Imagine you are offered a trustworthy opportunity
for immortality in which your mind (perhaps also your body) will
persist eternally. Let’s further stipulate that the offer includes
perpetual youthful health and the ability to upgrade to any
cognitive and physical technologies that become available in the
future. There is one more stipulation: You could never decide later
to die. Would you take it? Metaphysician and former British
diplomat Stephen Cave thinks accepting such an offer would be a bad
idea. 

Cave’s fascinating new book, Immortality,
posits that civilization is a major side effect of humanity’s
attempts to live forever. He argues that our sophisticated minds
inexorably recognize that, like all other living things, we will
one day die. Simultaneously, Cave asserts, “The one thing that
these minds cannot imagine is that very state of nonexistence; it
is literally inconceivable. Death therefore presents itself as both
inevitable and impossible. This is what I will call the Mortality
Paradox, and its resolution is what gives shape to the immortality
narratives, and therefore to civilization.” 

Cave identifies four immortality narratives that drive
civilizations over time which he calls; (1) Staying Alive, (2)
Resurrection, (3) Soul, and (4) Legacy. Cave gracefully marches
through his four immortality narratives citing examples from
history, psychology, and religion up to the modern day. “At its
core, a civilization is a collection of life extension
technologies: agriculture to ensure food in steady supply, clothing
to stave off cold, architecture to provide shelter and safety,
better weapons for hunting and defense, and medicine to combat
injury and disease,” he writes.

In the Staying Alive narrative Cave opens with the quest of the
First Emperor of China to find the elixir of life but lands us soon
the 21st century where transhumanists aim to use modern
science to finally achieve the goal of perpetual youthful life. He
notes that in the last century, humans have in fact doubled average
human life expectancy.

Why not simply repair the damage caused by aging, thus defeating
physical death? This is the goal of transhumanists like theoretical
biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey who has devised the Strategies for
Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) program. SENS technologies
would include genetic interventions to rejuvenate cells, stem cell
transplants to replace aged organs and tissues, and nano-machines
to patrol our bodies to prevent infections and kill nascent
cancers. Ultimately, Cave cannot argue that these life-extension
technologies will not work for individuals but suggests that they
would produce problems like overpopulation and environmental
collapse that would eventually subvert them. He also cites
calculations done by a demographer that assuming aging and disease
is defeated by biomedical technology accidents would still do in
would-be immortals. The average life expectancy of medical
immortals would be 5,775 years. Frankly, I will be happy to take
that.

Resurrection is his next immortality narrative. Of course, the
most prevalent resurrection story is that of Jesus of Nazareth
2,000 years ago. The New Testament explicitly states that one day
every individual will once again live in his or her real but
improved physical bodies. Physical resurrection is also the
orthodox belief of the other two Abrahamic religions, Judaism and
Islam. Thus, Cave notes, half of the world’s population officially
believes in the future resurrection of their physical bodies. He
adds, however, that many Christians, Jews, and Muslims actually
subscribe to another immortality narrative, Soul.

Cave identifies three major problems with the Resurrection
Narrative: the Cannibal problem, the Transformation problem, and
the Duplication problem. Briefly, if resurrection is to mean
anything, it must mean that a specific individual is brought back
to life. The question is what happens when atoms have been shared
by more than one person: Who gets to use the specific nitrogen and
carbon atoms when everyone is brought back to life? I don’t think
that that is much of problem since atoms are interchangeable and
presumably God could simply put any random carbon and nitrogen
atoms back in the same places they were in your physical body. They
needn’t be the exact same atoms that you had when you died.

The Transformation problem is harder. Many believers would have
died old, decrepit, and demented. That’s not how they believe they
will be resurrected; they expect to get better, incorruptible
bodies. By being thus transformed would the resurrected believer
really be the same person who had died or a different person? And
then there is the problem of duplication. God could not just
reassemble a believer as she was when she died, he could also
reassemble her as a 5-year-old girl. Cave argues that these three
problems calls into question the notion that it would truly be a
specific individual believer rising from the grave.

