeks. That’s it. Maybe 1,500 of them are your prime years. Fewer, if you spend them in meetings that drain you, with people who deplete you, chasing goals you never chose.”
That number is the whole engine. I hide the wine, guard my mornings, and walk away from what drains me for one reason: the weeks are running out. Take the clock away and you don’t get freedom. You get an open bar with last call canceled — no reason to savor anything, because there’s always more.
Your point about memory is the clever one, but I think it sinks you. If every pleasure eventually feels brand new, then nothing builds. A love that survives fifty years means no more than a love that survives fifty days, because the fifty years left no mark. Forever doesn’t deepen a life. It flattens it.
Maybe immortality cures boredom. I’m not sure it survives meaning.
So I’ll ask you plainly: if the weeks never run out, what makes you spend a single one of them well?
I absolutely would be fine lolloping around in a thousand years doing absolutely nothing. Now, presuming my immortality means I survive the Big Crunch/Heat Death end of the universe phase - and I'm floating immortally in an endless vacuum of nothing, I grant that I may eventually get bored.
I take Bernard Williams to make a disjunctive argument - *either* one would get bored, *or* one would change so much over the centuries that one isn’t really the same person any more, so it’s not true immortality. I suspect something like the second is right, but I don’t think that’s such a problem. There are already plenty of ways that I’m not the same person that I was as a ten year old, but that’s fine. None of the persons that have shared this body ever had to go through the pain of dying, or have their plans for the next five years interrupted by death. And it would be great if none of the future continuants do either, even if none of them ever get to see through a 400 year plan to completion either.
Arguments on the other side (eg, Bernard Williams) have always struck me as pure cope. Do whatever you gotta do to reconcile yourself to mortality, I guess.
Strong agree. I mean, if we all lived to 1000 years, I bet nobody would be arguing that we should all kill ourselves at 120 …
Reminds me of the meme where a guy is floating naked in a black void, a trillion years after wishing for immortality...all he says is "Fuck"...
"I’ve never met a healthy old person who says that they’re sick of existence." I have.
I did not realize until the footnote that your premise is that only YOU are going to be immortal (or only ME, which sounds even better). In that case, I suppose one other counter argument is that you are accumulating the regrets and sadnesses of multiple lifetimes. All your friends and lovers will die, and you won't. Of course it's also true that the hedonic treadmill probably means that pretty quickly you won't feel so bad, plus you have infinite do-overs. Just wondering...
Lets assume that the Flynn effect is a persistent phenomenon and continues for centuries in to the future. Do you really want to live in a world where you would be considered a simple 21st century savage :-)
Not really! (So it’s a good thing that the Flynn Effect stopped about 30 years ago)
It was a fun thought experiment though :)
May be of interest
https://aeon.co/essays/theres-a-big-problem-with-immortality-it-goes-on-and-on
I'm surprised that the argument of sorrow was not there. Not only will everyone you love die but you will also fear attaching to people since they keep dying.
Maybe I missed it?
Immortality sounds like a high class problem. Sure there are all the arguments against, boredom, lassitude yada yada.
But
There is so much to do and learn it could take a 1,000 years. The books, movies, music, nature, learning about, well everything. The ability to have more ex-wives. I am not in a rush.
If
have health and marbles.
Fascinating reflection, whose tentative conclusion I interpreted as partly written tongue in cheek. Am I wrong? Since I'm about your same age (a year older, I believe, but who's counting?), I too have been thinking about this question, but landing pretty clearly on the side of being glad I won't be around forever. To the extent I've thought about it in any rigorous way, I'm trying to be "realistic" (a word that sounds odd in this context.) What would life "really" be like if you lived forever? Would you get to choose the self in time that becomes eternal; i.e., eternal youth and vibrancy and curiosity, with its sense of energy and newness and discovery? I assume you wouldn't choose life as a Struldbrug, the immortal race that Gulliver discovers on the island of Luggnag, who live forever as decrepit elderly people? But speaking realistically, would you get to choose?
