“The demand for immortality is nowadays essentially teleological. We believe ourselves immortal because we believe ourselves fit for immortality. A ‘substance’ ought to perish we think, if not worthy to survive, and an insubstantial ‘stream’ to prolong itself where worthy, if the nature of Things is organized in the rational way we trust it is.”
--William James, “The Consciousness of Self”, The Principles of Psychology
Whereas nowadays, at least in communities like this one, the demand is moral and technological. We think that not dying is desirable and achievable, but not yet achieved.
Do we all truly feel that we only want immortality out of simple self-interest, greed or selfishness if you will—and not because we feel that creatures such as ourselves should not have to die, that death is an injustice, that we deserve to live?
If so, then maybe we are not like the men of the 19th century James is describing, and that is a very interesting change in its own right.
What would it be like to be a rational atheist in the fifteenth century, and know beyond all hope of rescue that everyone you loved would be annihilated, one after another as you watched, unless you yourself died first? That is still the fate of humans today; the ongoing horror has not changed, for all that we have hope. Death is not a distant dream, not a terrible tragedy that happens to someone else like the stories you read in newspapers. One day you’ll get a phone call, like I got a phone call, and the possibility that seemed distant will become reality. You will mourn, and finish mourning, and go on with your life, and then one day you’ll get another phone call. That is the fate this world has in store for you, unless you make a convulsive effort to change it.
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If I had spoken Yehuda’s eulogy I would not have comforted the mourners in their loss. I would have told the mourners that Yehuda had been absolutely annihilated, that there was nothing left of him. I would have told them they were right to be angry, that they had been robbed, that something precious and irreplaceable was taken from them, for no reason at all, taken from them and shattered, and they are never getting it back.
“If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. This second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem, ‘Fears and Scruples’ by Browning foretells Kafka’s work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics’ vocabulary, the word ‘precursor’ is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is the every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation the identity or plurality of the men involved is unimportant.”
--William James, “The Consciousness of Self”, The Principles of Psychology
Whereas nowadays, at least in communities like this one, the demand is moral and technological. We think that not dying is desirable and achievable, but not yet achieved.
Do we all truly feel that we only want immortality out of simple self-interest, greed or selfishness if you will—and not because we feel that creatures such as ourselves should not have to die, that death is an injustice, that we deserve to live?
If so, then maybe we are not like the men of the 19th century James is describing, and that is a very interesting change in its own right.
EDIT: This may be an interesting link about the emotional content of the fight against death: http://yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda
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“Life itself is a quotation.” Jorge Luis Borges
-- “Kafka and his Precursors”