Immortality

by Stephen Cave

  And if we look at it from the original Frank’s perspective, it is even clearer that he cannot be both of them. Imagine he sees one of the plane’s engines catch fire and knows he is about to die. He remembers that he has recently been scanned and so thinks that he need not worry about dying high over the ocean, as his psychology will simply be transferred to a new brain and body. He is reassured, believing he can reasonably look forward to waking up in the new body, just as he might look forward to waking up from a night’s sleep—that, after all, is what we would usually expect if someone told us that we were going to live on.

  But the factory has produced two new Franks. We can imagine that Frank 2b on emerging from the factory is shocked to see a mirror image of himself on the other side of the road and accidentally walks into an oncoming car, causing terrible pain and injury, while Frank 2a looks on. If it were true that Frank is both Frank 2a and Frank 2b, then this means he would experience both being hit by a car, as happens to Frank 2b, and seeing the collision from the other side of the road, as happens to Frank 2a. But there is no person having both of these experiences. Indeed, these experiences are mutually exclusive—one cannot simultaneously both be in terrible pain and not in terrible pain.

  So Frank cannot be both of his replacements. Is he, then, just one of them? But how could this be? The relationship between Frank and Frank 2a is just the same as the relationship between Frank and Frank 2b. Both new Franks have just the same claim to be the original—there is no reason to think Frank might be one of them rather than the other. The immortalist could perhaps try to argue that Frank is whichever was produced first—but we can just as easily imagine that the factory produced them simultaneously, so this argument won’t work either.

  Yet if Frank is not both of them and not either of them, then he must be neither of them. In other words, he has not really survived at all. It looks very much like the immortality factory has not actually resurrected Frank but just produced two duplicates of him. It is as if someone made two new versions of a Vincent van Gogh painting that had been burned to ashes: no matter how true to the original they were, we would not think that van Gogh’s work had come back into existence. And if someone tried to claim that the two new paintings really were the original, we would consider that person a fraudster.

  To make this problem for the Replication View even clearer, let us imagine a slightly different malfunction: the message is sent to the immortality factory that Frank is about to die, but then the plane suddenly rights itself, and he does not die after all. But the factory has already started producing Frank 2, who duly rolls out of the machine based on Frank’s latest brain scan. Now Frank has survived his flight, and he has not even noticed that a replica was being produced of him in the distant factory—it has had no direct impact on him at all. Frank might not find out that he has been replicated until he returns home from his travels to find Frank 2 in bed with his wife. In this case, in which the original Frank still exists, it is clear that the factory has just made a copy of him—so let us call this the Copying Case.

  The relationship of this copy to the original Frank would be like that of identical twins—they would be extremely similar, but they would not literally be the same single individual. If Frank was about to die, it might provide some consolation for him to find out that his duplicate was living happily in Peru—Frank could even telephone him to be reassured that Frank 2 would continue his life’s work for him or look after his children. But Frank would not when he died literally become Frank 2; he would not literally live on as him, any more than someone literally lives on as his or her identical twin.

  In all these cases, the relationship between the original Frank and the new Franks is exactly the same—the new ones are freshly minted persons made to the mold of Frank’s psychology. But what the Duplicate Case and the Copying Case show is that this relationship of psychological similarity does not suffice to make Frank literally exactly the same person as the replica. And if this relationship does not suffice to guarantee literal identity in these cases, then we have no reason to think it would guarantee literal identity in the original, straightforward case, where Frank dies and a single new version rolls out of the factory. What the immortality factory does is produce copies, just as much as if it were to produce copies of a van Gogh painting.

  Which means you could not evade death by having your mind uploaded onto a hard drive and downloaded onto an avatar or a new body after all. The problems with digital immortality, computational resurrection and immortality factories are not merely technological: they are also conceptual. These would all just be high-tech ways of producing a counterfeit you. When you closed your eyes on your deathbed, you could not expect to open them again in silicon form. Even if DigiGod made a perfect copy of you at the end of time, it would be exactly that: a copy, an entirely new person who just happened to have the same memories and beliefs as you.

  Which is bad news for techno-utopians and science fiction fans. This kind of replication is very common in sci-fi—for example, in the classic series Star Trek, it is the main mode of transport. Called “beaming,” it involves Captain Kirk and his colleagues being “converted into energy,” then “rematerialized” at the target destination. One real-life theoretical physicist and futurist, Professor Michio Kaku, has predicted that such a technology could really be attainable within a century. But there is a snag: “converting someone into energy”—which is taken to involve at the very least pulling him apart into individual atoms—would, by any reckoning, kill him. This might be forgivable if he was then genuinely resurrected at his destination, when his atoms were put back together again. But we have seen that such a reconstructed person is really only a replica—a copy, like an identical twin, not literally the same person come back to life. The tragic truth is that Captain Kirk, poor man, died a long time ago—and countless duplicates of him have gone the same way since.