In the final decade of his career in medical science, my father turned to the study of aging (true to family values, before there was any money in it). Some years before he died at what retrospectively seems the young age of 71, he edited a book on the ethics of life-span extension. By far the best essay in it was by the philosopher @Peter Singer, who weighs in on the question with a predictably brilliant thought experiment that breaks the question into three parts--is it good for 1) individuals alive today; 2) individuals yet to be born; and 3) the species. To cut to the chase, he dismisses species as not having interests and argues that current individuals have a clear interest in extending their lifespans as long as they remain more or less able to enjoy it. The impact on future individuals is what tips the scales for Singer in the other direction, however.
Several years ago, I reached out to Singer with a quibble. Was he so sure about individuals alive today? (For the purposes of transparency, i had just watched my mother, a wonderfully vibrant person, spend her final 5+ years in a memory care facility descending ever-deeper into dementia. She finally died, thank god, at 94). To my surprise, Singer responded and said yes, reaffirming the point that it had to be under pretty good circumstances. I'll conclude by saying there is such a thing as being "condemned to life". I have seen it from afar, and hope it doesn't happen to me. Besides that, the point about future individuals is germane. Imagine a tree, not an evergreen, that doesn't shed its leaves, with the withering ones on the branches blocking the young fresh ones from bursting forth anew upon the world. Human progress is fueled by youth; eternal life, realistically speaking, would block progress at the root. My two cents on an important topic.
I think my horror at the prospect of immortality broadly falls under your second category: mortality makes our lives finite, creating the situation whereby you can only hope to accomplish or experience a handful of the useful, interesting or pleasurable things there potentially are to do in the world, and you engage in life by making choices under this constraint – choices that only have any stakes at all because you can't just do everything. For an immortal the answer to the question "should I do X or Y?", provided that they were both justifiable ways to spend one's time in other senses, would always be "who cares? there's always tomorrow."
I guess it's the same as, or analogous to, the argument that preciousness requires scarcity?
Does it make a difference for you that, even if you’re immortal, there are all sorts of other constraints that force you to act now—most notably, the fact that others are mortal? You have limited time to repair a relationship, to see your favorite band perform live, to spend time with your child before they grow up and leave the house. When I think of all the things on my “todo” list and imagine knowing that I will live forever … I still feel pressure to do them, just because of the feelings and opinions of other people. (I admit that the situation is different if everyone were immortal.)
I think if it was just me (I hadn't properly realized that this was your scenario) then the situation would be worse! I'd be in exactly the same condition of meaninglessness about which relationships or experiences to choose over others, but with the added sadness of having to deal with them ending once I'd chosen them and invested in them. But… I don't think the point I'm making is about feeling pressure. I think it's about the sacrifice of alternatives being what gives choices their meaning.
If you think that immortality will lead inevitably to all outcomes, then you're right. However I think you will miss out on experiences just by being finite, you can't be everywhere at once. You either explore space or stay on this planet, read a book, stargaze or party like it's 1999 or 9999. Moments that will only occur once will only occur that once. You don't become omnipotent in this scenario.
That's an important point. It also bears on the issue of boredom. Even if I lived until the end of the universe, it's extremely unlikely that I'll win the Academy Award for Best Actor or an Olympic gold medal in the triathlon. There will be all sorts of things I can strive for and most likely not get, which is part of what makes life interesting.
The rate of cultural change within the last ten years has already been a bit overwhelming. I imagine technological and cultural growth will continue to be rapid, and I think that does counteract, to at least a significant degree, the intuition that life will get boring.
I enjoyed reading this, especially the urgency argument. That meaning isn't downstream of death, I agree wholeheartedly. But I think the boredom argument is weak. Your rebuttal is that faded memory keeps experience fresh: the 1060-year-old feels much like a 60-year-old because the centuries have blurred. Grant that, and Bernard Williams' other horn closes around you, the one Kenny Easwaran calls out. If my memories have faded so much that a 500-year-old delight feels new, the being savouring it isn't quite me. Growth seems to require forgetting; we become ourselves partly by not carrying the three-year-old intact. Extend that indefinitely and you haven't won immortality for a self. You've run a relay race of strangers through one body, none of whom had to die, none of whom quite persisted either. Which may be fine! But it's no longer obviously me getting the extra innings.
