Who Wants to Live Forever?

Of course, some are taken from this world too soon. Queen's Freddy Mercury, who penned the song from which our title is taken, was one such, departing at 45 (which my daughter says is actually old, but I, being 45, say otherwise). We might wish to live longer. But forever? What tedium. What opportunity for stagnation.

The ancients knew well that death is the birth of the new, just as birth is a death of the old. Nature knows it, too, with death occupying a central position in its workings. We seem to have forgotten this fundamental lesson. If there is too big a gap between the old and the new, there is a tendency to become accustomed to the old and not create the new. We become comfortable with the status quo and stop imagining that the world could be anything other than it is and has been. Were it not for those folks we label "geniuses" who seem to look ahead, we would be forever stuck in the past.

Talk of Immortality

Yet, these days, we are peppered with talk of extending life, even to the point of immortality. The friends of the singularity—in which there is such an explosion of artificial intelligence that there emerges the real option of "uploading brains" to have them simulated in abstract information, which is potentially eternal and capable of infinitely many reanimations—are pushing hard for this future.

Now, I admit it: I’d like more life, as I would expect would most young and sprightly 45-year-olds (yes, young and sprightly!). But immortality? Hmmmm. That is very different. Even 10,000 years sounds rather excessive. I imagine I could handle 1,000 years, but, beyond that, existence may begin to grate.

Besides, we must consider if it even makes sense to speak in terms of the immortality of a person, or even of extremely long lives. If memory doesn't fail to hold earlier stages at some point, it would still be difficult to speak of a single individual spanning these lengths, as opposed to a number of stages that have the quality of different people. We would change interests radically, I'm sure. And maybe alter our preferred appearances. At some point, we might even be forced to simulate death to let our old selves die and allow for new things to emerge and surprise us. For all we know, this is exactly the nature of our world, and God plays this very game.

Perhaps life is just about the right length, however short it might be even when at its apparent human limits, for a reason? We can sense the reason by imagining how our lives change as we push that limit out further and further toward infinity. At full-blown immortality, it's hard to speak of life at all. Reducing the limit to a million years, there hardly seems any urgency to make wise choices in what we decide to do with our time. Maybe you choose some career path early on and decide it's not for you. No matter—just switch: plenty of time. I expect this same feature would be true for 100,000 years.

Making Action Meaningful

The point is that there needs to be some sense of urgency to make action meaningful. Our choices, after all, build our past, and our past is what makes us. If those choices don’t matter, then we remove a huge source of meaning. It is precisely the function of death, and a death not too distant, to narrow our focus (or, at least, ought to: there are many means in this modern world of ours to distract us) so that we forge who we are. We must be slapped in the face with death to pull ourselves out of distraction and see what’s important.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be presenting a series of brief posts dealing with matters of life and death, and meaning, including the further bounty of meaning that comes from our power to choose what we do in the world.