To start with, one cannot “undo” some of the choices they have made in the past. For instance, once one has had sex for the first time, one can never be a virgin again, no matter how long one lives. In a broader sense, there are choices, experiences, and things that happen to us that shape the way we see the world, interpret information, and do the things we do.
For instance, there are at least some professional choices that shape our approach to the world in a way that would be perhaps impossible to “undo”. As a moral philosopher, for instance, one gets into the habit of considering pros and cons of arguments, systematizing different views within certain moral paradigms, and formulating thought experiments to test the plausibility of certain arguments. Once one develops this (or any other) filter to process the world, it is difficult or perhaps impossible to remove such filter and approach the world in a different way. So even if a philosopher were to decide to become a social worker one day, they might not be able to remove their “philosopher filter”, although they may be able to add a social work filter on top. Of course, this is not to say that there is anything intrinsically undesirable about having multiple filters through which to process the world1; it is merely a reminder of the fact that some options could be available just once even over an indefinitely long life.
There is another form of regret that cannot be prevented by adding more time to our lives, namely the regret of not being given an opportunity. Whoever has experienced the pangs of unrequited love knows very well that if someone is not in love with another person, it is very difficult to make them change their mind (or their heart). Of course, having more time would increase the chances that a certain person falls in love with another certain person.2 But since it is neither certain nor likely that unrequited love for someone would, given enough time, eventually be reciprocated, it may be that immortality will not save one from the regret for not being given the chance to be with someone they love. Falling in love is not a direct result of the time and energy we invest in the project of winning someone’s love (although it may play a part, of course). Perhaps in a billion years, one could learn to play the piano like Mozart. Perhaps after studying hard for a million years, one could find a cure for cancer. But there are things that cannot be achieved through hard work, that are out of our control, because they are the outcome of a random series of coincidences and other unpredictable factors.
In sum, it seems that immortality would eliminate some but not all forms of regret from our existence. However, even if some options were precluded because of other choices made in the past, an indefinitely long life would still leave far more options open than a short (i.e. normal span) life. Within the options available to each of us, we could explore more than a couple of career paths, try activities that require a lot of time to master, and have more time to enjoy our interests, hobbies, relationships, and long-term projects. We would still have some regrets, but we would have less regrets than we can currently expect to have on our deathbed. So it would seem that immortality qua freedom from some types of regret would be good enough to decide that an immortal life would be better than a mortal one.
However, freedom from regret could come at a high price. In the rest of this chapter, we will tackle other challenges that might arise for an individual living an indefinitely long life.
Personal Identity
As we saw in Chap. 3, philosopher Bernard Williams argued that what makes life worth living is wanting to fulfil one’s categorical desires—those goals, projects, and plans that propel people to the future. According to Williams , such desires would become depleted over a very long life, and one would hence lose the interest and motivation to keep living. But he also considered the possibility that such desires could change in dramatic ways over a very long lifetime. If this happened, he argued, then one could no longer be considered the same person that they were when they had radically different categorical desires. But if the person living through centuries is no longer “me”, then why should I take an interest in her survival? I would have no reason to say “I lived for centuries, I survived hundreds of challenges”. In Williams’ own words:The state in which I survive should be one that, to me looking forward, will be adequately related, in the life it presents, to those aims I now have in wanting to survive at all … [S]ince I am propelled forward into longer life by categorical desires, what is promised must holdout some hopes for those desires … at least this seems demanded, that any image I have of those future desires should make it comprehensible to me how in terms of my character they could be my desires . (Williams, 1976, p. 91)
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Williams is right in claiming that categorical desires are an essential component of our personal identity. It seems that, given this account of personal identity, we do not really need to consider the case of an extraordinarily long-living individual in order to conclude that there has been a radical change in the identity of that person. If I think of myself at the age of five (F5) and realize that I had radically different categorical desires from the ones I currently have, I should conclude that I am now a different person from F5. Hence, I should conclude that she (I) did not survive the change of categorical desires that occurred over the past 30 years.
Indeed, if I compare F5 and my current self (Fnow), I can clearly see that they have radically different categorical desires. F5 wanted to be a singer, to have bread and Nutella at every meal, and to develop magic powers. Fnow wants to continue being a philosopher, to finish this book, and to live in a house full of pets. Yet, I would not draw the conclusion that it was not worthwhile for F5 to continue to live for 30 years past the age of five. Similarly, the fact that I will likely change my categorical desires over the next 30 years does not worry me as much as the possibility that I might die over the next 30 years. I have the intuition that I would rather be someone with radically different desires than no one at all.
