by Andrew Stark
Think of the lover in Andrew Marvell’s famous poem of seduction. If his mistress and he were immortal, the lover says, then the two of them would have all the time in the world to luxuriate in teasing and titillating each other.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest
Caressing his mistress’s breasts every night for eternity, the lover seems to realize, would risk becoming tedious. He’d have to spread things out a bit, say a caressing once every fifty thousand years, to avoid boredom. But if after fifty thousand years the caressing then lasted for the current mortal norm of only (say) fifteen minutes, it wouldn’t have sufficient weight in the lover’s experience to combat nostalgia for caresses past. Nor would it have enough substance to form an ongoing and significant thread in his life, warding off self-alienation. That’s why, as the lover says, a proper caress should take two hundred years. A mere quarter of an hour, and it would be such a small pinpoint in an immortal life that it would fail to satisfy any nostalgia for previous moments of intimacy or assume the role of a meaningful, self-constituting event.
So for us to avoid boredom, nostalgia, and self-alienation, everything in our immortal life would have to lengthen in time accordingly, the caressing of breasts and all else in the intervals in between. We would live the same lives as we do now, only in slow motion: just as Marvell’s lover proposes.
But then if everything really did “slow down” proportionately, what would we have gained? As the philosopher Frank Arntzenius observes, “It does not make much sense to suppose that if everything in the world were to speed up uniformly it would change my mental state.”6 Likewise, presumably, if everything were to slow down uniformly. An immortal’s experience of immortality, on this “slow it down” scenario, might elude paralytic boredom, rupturing self-alienation and intolerable nostalgia. But that’s because it wouldn’t differ from our experience of mortal life as it is.
Ramp It Up
In any case, this kind of immortal life—an unlimited life span that somehow contains the same number of events as a mortal life, with each event elongated accordingly, and which would feel effectively like a mortal life—is not on the table. So Marvell’s lover proposes an intriguing alternative: yet another fantasy of immortality.
Take our limited life span as it is. And then radically ramp up the number of events it contains. Don’t waste even a second. And in that way, by cramming into a mortal life all of the experiences you would get in an immortal life, you would feel as if you have lived one. This is what the lover means with his concluding proposal to his mistress: “Though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make him run.”
The sun—its rising and its setting—is what we use to mark the passage of the daily cycle. By “making the sun run,” the lover and his mistress would simply speed that daily cycle up. They would, in other words, break the normal equation between the day as marked by the sun’s rising and setting and the day as marked in another common way: by the passing of twenty-four hours. Lover and mistress would seek to pack more and more sunrise-to-sunset days into a twenty-four-hour day. That’s what it means to make the sun run.
Of course, it’s impossible to literally make the sun rise and set more quickly. The sun’s run from morning to night is simply a metaphor for our everyday circuit of events. So instead of sunrise, think morning coffee. Instead of sunset, think evening nightcap. And then think of all the events in between, whether dallying with one’s amour, carousing with one’s friends, playing with one’s children, jesting with one’s colleagues, closing a corporate acquisition, or hiking a mountain trail. What the lover is saying is: ramp it up. Jam, say, seven of these coffee-dalliance-carousing-playing-jesting-closing-hiking-nightcap cycles—each representing a day’s events—into a twenty-four-hour period. It will now take seven such coffee-to-nightcap days, instead of just one, for us to complete a twenty-four-hour day.
Then (so Marvell’s lover asks) would we not in effect have slowed time down? Won’t each single day now stretch out and feel like a week? Won’t we have made our lives seem 700 percent longer?
Consider an analogy. Suppose that, instead of taking one day to travel two hundred and forty miles across the state, you decide to take seven days to do so. You will have slowed things down. The trip will last longer. Likewise, suppose that instead of taking one coffee-to-nightcap day to pass a twenty-four-hour day, lover and mistress now take seven coffee-to-nightcap days to do so. Haven’t they slowed time down, at least as they experience it? Won’t each twenty-four-hour day—and thus their mortal life—seem that much longer? And what if they ramp things up still further, packing seventy or seven hundred or seven thousand coffee-nightcap days into a twenty-four-hour day? Then will they not slow their mortal life down to the point where it will resemble an immortal one? It’s a lovely thought, and one that many of us entertain: we can come closer to immortality the more we pack into our mortal lives.7
But of course that’s not what will happen, as anyone knows who has tried to pack more and more events into a limited period of time. What happens is that things don’t slow down. They speed up.
Think of certain kinds of vacations, such as a ski trip, or a holiday at Disney World with the kids. During such periods, the psychologist Douwe Draaisma observes, we often experience “quick days”: twenty-four-hour days that do not slow down but fly by at the time. And they do so precisely because we are packing them with several normal days’ worth of events.8 What Marvell’s lover proposes, namely making the sun run, thus won’t—as he thinks—slow life down till it seems endless. It will speed life up till it seems like the blink of an eye. True, such a life will defeat boredom, nostalgia, and self-alienation, simply because it will go by in a flash. But it won’t feel immortal. Just the opposite.
What’s interesting, though, is the nature of the mistaken assumption that underlies the lover’s proposition.
