The Ethics of Cryonics
Page 13
Before we delve deeper into the boredom issue, it is important to note that there is a key difference between boredom in an ordinary sense and boredom in an existential sense. Although they are often conflated in the literature, the term “boredom” can refer to two possibly related but not overlapping states: I can be bored in an ordinary sense by things that are repetitive (I am bored because the customer service I have called has forced me to listen for 40 minutes in a row to the same jingle), without being bored at an existential level (I feel genuine enthusiasm for new experiences in my life). Conversely, I can be bored at an existential level (I have already had new experiences so many times that experiencing something new itself has become monotonous to me) without being bored in an ordinary sense (I am constantly entertained by videos of cute animals).
We are only concerned with existential boredom, as that is the kind of boredom that, according to some philosophers, would make a long or immortal life undesirable. Keeping the two concepts completely separate is not possible, because a life that was almost constantly ordinarily boring would sooner or later turn into an existentially boring one. Similarly, if one felt deeply existentially bored for a very long time, they would also probably be bored in the ordinary sense.
Consider now the following hypothetical scenarios of individuals living indefinitely long lives:Scenario 1: Alice has lived for a million years: she wakes up at 7 a.m. every day, except on weekends. She has worked at the same company for 800 years, doing more or less the same set of tasks. She has always spent time with the same friends from childhood, and she has had the same partner through her whole life. She goes on holiday twice a year, usually to Italy and California, and likes to spend her free time reading novels and singing in the choir.
Scenario 2: Albert has also lived for a million years. He has travelled around the world several times, and explored all of its corners. He has visited the same cities many times, and has seen them changing in radical ways. He has read millions of books, some of them several times. He has watched millions of movies, TV shows, and concerts. He has learnt to play the piano, and when he became very good at it, he learnt to play the cello, and when he became extremely good at it, he learnt to play the trumpet, then the drums, and then the violin. He can now play most musical instruments, and he has played every piece of classical music ever composed at least once. He has changed jobs hundreds of times; he has been a plumber, philosopher, pilot, chef, brain surgeon, gardener and many things more. He has raised his children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and so on. He got married hundreds of times, and he has been married to the same person for thousands of years before moving to the next partner.
Scenario 3: Adrian has also lived for a million years, and he has been connected to experience machines for a large part of his life. He has lived in a simulation where he has experienced life not just as himself in countless parallel universes, but also as a bat, an alien, a dinosaur, an ocean, and countless other things. He has also experienced the world as different people, including historical characters like Napoleon and Marie Curie, as well as fictional ones like Anna Karenina and Harry Potter.
The first scenario seems to be the most boring in the ordinary sense (i.e. repetitive and monotonous) because Alice would go on living the same life for an indefinitely long time. However, it would appear that, at least in the second and third scenario, objections to immortality based on “ordinary” boredom would be hardly justifiable. If monotony and repetitiveness are what cause ordinary boredom, then the second and especially the third scenario would appear to describe a desirable indefinitely long life. However, I think that there are two considerations that ought to be taken into account before getting to the conclusion that scenarios 2 and 3 are the least boring, and that they would be the most desirable.
First, it is plausible that, because of different psychological makeups, different individuals would perceive the same kind of life (repetitive as in scenario 1, and increasingly exciting in scenarios 2 and 3) in the same way.
Alice, for instance, might not feel bored in an ordinary sense. She might enjoy spending her life in her small town, within her small social group, doing the things she likes to do and the ones she has to do. Unless one’s life were repetitive to an extreme level, for instance, if one were forced to watch the same 30 seconds of the same video while eating boiled potatoes for eternity, repetition and monotony would not necessarily cause someone to be bored either in an existential or in an ordinary sense. Meanwhile, people like Albert or Adrian might need to change their surroundings, their job, and their social context quite regularly. They might be the kind of people who need to travel very often, live in big cities, and try different jobs and partners throughout their life.
So it is possible that two people conducting very similar lives would have very different opinions about whether such lives are boring (in an ordinary sense) or not. Moreover, it is possible that even if Alice and Adrian agreed that Alice’s life is boring, they would disagree on the assessment of the quality of Alice’s life. Alice might think that although her life is boring, it is also peaceful, calm, and happy, and hence worth living. Adrian might think that Alice’s life is so boring that, if he were in her shoes, he would prefer a different kind of life; and if that were not an option, he would prefer death over a boring life.
Second, even if the problem of ordinary boredom were solved, we would not be able to predict whether existential boredom would eventually arise, regardless of the differences in the scenarios we have considered.
It is difficult to predict whether all unnaturally long lives are bound to become existentially boring. In one sense, many of us begin to lose enthusiasm towards life long before they even reach a naturally old age. At the beginning of life, everything is new. There is the first time we pet a dog, the first time we make a friend, the first time we eat chocolate, hold hands with someone, swim in the sea, and so on. The goodness of novelty is not just about the content of each new experience, but also about experiencing novelty in itself. However, as we age, not only do the number of new experiences we can possibly have begin to narrow down, but we also get used to experiencing new things. There is a sense in which experiencing something new becomes obsolete, because we are familiar with the feeling of being surprised, of exploring something unknown, of being in a different situation. Yet even though life becomes a bit less “new” in this sense—and I think this is what existential boredom is—we still enjoy it for several decades. It is hard to predict whether, over a very long life, we would get so used to experiencing things that we would become simply incapable of experiencing any kind of emotion about anything—and whether, in such a state, we would prefer death over continuing to live.
