Everyone wants to live longer (I assume), but infinity changes any question. Can life really be good enough for us to want to live forever? Can our fulfilment outweigh our suffering? For the Buddhists life is suffering. You’d definitely not want to live forever. But, it would give you more time to find enlightenment if your physical self could life forever. Religious ideology aside, it’s an interesting question.
Personally, I want to beat death. Why? I think the better question is: why not? There is no reason to want to die, especially if everyone else you care about will also live forever. Even if it was just you, I think there are very compelling reasons or at least compelling ways of looking at life and death such that death ought to be beaten.
The “death gives life meaning” argument is the worst argument one can propose as a proponent of death. This is the point where I interject and tell you to look at how stupid “proponent of death” looks, even if (read: though) my choice of language is loaded with bias. Death does not give meaning to life. I’ve never heard anyone’s eulogy state they’ve now found meaning in life. No. They’re dead, they cannot conceptualise meaning, let alone find it. Oh, but maybe you mean that death, being nothingness, is how we start and end, and if there is no such end, is there ever a start? Or drawing the same conclusions the naturalistic way, that we don’t live forever and therefore shouldn’t i.e. we need an end to be associated with a start. The hypocrisy of this is unbearable. The only people who can get away with being pro-death are Luddite masochists. Technology was not natural, it’s still around, therefore it should “die”, but it hasn’t and it doesn’t look like it will anytime soon.
Ah, but technology is a concept or a group of related individual items. The iPhone 3 has died. It has created room for future generations. It has evolved. The iPhone X is now here. There is therefore nothing inconsistent in supporting technology and being pro-death. But why then can’t we evolve as the iPhone does and become amortal? You may say that it’s different, and I would agree. A new iPhone is created, killing its predecessor. For us, nothing will die in our wake, we get better at an individual rather than a group level. I can’t see any moral problems there. Perhaps nothing died in order for us to continue? Or that as individuals we don’t die and it’s therefore unnatural?
What about the “bad person” argument. If bad people live forever, and they keep their secret serum a secret then we will never be able to break the chains of tyranny! What if a good person lives forever? It’s much more likely. This argument could be used against any technology which is exactly why it’s a bad argument. We would have nothing if we were trying to stop bad people from getting anything that may benefit them; since it likely also benefits us. We don’t stop filtering water because if a bad person possesses clean water they will be more hydrated and less likely to get diseases from dirty water.
I’d like to return to the notion of “natural”. There is a serious flaw to the naturalistic line of argumentation. Here’s an example naturalistic argument: Death is natural. We should keep natural order. Cancer is natural. Therefore we should keep cancer. This is where the masochist idea becomes evident. You really have to enjoy the thought of having cancer in order to be a pure naturalist. Though maybe not. There is a difference between death and cancer. Perhaps we should stop cancer because it causes suffering, death does not cause suffering. That’s true too, but that only puts cancer as a “bad” and death as neutral at best. Let’s assume the best then. Let’s say death is neutral. We still must attempt to remove all suffering. That means removing any painful disease, all cancers, heart attacks, alzheimers etc. I’m unaware of any natural causes of death that don’t cause some degree of suffering. Removing all this suffering would cause one to live indefinitely anyway. But, let’s suppose there is a painless disease that causes no suffering for the individual. Ought they to die, even if the disease is known to be present? Say they are to let die. Imagine the suffering caused for everyone else that cared about them.
Suffering for everyone else is probably the best argument against amortalism. Suppose nobody can die from natural causes. Now suppose your best friend dies in a car accident. Is it more or less tragic that they lose a massive life-potential vs. an 80 year existence? I’m inclined to say it’s no different. The fact they lose their life’s potential is counterbalanced by the fact they are a blip in your (potentially) infinite existence. This thought process is similar to star-gazing therapy, where by looking at the stars and realising/considering one’s insignificance, anxiety dissipates.
What about the more pragmatic of challenges. Over-population. We just need better technology to support a growing population. Colonisation of Mars is near and from there we are officially multi-planetary.
Let’s hope that technology will take us to some unprecedented levels of life-expectancy, and that Draconian dictators are not the only ones who solve the problem of death!
