Mortality Matters: Meaning & Death

Would it be a letdown if you discovered that your near-death experience of an Afterlife turned out to just be a dream? That what you took to be an Afterlife isn't real and that the experience was something like a hallucination? You might be surprised to learn that Fischer argues that the unreality of the Afterlife in no way diminishes the significance of near-death experiences for those who are sincere about them. He argues that near-death experiences can provide us with emotional understanding (which is quite different from cognitive understanding) that is quite similar to how we understand narratives in fiction. Fictional narratives are no less meaningful in virtue of being fictional and so too with dreams, hallucinogenic drug trips, and near-death experiences. Fischer's argument here in chapter 9 is premised upon the success of his argument from chapter 8 (that near-death experience offer no evidence whatsoever of the existence of an Afterlife), but were that argument to fail, then so too would his argument struggle in chapter 9 as well. If the evidence near-death experiences give us of the existence of an Afterlife turns out to be misleading, because there would be no such place, then so too would one's experience of it be a letdown: it's significance and meaning would diminish for us. Do you remember what it was like to discover that the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus wasn't real? It was a letdown and for some of us a big letdown. So too is this the case with near-death experiences and the Afterlife.

Are near-death experiences evidence of an afterlife? What are we such that an afterlife could be possible for beings like us at all? In this episode, I discuss Fischer's criticisms of the evidentiary role near-death experiences have for belief in an afterlife. While he doesn't deny that they are experienced, Fischer likens near-death experiences to dreams and would only constitute evidence of an afterlife if there were something supernatural about the mind, namely, that the mind could exist without the body. Instead, he favors a naturalistic explanation of mental phenomena in which mentality is fully explicable in physical terms, and as such there is no reason to believe that any near-death experience is veridical. However, Fischer sets an unfair explanatory burden upon the possibility of supernaturalist explanations, which entails less plausible conclusions about its inconceivability. Furthermore, the kind of naturalistic explanations he gives for near-death experiences merely provide neural correlates, which when we consider an analogy with color perception we see that this doesn't provide the kind of reduction that Fischer needs to dispatch supernaturalism about the afterlife. What we're left with is a dialectical impasse, in which near-death experiences do provide some evidence of an afterlife though perhaps misleading evidence if in actuality there is no such thing.

In this episode, I focus on the second half of Fischer's response to Williams' pessimistic criticisms of immortality in which he concentrates on supernatural conceptions of the afterlife. I first consider whether the afterlife is even possible for beings like us. Notably, any who believe that there is an afterlife (whether that be good or bad) must also think that death is a transition of some sort, typically a separation of soul from body, and that the transmigration into heaven or hell preserves the personal identity of the one who dies. Neither assumption is obvious and both are subject to challenge. Next, I consider various conceptions of the afterlife in which there may be certain goods that would be otherwise unavailable, such as conversing with God or with good people from the past. Fischer underestimates how good heaven could be by focusing too much on a traditionally Christian conception of it. There is no good exclusive to mortal existence for which there could be no coherent conception of an afterlife that would include it, so however good eternal existence in heaven would be, it would be no worse than an immortal continuation of our lives in our material plane. For this reason, all of the arguments Fischer gives as to why immortality wouldn't be so bad would likewise apply to the afterlife, and then some. Lastly, I discuss the desirability of various immortality scenarios depending upon who gets to be immortal, disagreeing with Fischer about the socioeconomic inequalities an indefinite life extension therapy would create as well as the prospects of overpopulation. Despite painting himself as a moderate between immortality pessimists and optimists, Fischer's definitions requires these to be not only mutually exclusive but exhaustive characterizations of our attitudes about the subject, so there is no conceptual room for what he takes to be his middle-ground position. Fischer may regard himself a realist about the desirability of immortality, but he is far too pessimistic about the desirability of human life continuing through future climate change.

Would immortality be a curse of eternal boredom, were it even possible? If so, then you might think that we're better off as mortals and that death is a blessing of a kind that prevents us from being depleted of whatever makes life worth living, as it will eventually run out. Fischer rejects this line of thinking, arguing instead that not only is death unnecessary for life to be meaningful but that immortality would be no worse or much different from mortality. Specifically, he argues against Williams' pessimistic views about immortality and instead opts for what he describes as a more realistic median between pessimism and optimism about immortality. In this episode, I focus on the first half of the chapter Fischer takes up Williams' pessimism (chapter 7) and enhance some of the reasons for pessimism that I think Fischer underestimates. In particular, Fischer underestimates Parfit's concern that immortality isn't even coherent as in any possible world in which beings like us live sufficiently prolonged lives, our personal identity over time would fail to persist through significant and prolonged psychological transformation. Even putting this worry aside, Fischer talks past the heart of Williams' point that immortality must be boring by interpreting boredom too subjectively. Boredom isn't merely a psychological side-effect that could be medicated away or alleviated with forgetfulness. Williams' point generalizes to the exhaustibility of whatever makes life good, that eventually it will be depleted. I agree that this point doesn't generalize, however, as there are some projects that are unfinishable, but Fischer overestimates how many these are with his examples. Far fewer projects would remain unfinished to true immortals given indefinite amounts of time. A more promising criticism of Williams is found in Bradley & McDaniel, who argue that no kind of desire can account for all of the roles Williams requires for his argument for immortality pessimism to work. While Williams' argument itself may require much of a certain kind of desires to give meaning to our lives and propel them into the future, dropping some of Williams' auxiliary assumptions allows a reconstruction of his argument that is less objectionable. Fischer hints at this point in his discussion of repeatable pleasures, that whatever is intrinsically valuable cannot have its value exhausted by repetition over an endless life. Intrinsic value may be true strong however as I think this phenomenon generalizes to what I describe as "ampliative goods," though I agree with Fischer that the intrinsic goods are among them. In this regard, at least, an immortal life would still be worth living, though its richness would be deprived of many goods we mortals enjoy.