Tiredness
It seems that some of the concerns about existential boredom would be better expressed as concerns about the “existential tiredness” that would arise over an indefinitely long life. For instance, Charles Hartshorne (1958) wrote:No animal endowed with much power of memory ought to live forever, or could want to, I should maintain; for the longer it lives, the more that just balance between novelty and repetition, which is the basis of zest and satisfaction, must be upset in favour of repetition, hence of monotony and boredom … As Jefferson wrote to a friend: “I am tired of putting my clothes on every morning and taking them off every evening.” (qtd by Lamont, 1965)
The Thomas Jefferson quote at the end of this passage is used by Hartshorne to support his claim that the longer one lives, the more repetitive, monotonous, and boring life becomes. However, Jefferson explicitly says is that he is tired, not that he is bored, and it seems to me that there is a relevant difference between being bored of life and being tired of living.5 One could experience ordinary or existential tiredness without simultaneously experiencing ordinary or existential boredom (in the same way as I can be tired of walking without being bored of walking, and vice versa).
Just as different people might get bored more easily than other ones, some people might
get tired more easily than others. Differences in how easily or quickly one grows tired might depend on different levels of resilience, or the intensity with which people live their life, or on the different challenges people meet over the course of their life.
Philosopher Peter Singer (1987) described life as an uncertain voyage. Whilst Singer in his essay focuses on the uncertainty about when life’s voyage starts and ends, I think the metaphor also works perfectly to describe life in general. Life is a trip we all must take once we are born and as long as we choose to stay alive. Since both the path and the traveller are different, so, too, is each trip. The tiredness of carrying oneself through life is something that people could experience regardless of how beautiful and happy their life is. Philosopher Walter Kaufmann (1959) put it thus:If one lives intensely, the time comes when sleep means bliss. If one loves intensely, the time comes when death seems bliss … The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation that makes life worthwhile and death welcome.
It may be that living intensely is a necessity for people who get easily bored, as only by living an intense life can they outrun the boredom that seems to always be at their heels. But there are also people who perceive their life as intense (and tiring) not because of the extraordinary adventures they choose to embark on, but because of their psychological makeup. Some people just happen to feel everything more intensely than others, and to them, the world is like a high-contrast photograph: bright colours are always extremely bright, black is always pitch black, and experiences make them either very happy or very sad. Life through high-contrast lenses has a higher emotional impact and is more tiring. There are also people with the opposite psychological makeup, who see life’s colours as an uninspiring mix of pale hues and grey tones, as though they were always wearing dark sunglasses. And of course, there is a whole scale of intensity between these two extremes. I suspect that the more intense the world feels, the more tired of living one becomes, and vice versa.
And to some people, life is just very challenging. They have to push especially hard through their life because of illness, or poverty, or because tragic events have studded their path, making the trip more exhausting to them. Again, each trip is different, with obstacles of a different nature, and different travellers might be affected in different ways by the same type of obstacle.
Existential boredom is not the only possible threat to an indefinitely long life, because existential tiredness could arise even in a non-boring existence. However, to say that existential boredom and tiredness could arise over a very long life is not the same as saying that they would be a necessary feature of every indefinitely long life. And even if it turned out that many people living for a long time would eventually become existentially bored and tired, we should not assume that they would all choose death over life. A boring life might still be worth living, and a person who is tired of living might still want to keep going.
Of course, there probably is a limit to the degree of boredom and tiredness one can endure, and some people would probably choose to die, eventually. However, to say that existential tiredness and boredom might pervade the existence of some, or the majority, or even all of the people who choose to extend their lives does not imply that trying to extend human lifespan well beyond its current limit would be useless. We would not say that saving the life of a three-year-old is pointless merely because she might nevertheless want to die when she is 100. For the same reason, developing technologies that would allow people to live for hundreds or thousands of years would not be pointless simply because people might choose to die around their 9834th birthday. Insofar as we think our life is worth living, and dying would be harmful, the effort of extending a life is not pointless. Drawing a line at the current human life expectancy and confidently declaring that “This is the age at which dying is no longer a harm, but a blessing!” is as fallacious as drawing a line just before a woman’s fertility starts to decrease, and declaring that to be the ideal time for her to have a child. We have adapted to these natural deadlines because we could not change them. We have internalized them and structured our lives and expectations around them. But when we are presented with an opportunity to push away our naturally imposed deadlines, we should not shy away, but rather ask ourselves whether it would be morally acceptable to take the opportunity, and whether the expected payoff would be worthwhile.
In the first four chapters of this book, I have considered various reasons for and against cryonics as a fundamental step in the quest for indefinite life extension. Although there is uncertainty about whether true immortality might be desirable, and about how long the ideal lifespan would be, I believe that adding time to our currently short lives would be desirable, morally permissible, and beneficial to many people—including those who are already very old. A trip of 80, 90, or even 100 years is not long enough; living takes a lot of practice, and death can wait.
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Footnotes
1In a sense, we already use multiple filters: I filter the world as a philosopher, as a woman, as a European, and so on.
2Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1985) is a beautiful book about unrequited love that eventually turns in reciprocated love, after several decades of waiting.
3Virtual immortality exists in nature. Such “biological immortality” is especially well known among members of the phylum Cnidaria, the ancient group of animals that includes the jellyfishes, corals, and comb jellies. These relatively simple animals are able to regenerate all parts of their tissue, and a number of them—including the ubiquitous Hydra, which inhabit freshwaters worldwide, and the aptly named “immortal jellyfish” of the genus Turritopsis—do not show any signs of ageing over time.