I'm providing the abstract from my essay on the philosophy of death:
In this essay, I argue that an immortal existence could be desirable. Taking the accounts of Williams and Smuts under careful consideration, I agree with Fischer that an immortal existence could be gratifying. When Fischer argues that it is unfair for Williams to posit that an immortal life must have self-exhausting pleasures and, overall, a better experience than mortal life, he gets to the crux of the argument for immortality: as long as there are positive categorical desires for the individual, then such life-affirming desires will provide an impetus to carry on. In moving past the Teiresias model of a phenomenon that retains memories while changing characters, I argue that a life of intellectual inquiry – which essentially alters the character of the individual while maintaining memories – offers an outward looking existence which provides internal pleasures. Accordingly, with the use of technology, computer simulations have the potential to provide pleasures and experiences that escape reality. In this sense, technology has the potential to supplement an immortal life. We cannot say whether there will be a pinnacle of such learning and pleasure which leads to decreasing returns, but it seems plausible that an immortal being who incorporates learning and pleasure that could potentially lead to innovation and discovery would seek to continue such intellectual inquiry and varied experiences until all learning potentials were exhausted.
HCAJR
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Very cool, H. J. Alphin Jr. -- and thanks for sharing!
ReplyDeleteSee if you can provide some specific references when you have the time. My thoughts on this are formed, or informed by:
ReplyDeleteA. G. N. Flew. He was a tutee of Grice at Oxford. He has changed _so much_, the man -- that it's difficult to trace his former self, the editor of things like "Analytic Philosophy", where Grice published, in 1966, and his later atheist views.
-- The other mentor on this should be J. L. Borges, the Argentine blind librarian. He is an icon where I come from, and all of his views are recorded for posterity (My mother is a great fan of the man). Borges wrote half-ironically, but he has scattered things to say about the pros and cons of an immortal life.
--- The more Gricean thoughts on this have been only recently made public by R. Warner, when he edited for Clarendon, Grice's "Happiness" paper. His approach is strictly Aristotelian, so we cannot say it endorses the idea of immortality of the soul, but the idea of long-standing pleasures which are constitutive of happiness as a coherent system of co-ordinated goals has been elaborated by Warner in his subsequent books.
Grice pokes fun _once_ on attempts by philosophers to argue, with a tenacious degree of certainty (I don't mean you!) about this things. N. E. A. for example, in his blog, thinks that Grice is having Hampshire in mind when he speaks of this undergraduate friend of his back in the Oxford of the 1930s who was arguing about survival of the soul -- _in chicken_! Grice is in a friendly way raising considerations as to whether Aquinas's arguments based on Aristotle could be seen as QED proofs, or whether a theological bias is involved.
Personally, the final lectures of Ayer in "The central questions of philosophy" (Gifford lectures) have also been influential with me, as well as R. Swinburne's theories and A. J. P. Kenny, in the God of the Philosophers (as Wilde Reader in Philosophical or Natural Theology, Oxford).
Excellent to have your reflections at the Club, Henry.
Thanks, J.L. You are certainly correct about Borges and his scattered thoughts on immortality. I used "The Immortal" in my essay. I plan to pick up more of his offerings. I will look into Flew, Ayer, Swinburne and Kenny.
ReplyDeleteI come from a Continental background and my professor for the course really pushed me to focus on analytic aspects of death. I covered Fred Feldman - who lost his daughter at a young age, Bernard Williams, Nozick and his experience machine, and so forth, but the difficulty for me was to refrain from diving deeper into the Nietzschean Ubermensch and posthumanity. While most philosophers of death cannot view immortality as being desirable, I simply felt the need to argue that Fischer is correct, it could be desirable under proper conditions - such as consistent categorical desires.
Very good. Will revise "The immortal" myself and report back! Excellent to have your new references, too. And I admire your tenacity to challenge your tutor -- what´s wrong with a _continental breakfast_? :).
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