The Ethics of Cryonics
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In the end, it seems that death as frustration of desires by itself does not provide us with a convincing answer to our inquiry on whether death is good or bad. On the one hand, death is bad when it prevents someone from fulfilling their goals and desires to enjoy the goodness of life. On the other hand, the possibility that, given enough time, one would necessarily run out of those desires that propel us into the future casts a gloomy light on the perspective of immortality. In other words, even if death is a bad thing, it might be that immortality is even worse, as William’s view implies. In the next chapter, we will take a closer look at immortality in order to understand if Williams’ concerns and similar ones are justifiable, and whether there are arguments that can convince us that an immortal life would be so undesirable that pursuing indefinite life extension would be futile or even undesirable.
References
Benatar, D. (2008). Better never to have been: The harm of coming into existence. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from https://market.android.com/details?id=book-paoVDAAAQBAJ
Fischer, J. M. (1994). Why immortality is not so bad. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2(2), 257–270. https://doi.org/10.1080/09672559408570794
Fischer, J. M., & Mitchell-Yellin, B. (2014). Immortality and boredom. The Journal of Ethics, 18(4), 353–372. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-014-9172-3
Friend, T. (2017, March 27). Silicon Valley’s quest to live forever. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/silicon-valleys-quest-to-live-forever
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Macmillan. Retrieved from http://www.math.chalmers.se/~ulfp/Review/fastslow.pdf
McMahan, J. (1988). Death and the value of life. Ethics, 99(1), 32–61. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11653818
Nagel, T. (1970). Death. Noûs, 4(1), 73–80. https://doi.org/10.2307/2214297
Williams, B. (1973). The Makropulos case: Reflections on the tedium of immortality. In B. Williams (Ed.), Problems of the self (pp. 82–100). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511621253.008
Footnotes
1Given the limited scope of this book, I will leave aside non-Western cultures in which the influence of traditions like Hinduism and Buddhism have contributed to the development of a different approach to life and death.
2Many languages have an equivalent of the sentence “if my grandmother had wheels, she would be a cart”, a joke used to reply to someone fantasizing about hypotheticals in which the premises implies a scenario that is incompatible with the existence of the subject who is speaking (“If I were born in Ancient Greece” or “If my mother were Cleopatra”).
3I will consider conceivability the mere metaphysical possibility of something (I can conceive of a green horse, but I cannot conceive of a horse that is also a cabbage). I will consider possible something that is not merely conceivable, but also has some chances to happen (it is possible that a horse lives up to 50 years, although it has never happened). I will consider probable something that has quite high chances of happening (it is probable that a horse lives at least 20 years).
4For instance, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are among those who think indefinite life extension will probably be available within the next 20 years. See, for example, Friend (2017).
5This character was originally developed in a play by Karel Čapek, and later on adapted into an opera by Janacek.
© The Author(s) 2018
Francesca MinervaThe Ethics of Cryonicshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78599-8_4
4. The Immortality Conundrum
Francesca Minerva1
(1)Philosophy and Moral Sciences, University of Ghent, Ghent, Vlaams Brabant, Belgium
Abstract
Hypothetical future treatments aimed at “rejuvenating” the body, thereby keeping it young and healthy for an indefinite amount of time, could offer a form of biological immortality. This chapter explores whether such immortality would come with downsides that would eventually make it an immoral or an undesirable goal. In order to assess the desirability of an immortal life, a few key questions must be addressed: What would an immortal (or indefinitely long) life look like? What kinds of benefits and downsides would it provide? Some authors have suggested that an indefinitely long life would be unbearably boring, and thus undesirable. It has also been suggested that an individual living an immortal life would not be able to recognize it as belonging to them in particular, or even as a human life at all. This chapter addresses these and other questions about the nature and desirability of an indefinitely long life.
Keywords
ImmortalityIndefinite life extensionAmortalityExistential boredomExistential tiredness
Different Types of Immortality
When people talk about immortality, they do not always refer to the same thing. A Christian or a Roman Catholic who believes in eternal life after death would normally associate the concept of immortality to that of an immortal soul in a metaphysical dimension. According to most religions, humans become immortal not by staying alive, but by dying. It is believed that an omnipotent and omniscient god assigns a place (in heaven, or if one is unlucky, in hell) to the soul, after which there is no way to exit eternity. We can consider this a “coerced” form of immortality, since it is not actively chosen by the individual, and is inescapable.
