Abstract
I suggest a way in which metaphysics might cure us of our desire for immortality. Supposing that time is composed of instants, or even that time could be composed of instants, leads to the conclusion that there is nothing good that immortality offers, nothing we might reasonably want, that is in principle unavailable to a mere mortal. My argument proceeds in three stages. First, I suggest a necessary condition for a feature to ground the desirability of a life or a portion thereof. Second, after distinguishing between three different features that could plausibly be meant by ’immortality’, I argue that if time could be composed of instants, only one of those features satisfies the necessary condition, and it evidently fails to ground the desirability of a life. Third, I argue that no feature that entails any of the three features grounds the desirability of a life either. I conclude with reflections on what this means for our longing for immortality.
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Notes
Parfit (1984, 281).
See his Letter to Menoeceus.
Of course, there have also been arguments for the conclusion that death is no evil which make no appeal to non-trivial metaphysical premises.
See, e.g., Bradley (2004).
Defining ‘categorical desire’ is no easy task; see Bradley and McDaniel (2013). However, it is clear from Williams that however it is defined, it is supposed to be the case that a categorical desire, and no other desire, would give its possessor a reason to continue living and its possessor’s continued life a point.
By ‘a life’ I mean ‘a sum of some person’s temporal parts’. (Thus, there are lives iff there are sums of people’s temporal parts; I shall assume that of necessity, ordinary objects, including people, just are sums of temporal parts, and hence, since there are people, that there are lives.)
I am here and henceforth using ‘ground’ in the sense of ‘at least partly ground’.
Although, it’s noteworthy that the conclusion of the argument Seneca (Consolation to Marcia §21) puts forward is that the length of a mortal life doesn’t contribute to how well that life went, but is consistent with the claim that immortality does so contribute.
He says that the alternative “is about as good as immortality” (Sorensen 2005, 123).
Luper (2013) characterizes the notion of cumulative good this way: a good is cumulative if and only if it is a local good that boosts the value of life as a whole more and more the longer we have it (other things being equal), where a good is local if and only if we can have it during a relatively brief period of time and, other things being equal, having it boosts our lifetime welfare level.
By ‘a portion of a life’ I mean ‘a temporal part (proper or improper) of a life’.
Lewis (1983a, nt. 16) also uses the term ‘purely extrinsic property’. But as will become clear presently, I use that term in a slightly different way than he does. See nt. 18.
Where (a) a property is intrinsic just in the case that it never differs between any (actual or possible) perfect duplicates, (b) where one property entails another if it’s not possible for something to instantiate the one but not the other, and (c) a property is trivial just in the case that necessarily, everything instantiates it.
This is equivalent to Lewis’s (1983a, nt. 16) definition of ‘purely extrinsic’.
Two things are worldmates iff they are mereologically disjoint parts of the same world.
Note that it follows from this definition that the negation of any purely extrinsic property is itself purely extrinsic.
See nt. 20.
As an anonymous referee pointed out, the world might be made better by being more populated, or populated by a greater diversity of things. But I would deny that a person’s being part of a better world just as such makes the person’s life more desirable. Any intuition to the contrary, I think, stems from an implicit assumption that the person would be interacting with others parts of the world, whether human, divine, or otherwise.
I assume throughout that it doesn’t follow from the facts that P is a desirability-grounding feature and that P entails Q that Q is a desirability-grounding feature. That assumption seems plausible enough; otherwise, every trivial property, like being such that Fermat’s Last Theorem is true, would be desirability-grounding if any property is, and that doesn’t seem right.
I write in this section as if time is made of instants, or moments. If time is not made of instants, then either every life is topologically immortal (if time is gunky) or no life is topologically immortal (if time is chunky). Since topological immortality turns out not to matter, I ignore this complication.
Indeed, it’s hard to see how anything of any moral or existential significance could hinge on whether one’s life occupies a closed or open interval of times.
I am papering over various subtle questions about the proper definition of ‘death’. For a tour de force on that issue, see the recent article by Gilmore (2013).
Sorensen’s case is an adaptation of Moore’s (1990) “Staccato Life”; in Moore’s case, the intermittent breaks are periods of unconsciousness rather than non-existence. It’s not until the next section that I will argue that someone leading a Staccato Life—and hence living for an infinite amount of time—might nevertheless be my intrinsic duplicate, so I prefer to focus on Sorensen’s case.
As Lewis (1998) puts the relevant part of the principle, “possibilities about the intrinsic natures of distinct things are independent: Melbourne could be flat and Sydney could be hilly, or Sydney could be flat and Melbourne could be hilly, or both could be flat, or both could be hilly.” More generally, any number of intrinsic natures can be instantiated in any spatiotemporal arrangement.