The lover relies on a false analogy. As hours are to miles, he reasons, so events are to days. The more hours it takes you to pass through a mile, the slower the journey goes. Likewise, the more events it takes you to pass through the day, the slower the day goes.
In fact, though, it is not hours—but objects—that are to miles what events are to days. The more objects you cram into a mile, the less space there is for any one of them. And the space itself seems ever tighter. In the same way, the more events you cram into a day, the less time it takes to go through any one of them. And the day itself seems ever briefer. Events are not time’s units, such that the more we put into each day the longer that day will seem. No, events are time’s contents, such that the more we pack into each day the quicker the pace of life becomes—and the shorter the day will seem.9
I think here of the courageous Chinese dissident Yang Zili, whom I once met, and a prison story he told me. Jailed for eight years because he launched a reading group with a few friends, Yang was incarcerated in a single room that housed a large number of prisoners, all of whom slept next to each other on a sizable wooden board. The chief prisoner and his assistant—appointed by the guards to govern the cell—apportioned half the board for just themselves and, erecting a divider, left the remaining half for all the rest, who, because of their number, had to sleep on their sides, crammed up against each other like sardines.
One day a new prisoner arrived. But there seemed to be no room for him unless the chief and his assistant relinquished some of their space. This they were not prepared to do. Instead, at bedtime the chief directed the new inmate to the other prisoners’ side of the divider. He then instructed the newcomer to lie on top of two of the prisoners, parallel to them in the groove where their bodies met. And the chief then pounded him like a wedge till the new arrival squeezed between them.
The temporal equivalent of that spatial experience is what awaits us, if we make the sun run ever faster.10
Flow
One final optimistic scenario for immortality, which I will credit to the philosopher Nick Bostrom: assume that you are not only immortal, but also vastly more intelligent than you are now. If you are a superintelligent immortal, Bostrom says,
each day is a joy . . . you play a certain new kind of game which combines [virtual-reality] artistic expression, dance, humor, interpersonal dynamics, and various novel faculties and the emergent phenomena they make possible. . . . When you are playing this game with your friends, you feel how every fibre of your body and mind is stretched to its limit in the most creative and imaginative way.11
A fine balance: You are stretched to the limit, rendered neither so slack that you lose interest nor so taut that you snap.
What Bostrom describes resembles what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a state of “flow” or “optimal experience.” In flow situations, Csikszentmihalyi says, we encounter challenges that are not so same-old/same-old as to numb us with boredom. But nor do those challenges lie so far beyond the pale of our experience as to make us nostalgic for something more familiar. And in this state of fine balance, Csikszentmihalyi tells us, the “sense of time disappears. You forget yourself . . . feeling so focused on the present that you lose track of time passing.”12 After all, you have no inclination to let your mind wander either to the past (you’re not nostalgic) or to the future (you’re not bored) or to yourself (and so any self-alienation is a nonissue). “Time seems to fall away” in flow, the psychologist Kendra Cherry says, and we experience “a loss of self-consciousness.”13 Csikszentmihalyi quotes a rock climber on this point. In flow, “you are so involved in what you are doing [that] you aren’t thinking of yourself as separate from the immediate activity. . . . You don’t see yourself as separate from what you are doing.”14
To abide in such a permanent sweet spot, so focused on the moment that all thoughts of self and time disappear, may well be a happy circumstance. But it’s not one compatible with what I am here taking to be a keynote of the human condition: the sense we very much have of both self and time and, in particular, of being selves moving ever forward in time. After all, it’s precisely our selves who, moving second by second in time toward our deaths, cry out for a reprieve from mortality.
Now suppose that that reprieve is granted. Suppose that we became immortal. But suppose too that we also became superintelligent. Immersed (as Bostrom says) in the “joy” of flow, we would no longer have any sense of self or of time passing. Certainly then we would not feel immortal. To do that we would need a sense of our selves persisting on in time. And continuous flow precludes that sense. As Michael Frayn says in his novel A Landing on the Sun, the “pleasure” that comes from “complete absorption in some conceptual problem . . . was precisely . . . the loss of all sense of self.”15 But isn’t the loss of self a kind of death?
Of course, superintelligent immortals could always periodically emerge from flow. But then immortality would not be the heaven that Bostrom conjures up. Combining change and continuity in just the right mixture, flow ensures that you are neither bored by too much continuity nor rendered nostalgic by too much change. If, though, we fail to combine the challenging and the familiar in just the right way, then instead of heaven we will get hell. David Foster Wallace understood this. Require “a fellow . . . to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him think, but still rote,” Wallace warns, and then “just leave the man there to his mind’s devices.”16 In other words, assign him tasks challenging enough to keep him awake but familiar enough to make him desperately want to go to sleep. And then see what misery—the furthest thing from the heaven promised by flow—results. And Wallace was not even talking about an immortal hell, only a mortal one.