Another form of immortality, commonly portrayed in the context of science fiction or epic narratives, is that attributed to individuals who are invulnerable but can still choose to die if they so wish. This “chosen immortality”, sometimes called amortality, is probably the one most of us would find desirable. One could go about one’s life without having to fear death, yet knowing that one could exit life at any moment if one wanted to. Although some think amortality could be achieved through future technologies, it appears quite difficult to imagine a system that is simultaneously completely invulnerable to external threats yet able to be terminated at one’s own request.
Some have suggested that amortality could be achieved by means of “uploading” a complete copy of the information in one’s brain on to a digital substrate, allowing one’s mind to be simulated in a more robust and energy-efficient medium (Cerullo, 2015). Roughly, the idea behind brain uploading is that the information stored in the brain can be copied and uploaded on a non-carbon-based substrate, such as, for instance, a computer or a robot or a hybrid between a biological and a digital entity. In theory, once a brain has been uploaded, its content could be backed up an unlimited number of times—making it very difficult to destroy every last copy of, and thereby “kill”, that person. In an ideal scenario, the uploaded brains would always be able to terminate themselves (and eliminate all possible copies), just like it is always possible to wipe a laptop’s storage and all of its backups.
Leaving aside potential problems with viruses or other technical complications, it appears that radically modifying core aspects of human nature (like our biological substrate) would introduce a number of possibly grave dilemmas. Not only would we need to address empirical concerns about the actual possibility of transferring information, but we would also need to address metaphysical questions about consciousness on a non-biological substrate, as well as about the nature of creatures that were born as humans and had turned into machines or hybrids (Minerva & Rorheim, 2017).
Both coerced and chosen immortality are quite different from the kind of immortality that is even remotely conceivable with our current scientific means. Cryonicists, for example, want to achieve indefinite life extension in the physical world, not in a metaphysical one, and they want to have the possibility of opting out of life if they so wish. We do not yet know whether future therapies aimed at extending human lifespan will succeed. However, we can postulate that, if rejuvenating therapies and technologies at some point become so ad
vanced as to render it possible to live in a young and healthy body for an indefinite time, then immortality will become at least virtually possible. Of course, in practice accidents and incidents could still destroy a body, but one could in principle live forever by undergoing rejuvenating treatments a virtually infinite number of times. Moreover, we can assume that medical research will keep advancing, so that more and more conditions we now consider fatal will be easily cured in the future, thereby reducing the overall risk of dying from illness, trauma, or accidents. Such “virtual” immortality, commonly known as indefinite life extension, is what I will be referring to when we speak of “immortality” in this chapter (unless otherwise noted).
If one assumes that both cryonics revival and rejuvenation technology will someday be available more or less simultaneously, it is reasonable to also assume that revived cryonicists would choose to undergo rejuvenation at a sufficient frequency to remain biologically young and achieve virtual immortality in a physically young body. There are two main reasons behind this assumption. First, most people would probably want to stay young for medical reasons: ageing involves a number of biological processes that weaken the body over time, making older bodies more susceptible to injury and disease (Hayflick, 2000). So from a medical perspective, it would make more sense to use rejuvenation as a preventive therapy for avoiding age-related damage altogether, rather than having to cure individual diseases caused by ageing (Bostrom, 2005). Second, on a psychosocial level, biological youth seems to be the already preferred stage for many people. As they age, adults often try to “stay young” or “look youthful”, and frequently compliment each other on looking younger than their actual age. The abundance of anti-ageing remedies available on the commercial market (not to mention the near-total lack of an equivalent market for pro-ageing products) suggest that people would choose to stay young through rejuvenation if they had the chance, and we should expect this preference for youthfulness to remain unchanged also in the future.
What matters when discussing the ethics of immortality is to understand whether what we consider “virtual” immortality would be desirable or not, and whether it would come with ethical downsides that would eventually make it an immoral goal. If the latter turns out to be likely, we would have good reasons to argue that the cryonics enterprise should be stopped. But if the most robust objections to immortality and extreme longevity do not stand our ethical scrutiny, then cryonics should no longer be looked at with suspicion, and even be supported and pursued.
In the next few paragraphs, I will examine the most common arguments against indefinite life extension and immortality, and explore possible counterarguments to each one.
What Would an Indefinitely Long Life Look Like?