You might think that death is part of our nature or that mortality is essential to our nature as human beings. If so, then immortal beings would be radically different than us, so different in fact that they would not be recognizable as beings like us. So if you were offered a Faustian bargain to trade your humanity for the promise and reality of immortality, it wouldn't be worthwhile. In this episode, I discuss Fischer's defense that immortality is worthwhile against a battery of objections: that the lives of immortals would be shapeless or without form; that certain human goods like friendship, relationships, personal achievements, and virtue are unavailable to immortals; that endings are crucial for a life story; that in a never-ending story one cannot re-evaluate the past; that an infinite life is inconceivable; and that recognizably human lives must have end stages. While Fischer's defense against these objections succeeds in my view, he goes too far and endorses the view that there are no relevant differences between mortal and immortal lives with respect to which goods they can realize, hesitating only on whether marriage would need amendation between immortals. Fischer further adopts a motte-and-bailey approach when responding to these objections, retreating to the desirability of medical immortality when the objections are too strong against true immortality. Instead, I argue that we should drop Williams' recognizably condition altogether, which becomes more apparent once we see how it is a sufficient similarity condition in disguise. Being recognizably human in the future is equivalent with being sufficiently similar to how one is now in some relevant respect (such as being mortal, or having certain goods or stages, etc.). However, a similarity condition is unnecessary on our future resembling our past and yields a kind of objectionable conservativism against too much change. And so Williams' recognizability condition should simply be rejected.

In this episode, I discuss what Fischer means by 'immortality.' At this point in his book, he has taken himself to have established that death does harm the one who dies, even if the details about when or how it is harmful aren't fully worked out. It is natural then to consider an objection: if all else being equal it is always bad to die, it would then be best to live forever, yet living forever is bad for this immortal, so death must at some point not be so bad. This is why I think Fischer pivots to discussing immortality and why it's not so bad. Before considering whether immortality is worth wanting, Fischer first discusses what immortality means, starting with various myths before focusing on two secular conceptions of life extension: biological longevity prolongation with Aubrey de Grey and non-biological longevity prolongation with Ray Kurzweil. Both only focus on what Fischer calls "medical immortality," which is to be distinguished from "true immortality" in virtue of which sources of harm, if any, one is vulnerable to. I argue that this way of characterizing immortality is problematic and instead favor a reductive analysis in which one is immortal iff one isn't mortal, and one is mortal iff there is some time at which one dies.

In this episode, I consider how we should feel about our own death given how we tend to be indifferent about when we came into existence. Lucretius takes this indifference as a reason to likewise feel indifferent about our own deaths, as our future post-mortem condition is a mirror image of our past pre-natal condition. This is called the "Symmetry Argument," of which Fischer identifies two formulations that turn out to be problematic. I reformulate both versions multiple times then respond to what I regard as the best formulation in terms of which attitude of ours is most fitting about an early death and a late birth. Fischer identifies two kinds of responses to the Symmetry Argument, one class based on denying that an earlier birth is even possible, while another justifies past indifference on the basis of a general indifference regarding past benefits and harms, yet I argue that a better response is to challenge the premise that indifference regarding our creation is fitting to begin with.

In this episode, from the first part of chapter 4 of John Martin Fischer's book, "Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life," I cover and evaluate multiple responses to two Epicurean arguments that death cannot harm the one who dies: the Timing Argument, that there is no time at which death is harmful, and the No Subject Argument, that there is no one who can be harmed by death. I follow Ben Bradley in organizing the range of theories on the timing of mortal harm as responses to The Timing Argument, and evaluate them not only on their own merits but also in how well they provide a response to the No Subject Argument. I give a different ranking of preferred responses to The Timing Argument than what Fischer gives, and argue instead for my favorite response: that the time of death's harm is concurrent or simultaneous with the occurrence of death itself.

In this episode, I evaluate Fischer's argument that being betrayed secretly by one's friends and family would be harmful even if one were to never directly or indirectly experience anything from it. I consider two lives, one with a secret betrayal and another without it, though otherwise qualitatively identical. Fischer doesn't specify exactly why secret betrayals are harmful other than that they would set our interests back, so our intuitions that they are may be based in a confusion between direct and indirect effects of it. I agree with Fischer that a counterfactual intervener would falsify a weak experience requirement, that if one is harmed by a secret betrayal, then a shield would eliminate any possibility of experiencing it or effects of it, though, I argue, such an intervener would need to be infallible. I end with a brief description of my own view of the harm of death: destructivism. Incapacitations such as comas induced by strokes are similar to death in that they both are harmful in virtue of our loss of welfare at the time of their occurrence.

In this episode, I consider some initial objections against Fischer's view that death can harm the one who dies: that death cannot be experienced as a harm, that it has no time at which it is harmful, and that we have no more reason to fear an early death than we have do regret a late birth. Absent a successful defense to each of these challenges, Fischer would have to concede the argument to Epicurus and his followers, who contend that death is harmless. Lastly, I consider the indifference objection to Epicureanism, that were death harmless one has no reason to avoid death. Ultimately, I disagree with Fischer as I do not think Epicureanism can successfully avoid reformulations of this objection.

In this episode, I discuss what death is, arguing that it is the cessation of one's existence and not necessarily one's life, I discuss the difference between death, dying and the condition of being a corpse, whether death must be permanent, whether one can have an exit from life without dying, and what implications gappy existence has for a proper definition of death.

In this episode, I discuss the relationship between meaning in life and goodness, arguing that meaning just is goodness, I discuss variants of Nozick's Experience Machine, and the proper perspective by which to evaluate whether our lives are meaningful.