My Veiled Immortality
My Veiled Immortality
By Adrian Moore, Professor of Philosophy, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
It is often said that death deprives life of meaning. The sheer fact that my life will one day come to an end is reckoned to make it pointless. But why? As Wittgenstein once asked, would any riddle be solved by my living for ever? Surely there isn’t any kind of meaning that could attach to my life if I lived for ever that could not attach to it anyway. It’s not even obvious that, if I were to live for ever, my life would have more meaning. Perhaps it would have less. Perhaps the fact that my life will one day come to an end gives it a shape, a coherence, and indeed a sense of urgency that positively endow it with meaning.
There is also the point that any meaning attaching to my life, if I did live for ever, would of course depend on what kind of life it was. There are some never-ending lives that wouldn’t be relevantly different, as far as this discussion goes, from lives that lasted for only eighty years. An obvious case in point would be a life in which, at the age of eighty, I suffered a permanent loss of consciousness. That would be tantamount to death. But there are less obvious cases in point too. I want to tell some stories to illustrate this. These stories will make play with various notions of infinity.
The Decelerating Life: Both I and everything in my local environment periodically start to function more slowly, and time accordingly seems to me to pass more quickly, in such a way that, whereas the first forty years of my life seem to me like forty years, the next forty seem to me like twenty, the next forty seem to me like ten, the next forty seem to me like five, and so on ad infinitum. I live for ever but it seems to me as though I live for eighty years.
This story strikes us puzzling because we are left wondering how it can ever seem to me that the eighty years are up. But of course, given a real period of eighty years at the end of which I died, it wouldn’t ever seem to me that they were up. So my never-ending life in this story really is indistinguishable to me from an eighty-year life.
The same is true of the following story.
The Staccato Life: I live normally for forty years, and these are followed by a trillion years of unconsciousness at the end of which everything reverts to the state that it was in at the beginning of that trillion-year period, leaving me none the wiser. I then live normally for twenty years, and these are followed by a similarly undetectable trillion-year period of unconsciousness. I then live normally for ten years, and these are followed by the same thing. I then live normally for five years, and these in turn are followed by the same thing. And so on ad infinitum. Again I live for ever but it seems to me as though I live for eighty years.
In both ‘The Decelerating Life’ and ‘The Staccato Life’ there are, at any point in my never-ending life, periods of subjectively normal life left for me. (I’m assuming that there isn’t a minimal period of consciousness.) They differ in this respect from the case considered previously in which I suffer a permanent loss of consciousness. A permanent loss of consciousness, as I have already remarked, would be tantamount to death; but nothing that happens within either of these stories is tantamount to death.
Here’s a third story that illustrates something similar, albeit not exactly the same.
The Repeating Life: I live normally for eighty years, then lose consciousness. While I am unconscious I regress, both physically and psychologically, to the state that I was in when I was born and everything in my local environment reverts to the state that it was in at that time. I then regain consciousness and repeat the eighty years in exact detail, as does everything in my local environment. Then the same thing happens again. Then the same thing happens yet again. And so on ad infinitum.
There is one important respect in which ‘The Repeating Life’ is unlike the previous two stories. In ‘The Repeating Life’, it arguably doesn’t seem to me, overall, as though I live for eighty years. Although each eighty-year cycle is indistinguishable to me from a normal eighty-year life (since it contains no memories of previous cycles), there is more than one of them. Intuitions differ concerning whether this makes any difference to how meaningful the life is. Many people have the strong intuition that, even in this case, my never-ending life couldn’t have any meaning that would be denied a normal eighty-year life constituting just one cycle.
We can play out many variations on these themes. And they raise many further fascinating issues. For instance, we can tell a story akin to ‘The Repeating Life’ in which the cycles are not exact repeats. Suppose I keep repeating my eighty-year cycle except that I finish it differently each time. Would this make any difference to how meaningful the life is? The issues here are subtle and complicated. For one thing, there is the question of how much of my life is supposed to vary each time. Whatever the answer, there are nothing but differences of degree at stake here. Thus if only the last decade is supposed to vary, that differs merely in degree from the case in which the entire eighty-year cycle is supposed to vary. But if the entire eighty-year cycle is supposed to vary, then it becomes a real question whether this deserves to count as a single life—whether each of those subsequent subjects is really identical to me.
However that may be, reflection on all these cases shows that the difference between mortality and immortality is less critical than it appears. My life may or may not have meaning. But if it does not, this is not because of the sheer fact that it will one day come to end.
Adrian Moore is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. His main areas of interest are Kant, Wittgenstein, history of philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of logic and language, ethics and philosophy of religion. In particular, Moore has done much work on the nature of infinity which illustrates his ramified interests. In his book The Infinite, Moore offers a thorough discussion of the idea of infinity and its history.
September 17, 2023
