@ro_in_motion I should start by noting that my default position is actually to disagree with Bernard Williams. For all the defense I’ve given of him so far, there is much in his argument with which I disagree. I accept the Epicurean position about death, for instance, which says that being dead cannot be a harm to the one who dies if death entails non-existence. Williams wants to argue that the tragedy of death is that both dying and not dying are bad for us: when we die, we are worse off for it; yet if we live forever, we are also worse off for it. I disagree with at least half of this argument, and I am undecided about the other half.
I do believe, however, that the quest for immortality is unhealthy. It seems a poor obsession to have, even if we could prove that it would not be bad for us were it achieved. I also believe that immortality would be a curse if we lacked the proper attitudes to handle it. Thus I am forced to take Wililams’ argument seriously as one possible explanation of why the quest might be unhealthy (and why the needed attitudes might be rare, or even impossible). I am not sure he is correct, but I find that I go back and forth. This thread has already pressed me a bit towards the “against” side—indeed, I find that I tend to waver precisely at those times when I try to defend one side or the other, always finding sympathy with whichever side I am arguing against—but I might as well try and see the argument through to the end.
Williams’ worry about losing ourselves is that we will literally no longer be the same person anymore if we live long enough. It’s not just that we would be different than we are now, it’s that we would be literally separate people (as separate as you and I are right now). Now, this can be tricky. We often say that we’re not the same person as we were when we were younger, but that’s not the kind of change Williams is talking about. Though we may have different beliefs and values now than we once did, we still have continuity of self. That’s why we say “wow, I was so different back then.” Williams is talking about getting to a point where it no longer makes sense to call the former person “I.”
You might think there is no such point. If personal identity can be captured in purely causal terms, then Williams’ argument will not work. It is not clear that personal identity can be captured that way, however, for various reasons. Here is one example: when a massive brain injury reduces someone to a mental infant with no memory of his former self, we often say that the person we once knew has literally died and been replaced by a new person in the old body. “Joe is gone, and he won’t ever come back,” we might say. There is still a person in the body, of course, but it is not Joe. It’s someone else instead. If identity could be captured in purely causal terms, Joe and the new person would be the same person. But they’re not the same person (the English language might force us to refer to them as if they were the same person, and this linguistic foible might trip us up from time to time; but on reflection, we know they are not identical). Therefore, identity cannot be captured in purely causal terms.
Living forever is not exactly like suffering a massive brain injury, of course, but it may dissociate us from ourselves in much the same way. I suppose a practical definition might go something like this: “causally related persons cease to be identical when early person stages no longer have anything to do with the development of later person stages.” This is a rough definition, to be sure, but it is a start. The idea would be that a person who changes a great deal over the course of life is still affected by the early stages of his life—indeed, they may be why he changed so much—but a radical shift into another person occurs when this sort of internal relationship is no longer possible. I hold none of the beliefs I held when I was young, and I lack a lot of specific memories from my youth, but the experiences I had still affect my present psychology. If I could become so distanced from those experiences that they ceased to even have a subconscious effect on me, it seems there could be a genuine question about whether or not they were still mine—especially if the disconnect was clean and complete (that is, not irregular and patchy; the loss of a few influences here and there won’t be enough if there’s still continuity stretching all the way back).
There are metaphysical worries here. If identity is supposed to be transitive, and if dissociation occurs gradually, then we might think that the case of Joe is too disanalogous to do any real work here. Joe’s case is clean and complete because of a single event; Williams is talking about cases where nothing quite so dramatic happens. He has several possible replies, though. First, personal identity is not the same issue as metaphysical identity; as such, it may not be subject to the same restrictions. Second, dissociation is only half of his argument. He also has the claim about boredom to rely on. If it is true that everyone will eventually desire death, Williams might take it that his case has been made. Both replies are important. We seem to have left the boredom side of the argument behind, and we need to be careful about that. Williams’ argument is for a disjunctive conclusion, after all. The bit about personal identity versus metaphysical identity is also important, though, because I think Williams would argue that you are conflating the two. This goes back to the question about capturing identity causally. We can call something a future stage of ourselves on causal grounds, but Williams is worried about a different kind of relationship.
What to say, then, about your examples? It seems to me that Williams would say, and I must confess sympathy to the view, that you are a bit overly optimistic about the likelihood of being able to relate to people from the year 1012. You imagine you can, but Williams thinks failures of imagination are precisely the problem here. We insist on thinking about immortality in terms of what we know about mortal life: we know we can survive changes in character that take place over 50 years, so we assume we can survive changes in character that take place over 1,000,000 years. This inference does not clearly follow. Moreover, we ignore relevant aspects of what we know about mortal life: those at the end of an ordinary mortal life—even those not suffering from mental deterioration—already have difficulty relating to the culture and people of the world around them. This alienation is likely to grow exponentially as lifespan increases—unless we dissociate from ourselves and become new people.
To this point, you might restate your final question: is this bad? Well, no. But Williams doesn’t say it’s bad. He says it’s irrelevant (or, more precisely, that it lacks the same sort of relevance that your personal future has to you). You say that either outcome is fine with you, and that’s great. Williams’ point is only that a certain relationship would cease to exist (the relationship one has with oneself) and be replaced by a different kind of relationship (the kind one has with others). His argument is not that this is bad (as long as you’ve managed to avoid the boredom/alienation horn of the dilemma), but rather that your hopes are no longer self-regarding when you look forward to this sort of technological development. This matters insofar as we are concerned with immortality, as opposed to simply technological advancement. It’s one thing to say “I hope technology keeps getting better and eventually manages to perpetuate ideas and information.” It’s another to say “I hope that I—the person that I am—continues to exist.”
@rooeytoo Sure, but those aren’t the issues with which Williams’ argument is concerned. He’s happy to acknowledge the existence of personal growth, and talks about it quite a bit over the course of developing his own moral philosophy. But by definition, you cannot grow into a literally separate person. If your current self grew from your former self, you are still the same person in William’s view. He is discussing the possibility of a person causally related to us who cannot be said to have grown from us.
@ETpro Unfortunately, you are not an authority about what you would be like at 700. No one is an authority on the future—even their own future. You have certitude, but you do not have certainty (the former is psychological, the latter epistemological). Williams need not deny that someone would be delighted, however; he need only question if it would really be you.
Being able, comfortable, and fit are not all there is to life, after all, and they are not all that contributes to your current level of well-being. If you lacked the other constituents of happiness, merely being able, comfortable, and fit might not be enough. Williams’ worry is that you would not be able to be the same person (in the personal identity sense of that term) while at the same time staying wanting to continue living. I have explained the reasons for this in greater detail above.
As for your grandmother, we can grant that she would not have to deal with the health problems you mention. We cannot grant the point about loss of friends, however, as you have explicitly specified that we are not talking about a world without death. Accidents will still happen, and her friends might still have died over the course of time. That is highly relevant to the question at hand.
Composing members:
0
