If you found the legendary Fountain of Youth, would you drink the water and live forever?
UWM Associate Professor of Philosophy Luca Ferrero would, if the circumstances were just right. But he would still advise you to think long and hard before taking a sip. And, really, what would motivate you to get up in an endless succession of mornings?
With a grant from the Templeton Foundation as part of The Immortality Project at University of California-Riverside, Ferrero has been wrestling with philosophical concepts of immortality and its consequences. With advances in medical sciences, some of these concepts aren’t as conjectural as you may think.
The project asked philosophers such as Ferrero to explore issues related to the possibility of immortal life. Ferrero investigated the structure of such a life in hopes of answering one important question: is living forever actually desirable?
He presented his thoughts at the project’s Capstone Conference this summer and he will write a paper for publication detailing his conjectures.
“There’s a fantasy about having an immortal life and the things it will do for us, but when we reflect on the things that are really most important to us, it turns out that they are always related necessarily to the fact that we take our lives to be finite,” Ferrero said.
All of this may seem like a thought exercise – perhaps a long-ago discussion in a dorm room – but questions about immortality and what might shape it are hugely important as science advances. Researchers are examining ways to reverse aging and extend human life. Some scientists are interested in “resurrection medicine,” in which people the legally dead are returned to life through medical intervention.
Even the difficult questions about the cost of palliative care relate to philosophy, Ferrero said.
“Should we invest and spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to extend the life of a person just for a few days?” Ferrero said. “These are actually questions that we already face, and I think it would be a lot better to reflect on them using philosophy. Because these questions involve death, a lot of people don’t want to face them. … One of the bigger drives of civilization is how we conceive of death and how we address the prospect of death.”
Ferrero thinks that there are two ways of looking at immortal life. The first is as a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. An immortal life has no end and that’s a difficult concept for human beings. But Ferrero suggests we think of an ending not as a stopping point, but as what he calls a “dynamic resolution” – a satisfying conclusion to an action before the next action begins.
We may imagine immortality if it’s like a continuous story – and we digest it in small chunks that are linked together. Think of it in musical terms.
“In harmony, you can move away to a dissonance, but at some point, the dissonance gets resolved and yet the music keeps going,” Ferrero said.
Another way is to consider the opportunities and scarcities immortality may contain. We may value certain things in life because we expect our lives to end. What if we valued these things for other reasons?
“It’s not because they are finite in time; it’s more because there are limited opportunities for action over time,” Ferrero said. “Imagine for a moment that you have a life that never ends, but is such that you face certain choices and then you can never go back. It could be careers; it could be people, places. My conjecture is that even if our life goes on forever, it’s still very recognizable given that we continue to face these kinds of choices and we might suffer permanent losses.”
But what if an immortal life has no loss? What if there is unlimited time to accomplish everything possible, so everything in the universe that is possible does ultimately occur?
“Sometimes, when people discuss immortality, they combine the idea that the life never ends with the idea that there is no scarcity and thus all options, sooner or later, will become available,” Ferrero said. “Philosophers are worried, and I am too, that if this is what immortal life were to be like, then it would be shapeless. It would be unclear what would motivate us. Why should I get up in the morning if my life is immortal and whatever I’m supposed to do this morning, I could also do at later time?”
Therefore, Ferrero said, if he encountered the Fountain of Youth, he’d have strict parameters for what would make immortal life worth living. It would have to be in a universe in which people would be able to make choices with permanent consequences, and they would have to face losses and regrets – possibilities and opportunities that slip by.
