Why immortality is good

Terms and Conditions. Privacy Statement. Login to my Brill account Create Brill Account. In: Dialogue on Grief and Consolation. Author: Terence O'Connell. Login via Institution. Purchase instant access PDF download and unlimited online access :.

Add to Cart. PDF Preview. Save Cite Email this content Share link with colleague or librarian You can email a link to this page to a colleague or librarian:. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Table of Contents. Sign in to annotate. Delete Cancel Save. Cancel Save. View Expanded. It will get hotter. The oceans will continue to rise. There will be war, food shortages, and disease. Robots will possibly take over.

If immortality is your wish, then you must come to grips with the fact you're going to be living forever in Hell, basically. Why would anyone want to live in that world? We can leave this rock for another. We can colonize Mars! Or venture into intergalactic space, scouting for and settling Earth 2. That might very well happen. We may have no choice but to leave Earth, someday. But there is always the possibility that the next rock we land on will be shittier than the one we're already on.

And if it isn't shitty when we arrive we'll make it a wasteland soon enough, because apparently that's how we do. From there, we'll be forced to do it all over again. Once we've thoroughly gutted Earth 2. You and the rest of the immortals will face an oblivion that's miserable beyond our wildest dreams.

The point, here, is that the transhumanist dream of beating death is one of the bigger crocks of 1 Percenter horseshit I've ever heard. There is such hubris in wanting to live forever. Such entitlement. It's takes a certain pompousness to think, for whatever reason, that one's existence is so critical, so important, that one deserves—one must—exist forever.

Immortality flies right in the face of what it means to be human, which is to say, a meatsack with an expiration date. When someone says they're not afraid of anything because they're going to live forever, I call bullshit.

You want to live forever precisely because you're afraid of dying. Death sounds scary, yes. But should the gift of eternal life become universally available, and good health was guaranteed, and the drastic environmental impact of legions of immortal humans living alongside generations of their descendants was also somehow magically done away with, then I would be a Yes. There are so many lives I would have liked to live, and would still like to if I had the chance.

Of course living forever would come with all kinds of ennui, loss of purpose, diminishing drive — possibly for centuries at a time. But immortality would also bring with it room for stillness, contemplation, vast efforts and who knows what else currently unavailable to mere mortals.

If you beat him at chess — so the legend goes — he has to let you go. You, as the agent, can try to stay in control. This is because desiring immortality might not simply be about having a desire to live forever. It might instead be a desire to control when we ourselves will die , choosing to end it all only when — and not before — we ourselves are ready. Bhishma cannot die until he wills it — but that does not preclude him from later falling in battle at the hands of Arjuna, finding himself incapacitated on a bed of arrows.

Still, even when so incapacitated, Bhishma is not yet ready to die. He elects first to lie on the field of battle and pass on his wisdom to Yudhishthira, until he has decided that the time has come for him to depart. Bhishma prepares himself for death, and when he is ready, draws his life to a close. And the contrast with immortality as being somehow unable to die is clear. Had Bhishma been impaled on the bed of arrows while being unable to die — and hence presumably having to stay there forever — he would certainly have laboured under a curse.

As it is, things were different. Too early, if we are not yet ready to go. Indeed, we hardly need philosophers to convince us that, for many people, there are fates worse than death: assisted dying clinics in countries such as Switzerland demonstrate that many people will choose to die rather than carry on in gross physical pain or continued indignity, especially when there is no prospect of recovery.

It is a striking feature, however, of most societies that they deny people the choice to die at the very point when they most rationally desire it. Immortality is, obviously enough, an impossible fantasy — hence it cannot be a genuine solution to the unfortunate yet elemental facts of the human condition, nor an answer to the fraught complexities surrounding euthanasia as regards both social policy and moral judgment. Nonetheless, the reason such a fantasy endures in popular imagination — as well as being a target for philosophical reflection — is that it taps into something important about our attitudes towards death.

We are not simply afraid of death, we also resent it, because it is experienced as an assault on our personal agency. We can fully control our own deaths in only one direction — and that, of course, is usually no comfort at all. As with so many things in life, death turns out to be more complicated than it first appears. Modern biomedicine sees the body as a closed mechanistic system. But illness shows us to be permeable, ecological beings.

Nitin K Ahuja. Thinkers and theories.