Besides these ancient resurrection dogmas, modern technophilic
thinkers have devised a couple more: cryonics and mind uploading.
Cryonicists aim to avoid the three ancient resurrection problems by
having their bodies frozen at minus 276 degrees Fahrenheit in
liquid nitrogen with idea that future technologies will be able to
revive them. Cryonicists believe that reviving individual brains
with their unique patterns and history would be the way to
guarantee that specific individuals are actually brought back to
life. 

Cave notes that this focus on preserving a person’s mind leads
other modern would-be computational resurrectionists to argue for
uploading minds (information encoded in an individual’s brain) onto
another piece of hardware, an electronic avatar, a robot, or
another brain which would be psychologically identical to the
original mind. Cave argues that computational resurrection does not
actually achieve immortality for a specific individual, but merely
makes an exact psychological copy of him. There is the additional
problem that if minds can be digitized they can be duplicated many
times. If this occurs who then is the original resurrectee? “When
you closed your eyes on your deathbed, you could not expect to open
them again in silicon form,” he explains. The result of mind
uploading “would all just be high-tech ways of producing a
counterfeit you.”

Counterfeit? Counterfeit means to make a copy with the intention
to deceive or defraud. I doubt that people who decide to take
advantage of mind uploading would be defrauded or deceived. Even if
digital duplicates were made of the same individual’s mind, I
suspect that they would have no problem with that—the more versions
of their specific memories, desires, and psychology the
merrier. 

Cave does not address one other popular version of how
computational immortality might occur. As the 21st century
advances our bodies and minds will be increasingly integrated with
digital appliances of various sorts, e.g., more and more of our
memories and reasoning abilities could be located on silicon (or
whatever quantum computations devices come later) and accessed via
radio. Eventually more and more of the information that makes up an
individual’s mind will have migrated into these digital devices.
When the biological portion of an individual’s techno-complex
eventually dies it may be regretted but the event will not
significantly disrupt the continuity of the individual’s
self-consciousness.

The most popular immortality narrative is Soul. Most Christians
now believe that their souls, which persist after death, will be
reunited with their resurrected bodies. Souls thus solve a lot of
the identity problems associated with the earlier Resurrection
narrative. Cave argues that Soul narrative resolves the Mortality
Paradox by denying “that the failing body is the true self,
identifying the person instead with exactly that mental life that
seems so inextinguishable.” In Christianity all souls are equal
before God, so if the omnipotent and omniscient Creator of the
universe is interested in your life then who are your politicians
to ignore your desires?

What about the afterlife? Cave cites American evangelist James
L. Garlow who says that in Heaven “your every desire is satisfied
more abundantly than you’ve ever dreamed.” But what if your desire
is to be reunited with your wife who instead desires to spend her
eternity with her childhood sweetheart? A more sophisticated
theocentric view of the soul’s afterlife is that Heaven is the
eternal exaltation of God. But what can this mean? Cave points out
that an afterlife without time is not really a life at all.
“Everything that makes up a human life—experience, learning,
growth, communication, even singing hosannas—requires the passage
of time. Without time, nothing can happen; it is a state of stasis,
a cessation of thought and action,” he argues. “The attraction of
the soul view was the unique aura it gave to every individual life,
but its logical conclusion is an eternity of nothing, with life
negated altogether.”

The major Eastern religions, Hinduism and Buddhism, also
subscribe to versions of the Soul narrative involving cycles of
reincarnation. Cave points out though that both religions’ accounts
of souls are pared down to being some kind of vague continuum of
awareness. After death your individual experiences, memories,
hopes, desires are all forgotten as your soul moves from one body
to the next. Cave is correct when he asserts, “If you have a soul,
yet it does not take your mind, personality, or consciousness with
it, then its survival after the death of your body should be of as
much interest to you as the survival of your toenails.”