In the previous chapter, we considered how death would cause nonexistence, deprive us of a future life, and frustrate categorical desires and preferences. We described what death is and what death “does” to living beings and how, assuming a decent quality of life, most people would prefer to continue to live rather than die. However, to say that one would prefer to live rather than die does not entail that one would want to live indefinitely. In other words, the badness of death does not imply the goodness of immortality. Immortality might be as bad or even worse than death. In this section, we will consider reasons why immortality might be considered undesirable, or why, conversely, it might be a goal worth pursuing, both from a moral and from a self-interested perspective. In order to assess the desirability of an immortal life, we need to answer a few key questions: what would an immortal (or indefinitely long) life look like? What kind of benefits and downsides would it provide? And would it be possible to conceptualize an indefinitely long life as the story of one individual, or would it always be a series of stories of individuals—closely related to each other, but not psychologically connected to one another in the same way as all the pieces of my story are connected to me as an individual?
Freedom from Regrets
Let us first consider what is probably the best aspect of immortality. If immortality were an option, we would never suffer the bad aspects of death: we would not pass to a state of nonexistence, where our identity dissolves and we cease to be the subject of any experience. In more practical terms, an immortal person would not have to worry about running out of time to do the things they want to do. Of course, we are talking about virtual immortality, so one would still have some anxieties related to the risk of dying. Still, we can imagine how an indefinitely long prospective life would come with less death-related anxiety than a life that lasts for a century at most. Even if accidents could still kill, a virtually immortal person would have virtually infinite time to reach their goals, fulfil their desires, develop relationships, and enjoy the good things that life can offer. Just like most people in their 20s—given the remoteness and the unlikelihood of death at that age—rarely worry or think as much about death as people in their 90s do, we can imagine that in a world where people lived indefinitely long lives, death would always appear to be a remote possibility, rather than an impending one.
Under these circumstances, we can imagine that a person would be freed from the anxiety of watching time passing by, empowered by the prospect of having much higher chances of achieving their goals and fewer regrets. As Todd May (2014) pointed out, an immortal life would be free from regret, as we would always have the time to try once more to achieve our goals, to be one thing instead of another one, and hence to avoid the sadness of having missed out on some opportunities. We would live our lives without feeling constantly torn by the irreversibility of most of our choices. We would not be regretful for what could have been, but never was. The necessity to choose one path at a crossroad is one of the hallmarks of our existence, from choosing to get up in the morning or lie in bed all day, to the choice of devoting time to one project or another, to that of being with someone or not.
It is important to point out that regrets at an existential level are different from day-to-day regrets, as the latter tend to have a small impact on our life, and we can easily make a different choice the next time. I might regret my decision to order pizza rather than pasta at a restaurant, but neither the decision nor the subsequent regret will make a significant difference in my life overall.
Existential regrets, on the other hand, result not only from a strong feeling that we have chosen the wrong path, but also by a realization that we no longer have the time to begin anew and choose something different.
As we grow older, the options available to us narrow down at a speed that many of us find uncomfortable, if not downright scary. Let us consider our professional life: before we choose what kind of career to pursue, we can imagine ourselves taking many different paths. One can imagine oneself as a lawyer, doctor, actor, pilot, piano player, pharmacist, geneticist, and so on. In reality, the range of options available to us is not as wide as we might think, and it is constrained by the fact that we have limited time and each of us has only a few natural assets. As we try to minimize the time and effort required to learn new skills in order to apply for jobs, we choose a career path according to our interests, natural assets, and other environmental factors. So, for instance, a person with good mnemonic skills would perhaps choose to pursue a career in the legal profession, as remembering thousands of pieces of information is a big part of law studies, whereas someone with a wide vocal range and perfect pitch would be inclined to choose a career in vocal performance, and so on. After we have chosen a career path and worked in a certain sector for a number of years, it becomes difficult to move to something completely different, and we find ourselves “stuck” in a certain profession. We can, of course, move up and down the corporate ladder within the company we work for, or move to a similar role in a different company; but becoming, say, a chef after having been a pianist is not very easy, although surely not impossible. There are people who manage to successfully change careers twice or even thrice during their life, but even two or three careers paths are a limitation when compar
ed to the countless options we have before we start making professional choices, and that we would have if our lives were indefinitely long. It thus seems reasonable to argue that immortality, by keeping open the possibility of trying all of the options that we had originally discarded, would free us from this kind of existential regret.
However, it is not obvious that immortality would soothe a different kind of existential regret—one that does not originate from having picked the wrong profession, or partner, or resident city, but rather from always having to choose a path. Even if we are happy with the outcome of our choice, we are saddened by the thought of those counterfactual lives we would have had, if only we had made other choices—not necessarily better ones, just different ones.
Infinite time does not entail infinite options. Immortality would only offer the opportunity to try more paths than we currently do, but it would not be the same as being able to branch in different copies of ourselves and live different lives following different choices, nor would it be the same as rewinding time and making a different choice from the start.