  Many philosophers consider the Duplication Problem to be an insurmountable obstacle to accepting anything like the Replication View of resurrection. But if that is so, then there is no plausible account of resurrection. There is a deep reason for this, which is also the true lesson of the Duplication Problem. All versions of the Resurrection Narrative start out by accepting that we really do die and decay. But it is very difficult to make sense of how someone can return from this kind of utter extinction. The first route to immortality—Staying Alive—straightforwardly avoided this problem. And the third narrative form, which we will explore next, claims that although our bodies die and rot, our souls live on, so we do not really die at all. Resurrection is alone in taking death on the chin—and this is the problem: most philosophers believe that if something has completely ceased to exist—like a person who has died and rotted or a painting that has been burned—then any new version that is made, however similar, is nothing more than a copy.

  Even many Christian philosophers who actually believe that we will all be resurrected recognize this problem. They have therefore tried to come up with imaginative theories that deny the apparent fact that we die and rot—one respected philosopher, for example, has argued that for resurrection to work, God must actually steal our real bodies just before we are about to die and store them somewhere in suspended animation to be reawakened on Judgment Day. The corpses we see rotting or being cremated are fakes that God leaves in place of the real thing. Alas, the philosopher in question does not explain why no one has ever seen a dying person being carried off to the storage space in the sky (or wherever it is), or why God would want to be an arch-deceiver. Needless to say, this view has not gained widespread acceptance. If it is the best account of resurrection going, then it is no wonder that millions have set their hopes on a soul instead.

  This problem of the identity of the resurrected person is also reflected obliquely in the Resurrection Narrative’s dystopian side. Ample works of film and fiction spin a story of what happens when your once-friendly neighbor rises from the earth, not as his wisecracking old self but as a
shambling, blood-hungry monster. Mindless, soulless and infested with maggots, such reanimated creatures are, of course, zombies. They are the true children of Frankenstein, a countercultural mockery of our claims to master life and death. Their message from the other side is that we lack the power, wisdom and maturity to conquer the grave and that what is dead and buried is better left that way.

  THE LIFE WITHIN

  THE dream of rising again haunts the human imagination. Throughout history, many immortality narratives have promised that death need only be temporary and that we will have a second shot at life. This dream of Resurrection, the second fundamental form of immortality narrative, has forged new faiths and is helping to drive forward our current technological revolution. Its intuitive appeal is in reflecting the natural cycles of life, death and rebirth that humans have long observed all around them. This has provided the basis of countless religions and rituals—including the Abrahamic tradition that has so much shaped the world today.

  But the distinctive strategy resurrection offers for overcoming the Mortality Paradox is also its weakness. We have seen that in accepting that we really do die—denying only that it need last forever—the Resurrection Narrative runs headlong into a conceptual quagmire. The lesson both of Frankenstein and of philosophy is that the resurrection world would not be a paradise of happy reunions but more akin to a land of doppelgängers and zombies.

  Awareness of these problems, in one form or another, is as old as the belief in resurrection itself. We saw in chapter 4 that the early Christians had great difficulty in persuading the sophisticated Greeks that they would bodily rise again. We would do well to follow the Greeks’ example and be equally skeptical about the offers of digital immortality that promise you could soon be transferring your mind to a new and improved silicon body.

  Many of those who recognize the frailties of the body and are skeptical of its capacity to die and rise again have therefore turned to another vehicle for eternal life: the soul. Most people on earth think they have one, and most of those think it will take them to an afterlife. And many hold the view, passionately advocated by many ancient Greeks, that the life of the soul is a much nobler thing than the messy life of the flesh—a view clearly expressed by Mary Shelley in yet another of her meditations on eternal life, “The Mortal Immortal”:

  I yield this body, too tenacious a cage for the soul which thirsts for freedom, to the destructive elements of air and water … and, by scattering and annihilating the atoms that compose my frame, set at liberty the life imprisoned within, and so cruelly prevented from soaring from this dim Earth to a sphere more congenial to its immortal essence.

  In the next two chapters we will see how the idea of the soul has shaped civilization and whether it does indeed provide us with an immortal essence. We will begin in heaven, then pass through purgatory and hell on our way once again to the most modern laboratories. And for the first part of our journey, we will take as our guide that master of the afterlife Dante Alighieri.

  6

  BEATRICE’S SMILE

  WHAT HAPPENS IN PARADISE

  IN the manner of young Italian poets, Dante Alighieri was deeply in love. That he had seen the object of his adoration only a handful of times only fueled his ardor. At their first meeting they were both children: “She appeared to me dressed in a most noble color, a rich and subdued red, tied and adorned in a manner becoming to her very tender age,” he later recalled. Her tender age was eight, and she was Beatrice Portinari, daughter of a wealthy banker; Dante was nine but evidently old enough to experience the most burning passion.

  Nine years later, he came across her on a street in his native Florence, then an independent city-state; as he timidly stared, she glanced over and politely greeted him, at which point he immediately “saw all the bounds of bliss.” This modest salutation sent the love-stricken young man into such paroxysms of passion that he had visions of the god of love feeding his flaming heart to the seminaked Beatrice. So consumed was he with thoughts of his lady that he began to waste away, and only the writing of sonnets could give him solace.