For however long it could be sustained, endless superintelligent flow might well be idyllic. Superintelligent immortals would constantly be “in the moment.” But that’s because all concern with self and time, and in that sense the difference between immortality and mortality, would have become irrelevant to them.17
*
No one, of course, can say what immortality, or even the for-all-intents-and-purposes immortality of much greater longevity, would be like. What Joan Didion calls “magical thinking” applies as much when we imagine that mortal creatures like us are immortal as when we pretend that dead people are alive.
But given what little we know, one thing merits pondering. It does seem that each of the major benign scenarios for immortality ultimately relies on a fantastic assumption, whether about our selves or about the moments of our lives.
One benign immortality scenario assumes that we would no longer be selves who moved relentlessly forward in time. Instead, our self would turn into a kind of liquid, dissolving into time’s flow, becoming simply whatever it is doing at the present moment. Absorbed totally in the present instant, we’d experience neither boredom—which comes from the accumulating weight of the past—nor nostalgia, which emerges from the unending strangeness of the future. Both would fall away in this scenario for a blissful immortality.
In another benign immortality scenario, the self would also cease moving forward in time. But in this case it would simply expand like an accordion to encompass any measure of time. Merely by slowing things down as much as necessary to match its ever-lengthening life span—taking a hundred years to gaze upon a forehead or two hundred to adore a breast—an immortal self could remain just as coherent as a mortal one.
Another benign immortality scenario needs to assume that the experiences of our lives would no longer slip, moment by moment, relentlessly backward in time. Instead, they’d subsist in time the way objects do in space. We could perpetually keep them as close as we’d like to ward off nostalgia. But we could also rush away from them as fast as we liked the instant they came to bore us.
On a final benign scenario the experiences of our lives would, by ramping up to a pace that approaches infinite speed, in effect cease moving backward in time. But in this case, they themselves would become the very units we would use to measure time. The more of them we compressed into our own mortal life, the longer—the closer to immortality—it would seem.
Unfortunately, each of these benign scenarios for immortality is outlandish. Each offers us endlessness reflected through a fun-house mirror. The self as a flowing liquid, dissolving in time. Experiences as solid objects, subsisting in time. The self expanding to encompass any measure of time. Experiences compressing and then becoming measures of time. If we have to rely on such convolutions to make immortality attractive, what does that say? And so I find them impossible finally to accept. They ask far too much of us: we who are recognizably human, who unavoidably see our selves as moving forward relentlessly in time—neither dissolving nor expanding in it—while the experiences of our lives flow remorselessly backward in time: neither subsisting nor compressing in it.18
For us, the only immortality scenarios on offer seem, sooner or later, utterly malignant. Each possible combination between our selves moving continually onward in time, and the events of our life moving ceaselessly backward in time, seems to carry storm clouds. Boredom if that onward-moving self and those backward-moving events at one point cease to change. Recurrent self-alienation if both self and events do endlessly change. Nostalgia if our self doesn’t change, immured in old memories, attachments, and desires, while the events of our life ceaselessly do. And—although I won’t explore this here—a kind of dementia if our self does continue to change, regularly jettisoning its previous memories and attachments and desires, while the events of our life no longer do. After all, when we try to think of people whose memories regularly empty out, who relinquish their previous emotional attachments, and whose desires wander erratically—but whose life events repeat themselves over and over—it’s those afflicted with a kind of late-life dementia who come the closest.
But all of this is actually good news. It means we can be consoled by the thought that mortality has its blessings because immortality, for all we
know now, would be a terrible curse. In Part Four, though, I consider one final matter: whether the losses we sustain due to death might actually be no worse than those we regularly suffer due to life itself anyway. “To lose . . . power, love, a friend—all are deaths,” Michael Oakeshott writes, and “they are felt & suffered as deaths . . . these lesser deaths, the mortal material of our life—are the worst.”19 Perhaps life itself, with all its unpredictable ravages, sooner or later imposes each of the kinds of losses that death itself metes out. Life’s losses intimate death’s. If that’s true, then that consoles us about death. The thought doesn’t comfort us, perhaps, but it consoles us. Or so it’s said.
But first, a brief interlude.
interlude
MORTALITY VERSUS IMMORTALITY: WHY NOT THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE?
Some writers—the philosopher Jay Rosenberg, for example—have argued that the sharp dichotomy between mortality and immortality, as I have posed it throughout this book, is a false one. Preferable to either option would be a world in which we could, but did not have to, live forever. We would each enjoy life for as long as possible and then, if and when existence began to permanently pall, we would simply end it through some painless form of suicide.1 We’d have a long life, maybe a hundreds-or-thousands-of-millennia-long life, depending on our preferences. And then whenever things started going sour, we’d bail out. The best of both worlds, life and death. Or, more exactly, a happy life, eons long, capped by a short end-period of unhappiness that would prompt us to terminate it before things got much worse. Clearly that would be preferable to either unavoidable mortality or compulsory immortality. Call this scenario “option immortality.”
I wonder, however, whether option immortality, though perhaps preferable, is psychologically open to us. For us to be willing to terminate a happy life of great longevity, wouldn’t it have to get so much worse at the end that it would outweigh all the good that came before? So that it would then no longer seem, in retrospect and on balance, to have been a happy life?
