Why do we have this compelling, addictive interest in the idea of living forever?
It’s a human universal. Among all of the animals, we probably uniquely are aware that we’re going to die. We try to avoid the worst, to keep going one way or another, yet we must live in the knowledge that it is futile – that ultimately, the worst thing that can possibly happen will happen. That all our projects and all our dreams, everything we’re striving for, one day it will all be over. And this is terrifying. So we are very keen to hear any story that can allay this fear and say death isn’t what it seems, and we can just keep on going indefinitely.
In your book Immortality, just out, you identify four paths to that goal. Will you take us through them?
These four paths are, I think, the only ways in which we can imagine living forever. They have a logical relationship that takes us from one to the next. The first one is simply living on, in this body and on this earth. That might seem a rather implausible idea initially, given the success rate of it during history, but almost every culture dreams of this in one way or another – whether through an elixir of life or biotech.
If we think that isn’t likely to work, and we need a plan B, the next step is to think maybe this body that has to die can nonetheless rise again and live for a second time. This is the hope that we can be resurrected, and it has played an important role in various religions, in particular Christianity, Islam and ancient Egypt. We have modern conceptions of this too, such as cryonics – the idea that we can freeze our corpses and revive them at some later point.
But if you think this physical body is too unreliable, that ultimately we will crumble from disease and ageing, then you want instead an immaterial thing that is immune to all this. This is the third path, the belief in the soul. Something pure, some spark of the divine that won’t age or succumb to disease, that we can live on through. Belief in the soul is probably the most widespread of all the immortality narratives, but it too has problems from the philosophical perspective.
And for those who don’t believe in anything as definite as an immaterial soul that can preserve our personality, then there is the more indirect route to immortality of legacy, which is the fourth route. There are different forms of legacy – biological legacy, in our genes and children, or cultural legacy, living on through our works and fame. Every culture has some kind of story about why death is not the end. And this story will draw on one or more of these four fundamental forms of how we might live forever.
by Stephen Cave, The Browser | Read more:
Illustration: Florian Prischl. The Ladder of Divine Ascent