More formally, let \({L}_{\mathrm{n}}\) = \(\bigcup _{a_i \in \{0,2\}}\) \(\bigg [\sum _{i=1}^{n} \frac{\textit{a}_i}{3^i}\), \(\sum _{i=1}^{n} \frac{\textit{a}_i}{3^i} + \frac{1}{3^n}\bigg ]\). Then the Cantor Ternary Set = \(\bigcap _{n=1}^{\infty }\) \(I_n\).
More formally, let \({L}_{\mathrm{n}}\) = \(\bigcup _{a_i \in \{0,2\}} \bigg [\sum _{i=1}^{n} \frac{\textit{a}_i}{3^i}\), \(\sum _{i=1}^{n} \frac{\textit{a}_i}{3^i} + \frac{1}{3^n}\bigg )\). Then the Right-Open Cantor Ternary Set = \(\bigcap _{n=1}^{\infty }\) \(I_n\).
Admittedly, this is not the most illuminating argument for that conclusion. But it is short and to the point. There is a more enlightening argument, but is longer and more laborious. For the details, see my (Segal, forthcoming).
What about the property having more than one part? Doesn’t Measure-Theoretic immortality entail at least that intrinsic property? Well, I’m not sure if it does: perhaps there could be an infinitely long simple. But even if it does, I could offer an alternative, more complicated argument: the first premise would be that a property can ground the desirability of a life or a portion thereof only if it (or its negation), together with some extrinsic nature, entails an intrinsic property that contributes to the desirability of its bearer. This premise seems as plausible as the original first premise, and having more than one part—as opposed to being heterogenous—seems not to contribute to the desirability of a life or a portion thereof.
As an anonymous referee pointed out, it may be of no value to me to be prone to heart attacks but still be of great value to me to know that I am so prone. But that knowledge has only instrumental value, and I don’t deny that knowledge of one’s own immortality might have instrumental value (just like knowledge of one’s own mortality). So I should really say this: if it does you no non-instrumental good to be immortal—which is what Immortality No Ground of Desirability amounts to—then it won’t do you any non-instrumental good to be such that you couldn’t fail to be so or to know that you are. (Of course having knowledge, period, might itself be non-instrumentally valuable, and might ground the desirability of a life that includes it. But that doesn’t imply that knowing that one is immortal grounds the desirability of a life that includes it. Here we have a point analogous to the one made in nt. 23. It doesn’t follow from the facts that P is a desirability-grounding feature and that Q entails P that Q is a desirability-grounding feature. Otherwise, the conjunction of any property and a desirability grounding property would be desirability-grounding, which isn’t right. Grounding, as many have pointed out, is non-monotonic.)
To be more precise, we’d need to make explicit that the years are well-ordered, and we’d need to distinguish between different orders of infinity. Here’s the more precise definition:
(D5) ‘\({L}_{\mathrm{1}}\) is a Zenoian Alternative to \({L}_{\mathrm{2}}\)’ \(=_{\mathrm{df}}\)
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1.
\({L}_{\mathrm{2}}\) lasts for an \(\omega \)-sequence of years, and what goes on in the first year of \({L}_{\mathrm{2}}\) goes on the first half-day of \({L}_{\mathrm{1}}\), what goes in the second year of \({L}_{\mathrm{2}}\) goes on in the next quarter-day of \({L}_{\mathrm{1}}\)..., OR
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2.
\({L}_{\mathrm{2}}\) lasts for more than an \(\omega \)-sequence of years but no more than an \(\omega \) 2-sequence of years, and what goes on in the first \(\omega \)-sequence of years of \({L}_{\mathrm{2}}\) goes on the first half-day of \({L}_{\mathrm{1}}\) (in the manner described in (1)), what goes in the second \(\omega \)-sequence of years of \({L}_{\mathrm{2}}\) goes on in the next quarter-day of \({L}_{\mathrm{1}}\)..., OR
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3.
...
Note: if I’m right, then Bricker (1985) is wrong that an immortal life that lasts longer than an \(\omega \)-sequence of years is better than one that lasts an \(\omega \)-sequence of years, “all else being equal”. Indeed, “all else being equal,” neither is better than a mortal life.
Note also: for a ‘Zenoian Alternative’ to be just like the alternative God offered, ‘what goes on in the...of L’ is to be interpreted quite expansively; indeed, for simplicity, it should be interpreted in such a way as include all processes going on in L’s world, with the possible exception of the ticking of a clock in a remote part of the Universe.
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1.
Thank you to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.
Segal (2014).
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Acknowledgements
This publication was made possible by a grant from the UC-Riverside Immortality Project, funded by the John Templeton Foundation. I am most appreciative for their support. I would like to thank audiences at the Immortality Project capstone conference, the Fordham University Mind and Metaphysics Workshop, and the Hebrew University philosophy department colloquium, at which I presented versions of this paper, for their insightful comments and questions. Two anonymous referees for this journal provided invaluable feedback that certainly improved the paper, for which I am most grateful.
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Segal, A. Why Live Forever? What Metaphysics Can Contribute. Erkenn 83, 185–204 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9885-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9885-3