So if Williams were right in arguing that a radical change of categorical desires brings about a change in personal identity, it seems to me that this would be a problem for most people past the age of ten or so, given how quickly categorical desires appear to change between the age of five and ten. As Martin Fischer (2012) points out in discussing the same passage of Williams , we identify with, care about, and judge desirable futures in which our categorical desires change considerably. Perhaps, Fischer suggests, what matters is that such changes in categorical desires are the result of certain processes (such as ageing), rather than others (such as being manipulated). One can surely agree that having one’s own categorical desires modified through manipulation would be bad (because someone is breaching our autonomy), but this does not at all imply that under normal circumstances, we would prefer death to an indefinitely long life throughout which categorical desires are (naturally) modified.
Even though I disagree with Williams’ view that persistence of somehow similar categorical desires is the requirement to maintain personal identity over time, I agree that, in order to assess whether an indefinitely long life could be desirable, I need to assess whether an indefinitely long life could be desirable for me. So the question is, if I lived indefinitely, would I be capable of looking at my past history and feel a connection to those events, or would I be alienated from my very distant past in the same way I am alienated from events happening to characters of TV soap opera?
As humans, we need to organize the events of our life within the frame of a narrative that can make sense to us. Our brain organizes our experience in a way that can make sense to us, in such a way that it appears to be a story. We understand (and therefore value) our lives not because we perceive them as a series of random experiences, but because we can connect these experiences to a self. In a sense, we see our lives as novels, rather than as a collection of short stories from different authors and about different characters.
According to a number of philosophers, personal identity is a crucial element of persistence over time and it is maintained over time through psyc
hological continuity: one continues to be the same person not by continuing to have the same categorical desires, but by holding certain psychological relations between the experiences they have at a given time and the memory of such experiences (Parfit, 1984). The connections between the different stages of the self make life valuable, and death bad. The capacity to remember what has been processed by our brains, together with the perception that all these events are related to the same individual—the protagonist of the novel, essentially—are what makes each of us interested in continuing to exist as this individual. The desires, the projects, even the personality traits of the protagonist might evolve and change during the unfolding of the story narrated in book, but we can see that there is a connection between the character at page 10, aged 5, and the later character at page 200, aged 25. Moreover, in a coherent story, we see how some new desires have developed from previous desires, and how some events have determined a change of a certain trait of the personality because of being interpreted in a certain way by the protagonist.
But perhaps this kind of psychological continuity is also too high a requirement even for people with an average lifespan. Perhaps one does not need to be in an intransitive relationship of overlapping memories (or desires) with a past self in order to persist over time.
As we have seen, according to Williams , persistence over time is achieved through persistence of similar categorical desires, a clear sign that the person has not changed preferences, personality traits, and so on. According to other philosophers, what guarantees persistence over time is remembering to have been a past version of ourselves (although this too could be a tough requirement even for a 30-something like myself, not to mention for a Methuselah). Sophie-Grace Chappell (Chappell, 2009) suggests that Williams’ concern about a given character’s long-term persistence can be addressed by assuming that what matters for persistence over time is what Derek Parfit called “connectedness”, rather than a thicker connection between the present self and the past selves as portrayed by Williams , which is what Parfit called “personal identity”. According to Parfit’s notion of connectedness, in order to persist over time, one would not need to be in an intransitive relationship of overlapping memories with their past self (for instance, I do not need to have overlapping memories with my five-year-old past self). Rather, it is sufficient that one’s past selves are in a transitive relation with each other, and that they have overlapping memories. The crucial point here is that in order for me to say that I am the same person I was at age five, I do not need to remember what I wanted, how I felt, or what happened to me around the age of five. Instead, it is enough for me to remember what I wanted, how I felt, and what happened to me at the age of, say, 20. That version of me could recall what it was like to be me at the age of ten, and that version of me could, in turn, recall what it was like to be me when I was five. Thus, in order to guarantee my persistence over time for 30 years, I can rely on having overlapping memories with a somewhat younger version of me, and so on.
Compared to Williams’ view, Parfit’s view of overlapping relationships among past selves seems to present a more realistic requirement for retaining persistence over time, and for justifying one’s interest in continuing to live for several more years. Personal identity is not a requirement to persist over time, in Parfit’s view; hence the interest in my future self can be justified also in cases where I know that my future self will have no direct memory of my current self, insofar as there will be “intermediate” connections.
I think Williams is right to be worried about the survival of the protagonist’s personal identity throughout a story that goes on for thousands of pages (and, in the case of real people, thousands of years). However, I think this concern is motivated not by a fear that the character’s categorical desires would change, but rather by a fear that the character’s brain might fail to keep together the pieces of the story.