  But then something happened that was not in the script of courtly romance that Dante had earnestly been following: Beatrice died. She was just twenty-four and had recently married another man when “the Lord of Justice called this most gentle one to glory.” Dante wept until he could weep no more, writing that the whole of his beloved Florence seemed to him “left as if widowed.”

  For the young lyricist deprived of his muse, this seemed a tragedy. Who now would inspire his verses? The answer came to him in “a miraculous vision”: Beatrice was not dead and gone but with him, the Lord of the Heavens. Her soul lived on and, freed of its earthly shackles, was purer and more beautiful than ever. This was surely a worthy subject for the ambitious poet. No longer needing to be true to a living image, his artistic imagination was free to take his idol to a whole new realm. Dante undertook “to write of her what had never before been written of any woman.” And that is exactly what he did, in an epic account of the life of the soul that shaped Western ideas of the hereafter for generations to come.

  THE SOUL ASCENDING

  NO one likes to imagine their loved ones simply rotting in the grave. But this is what the Resurrection Narrative has in store for them, until God or science should summon them to live again. We have seen, however, that these stories are not only unsatisfactory for their zombie-movie undercurrents—they also have deep-reaching philosophical difficulties.

  The problems of resurrection are largely those of ensuring the deceased and the risen again really are the same person. The solution to these problems leads naturally on to the third fundamental form of immortality narrative: the Soul. The soul bridges the gap between this world and the next; it keeps an essential part of us out of the grave even when our bodies fail and permits us to fly directly to the next world without an embarrassing interim as a hapless pile of bones.

  The soul hypothesis has proven intellectually and emotionally satisfying for countless cultures across the globe. Even in today’s increasingly secular and scientific world, it remains hugely attractive: in America, for example, 71 percent of people believe they have one, whereas Europeans are only slightly more skeptical—in the UK and Germany, for example, polls suggest around 60 percent of people believe in a soul. In Africa and India, that figure is much higher—over 90 percent in India, and close to 100 percent in, for example, Nigeria. And even in communist or former communist countries, despite decades of official atheism, millions believe they have a soul. All in all, the overwhelming majority of the world’s nearly seven billion inhabitants subscribe to this particular immortality narrative.

  In the next chapter, we will look at whether these billions of people are right. But first, we will look at how the soul emerged from the murky world of the mystery cult to become perhaps the most influential single idea in the history of Western civilization. We will look at how the Soul Narrative succeeds in flattering our aspirational side with its promise of transcendence and how it has given us a sense of self that has fostered individualism, democracy and the demands for rights, equality and freedom that have shaped the modern age.

  Of all the narratives, the Soul should be best able to deliver an immortality worth having. It promises an eternal life that takes place in a fantastical realm—whether heaven or hell, the halls of Valhalla or the Isles of the Blessed. This has provided visionaries and poets with the chance to imagine an ideal afterlife, without the limitations of physical existence. In this chapter, we will examine some of these visions to see if they offer an eternity to die for.

  • • •

  THE idea of the soul is both ancient and intuitive. It claims that there is some part of you that is spiritual or immaterial in nature—and that this part is the real you. Being immaterial, this soul is not subject to decay and destruction like your physical frame, and so when your body dies, your soul can continue its journey—to the next life and immortality.

  In dreams
and visions, people of many cultures have had what seemed like the experience of floating free of their physical self to visit other places and times. They often regarded this as evidence that their real essence was some spiritual thing that can function independently of their fleshly frame. This incorporeal self goes by many names, with accompanying variations in the account: astral body, subtle body or etheric body; psyche, pneuma or mind; ghost or spirit. But wherever we find the belief that the real you is separate from your body and can outlive it, we have the Soul Narrative.

  Many cultures ritualized these experiences of dreams and visions, enhancing their meaning as journeys to the spirit world, where wisdom and power were sought and natural limits could be overcome. But their ideas of the soul were not necessarily much like the ideas prevalent today. The Egyptians, for example, believed in two souls, which played subtly different roles in making up a human. Such notions of multiple or composite souls were common; to many ancient peoples it seemed obvious that such faculties as breath, consciousness, intellect and appetite were all essential to human life yet were nonphysical and therefore dependent on different spiritlike aspects of the self. As not all of these “souls” were immortal by nature, the postmortem life of the spirit was inevitably shadowy and incomplete.

  In the Greek-speaking world, one movement in particular led the way in uniting these disparate elements of the self: the mystery cults, which we mentioned earlier as offering the participant a chance to become one with their deity. They believed their rituals would bring them a happy and full afterlife, in explicit contrast to the dark and partial existence that awaited the uninitiated. Instead of going to dank, dark Hades, their souls would rise up to the stars to live with the gods. These cults were very influential in certain educated circles, and one thinker who came under this influence was Plato.