I'd add one friendly needle: the footnote bracketing "a world otherwise unchanged" is where the hard questions went to hide. I wrote recently about a 122-year-old who managed the whole business on port wine and chocolate, and about an old Indian tale (https://rajeshachanta.substack.com/p/live-and-let-die?utm_source=publication-search). The question that interests me isn't whether more life is good. Of course it is, if it's a good life. It's what we'd actually do with the extra centuries and whether a self thin enough to survive them is still the one who wanted them.
Fair enough! But, as you know …
“You've run a relay race of strangers through one body, none of whom had to die, none of whom quite persisted either. …It it's no longer obviously me getting the extra innings.”
… is how many philosophers (such as Parfit) see a normal lifespan. A 30-year-old might wish to live past 80 even if, when he is 80, the memories of being 30 will be very dim. If the 80 year old does something he did once before, as a 30-year-old, it will certainly feel new. Does this mean that he’s not the same person as the 30-year-old and that the 30 year old s irrational to hope that he—the same person—will live to 80?
Personally (!), I don’t share this intuition about personal identity. If I live to 1000, and at any point only remember the last 100 years, I feel that it’s still me making this journey. But I accept that some don’t see it this way.
You've sent me to Parfit, for which thanks; I've not read him. On the first point I'll concede: the relay race runs through an ordinary life too, only at a gentler gradient, and the bright line I drew is really a slope.
On personal identity I won't pretend to a settled view. That's your territory, not mine, and I'd only be renting opinions.
But .. even if I agreed that it's unmistakably you making the thousand-year trip, the question I was actually asking still stands, unanswered: what would you do with the time? This isn't metaphysical. Jeanne Calment answered it without a theory of the self—port, chocolate, the afternoon light in Arles, the company of people she liked—and my hunch is she'd have answered it the same way at 122 or 1,022. The folktale I share worries about the same thing from the other end: man wins his extra decades and spends them living like the cow, then the dog, then the owl. Not whose years they are. What they're for.
Happy to leave the self to the philosophers. I'm still stuck on the afternoons.
"If you're bored then you're boring" -Harvey Danger
I do worry what the psychological effects would be. To watch my friends, children, grandchildren, countries, civilizations, grow old and die, while I remain. I fear I would become Dr. Manhattan-esq, detached from humanity, from my humanity.
But I don't think it's anything some time volunteering at an animal shelter couldn't fix.
I want to agree with you. I almost do. So let me make the case for the one thing you wave away.
You say mortality isn’t what drives you. The house still needs cleaning, the paper still needs finishing, guests still arrive Thursday. Fair enough. But those are chores. The real discipline of a good life isn’t getting things done — it’s choosing what’s worth doing at all. And choice only matters when you can’t have everything.
In my book The Input Effect, I say it straight:
“If you live 80 years, you get about 4,000 weeks. That’s it. Maybe 1,500 of them are your prime years. Fewer, if you spend them in meetings that drain you, with people who deplete you, chasing goals you never chose.”
That number is the whole engine. I hide the wine, guard my mornings, and walk away from what drains me for one reason: the weeks are running out. Take the clock away and you don’t get freedom. You get an open bar with last call canceled — no reason to savor anything, because there’s always more.
Your point about memory is the clever one, but I think it sinks you. If every pleasure eventually feels brand new, then nothing builds. A love that survives fifty years means no more than a love that survives fifty days, because the fifty years left no mark. Forever doesn’t deepen a life. It flattens it.
Maybe immortality cures boredom. I’m not sure it survives meaning.
So I’ll ask you plainly: if the weeks never run out, what makes you spend a single one of them well?
I absolutely would be fine lolloping around in a thousand years doing absolutely nothing. Now, presuming my immortality means I survive the Big Crunch/Heat Death end of the universe phase - and I'm floating immortally in an endless vacuum of nothing, I grant that I may eventually get bored.