#7 – What does it mean to be immortal? Fischer on the nature of immortality.

Mortality Matters: Meaning & Death

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.