Cryonics and life extension are not about keeping the same body alive indefinitely, but about keeping a certain person alive indefinitely. If the content of my brain were emptied to leave room to new memories, experiences, and so on, I would no longer be myself in a meaningful sense. I am only myself insofar as I can remember my past self and connect it to my present and future selves. Without this connection through stages of the same self, immortality is an empty concept, reduced to the immortality of a body. For immortality to be worth it, one must at least have some personal continuity and a relatively strong connection to some more recent versions of oneself—otherwise, one would not even be able to recall one’s categorical desires (or projects, or plans) for long enough to fulfil any of them.
We do not know how long a human brain might be able to maintain an unbroken connection between past and present. If at some point (say, after 10,000 years) every human brain started to lose the capacity to provide continuity or connectedness with the past, then we would know that we have reached the page limit of a coherent human biography. Until we reach that point, though, it is reasonable to argue that we have an interest in continuing to exist.
A Recognizably Human Life
It is difficult to conceptualize the life of a creature who is virtually immortal, yet does not age.3 If such a person appeared before us right now, we would probably perceive them as so profoundly different from us that we might struggle to recognize them as human at all (we would perhaps think he or she is more like an Elf, the eternally young human-looking creatures in The Lord of the Rings). Following Fischer (2012), we can call this question—whether someone living an indefinitely long life would still be recognizable as “human”—the “recognizability issue”.
A number of arguments have been put forth to suggest why an immortal life would not be genuinely human. For example, Bernard Williams (1973) argued that a person living an extremely long life would lack a coherent human character; Martin Heidegger (1927) thought that a life without a clear end would be “formless” and therefore not recognizably human; and Martha Nussbaum (1994) argued that our fundamental values would be deeply affected by extending our lives indefinitely.
One aspect of the recognizability issue that appears to be particularly interesting when considering life extension paired with rejuvenation is that of the separation between chronological and biological age. As we know, the immortality that cryonicists want to achieve involves extending a state that mimics biological youth/adulthood for an indefinite amount of time. If such a goal were achieved, ageing would become something radically different from what it is now, as there could be an unprecedented discrepancy between an individual’s chronological and biological age: someone could appear to have a biological age of 20 years, while being chronologically 20,000 years old.
At the moment, we have a relatively clear idea of how a person’s looks should correspond to their age and, in turn, what stage of life they have reached. For instance, we think of people in their 20s as looking very youthful, and devoting their lives to studying, entering the job market, and partying. We imagine people in their 30s and 40s as less youthful-looking, and more focused on consolidating their careers and starting a family. People in their 60s and 70s tend to have wrinkles and grey hair, have already achieved their professional goals, and enjoy greater economic and psychological stability than younger people. Of course, these are generalizations, and we all know someone who does not conform to the stereotypes of their age group. Nevertheless, statistical tendencies do exist (which is why a random sample of nightclub patrons will consist mostly of people in their 20s and 30s), and they do influence our social expectations.
So, if an indefinitely long life necessarily undermines this correspondence between biological and chronological age, does that mean the life necessarily loses its “human” character? And if so, would it be a bad thing? Human life as we know it progresses through different biological and psychological stages that are strictly related to each other—but would modifying or completely erasing such stages make it less human? On the one hand, we need to understand whet
her biological ageing is necessary in order to age psychologically and experience different stages of the human life cycle. On the other hand, we need to understand whether there is something valuable in experiencing all the different stages of life that we currently experience and in the particular way that we experience them.
Let us start with the question of whether, in order to age psychologically, it is necessary to also age physically and biologically. As noted by philosopher Samuel Scheffler (2013), we understand human lives as made of stages, and we attribute certain goals, activities, and behaviours to each stage. We evaluate accomplishments according to the stage of life one is at: we consider it an accomplishment for a 2-year-old to be able to speak, but not for a 30-year-old to do the same. We need to refer to different stages of life in order to decide what goals to pursue, what activities to engage in, and to accurately assess our own achievements. When I evaluate myself, as I think most people do, I estimate the percentage of my expected overall life that I invested in a certain project. I compare myself to other people my age, and I remind myself I am not just racing against other people, but mainly against the limited time of my life. As Todd May (2014) put it:For mortal beings, as we have seen, life is fraught. What happens is fragile. It might not have happened … The events of our lives, both good and bad, have an urgency that they do not have for the Immortals. An Immortal does not worry about missing anything. There is time for it to be experienced … For those of us who die, there is a singularity to the moments of our existence.
The Ethics of Cryonics Page 11