Immortality is the indefinite continuation of a person's existence even after death. In simple terms, immortality is almost indistinguishable from the afterlife, but philosophically they are not identical. The afterlife is the continuation of existence after death, whether or not that continuation is indefinite.
Immortality implies an endless existence, whether the body dies or not (in fact, some hypothetical medical technologies offer the prospect of bodily immortality, but not the afterlife).
The problem of human existence after death
Immortality is one of the main concerns of mankind, and although it has traditionally been limited to religious traditions, it is also important for philosophy. While a wide variety of cultures believed in some kind of immortality, such beliefs can be summarized in three non-exclusive patterns:
- survival of the astral body resembling the physical;
- immortality of the immaterial soul (i.e. incorporeal existence);
- resurrection of the body (or reincarnation, if the resurrected does not have the same body as at the time of death).
Immortality is, from the point of view of philosophy and religion, an indefinite continuation of the mental, spiritual or physical existence of individuals. In many philosophical and religious traditions, it is definitely understood as the continuation of the existence of the immaterial (soul or mind) beyond the physical (death of the body).
Different points of view
The fact that the belief in immortality has been widespread in history is no proof of its truth. It may be a superstition that arose from dreams or other natural experiences. Thus the question of its validity has been raised philosophically from the earliest times when people began to engage in intellectual speculation. In the Hindu Katha Upanishad, Naziketas says: “It is a doubt that a person is gone – some say: he is; others: it doesn't exist. I would have known about it. The Upanishads - the foundation of the most traditional philosophy in India - mainly discuss the nature of humanity and its ultimate destiny.
Immortality is also one of the main problems of Platonic thought. With the claim that reality as such is fundamentally spiritual, he tried to prove immortality without claiming that nothing could destroy the soul. Aristotle spoke of eternal life, but did not defend personal immortality, since he believed that the soul cannot exist in a disembodied state. The Epicureans, from a materialistic point of view, believed thatthat there is no consciousness after death. The Stoics believed that this is a rational universe as a whole, which is preserved.
The Islamic philosopher Avicenna declared the soul immortal, but his co-religionists, remaining closer to Aristotle, accepted the eternity of only the universal mind. Saint Albert Magnus advocated immortality on the basis that the soul itself is an independent reality. John Scot Erigena argued that personal immortality cannot be proved or disproved by reason. Benedict de Spinoza, accepting God as the ultimate reality, generally supported eternity, but not the immortality of individuals within it.
The German philosopher of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, believed that immortality cannot be demonstrated by pure reason, but must be perceived as a necessary condition for morality.
At the end of the 19th century, the problem of immortality, life and death as a philosophical concern disappeared, partly due to the secularization of philosophy under the growing influence of science.
Philosophical point of view
A significant part of this discussion touches on a fundamental question in the philosophy of mind: Do souls exist? Dualists believe that souls exist and survive the death of the body; materialists believe that the mind is nothing but brain activity, and thus death leads to the complete end of a person's existence. However, some believe that even if immortal souls do not exist, immortality can still be achieved through resurrection.
These discussions are also closely related to disputes about personal identity,because any description of immortality must deal with how a dead person could be identical to the original self that once lived. Traditionally, philosophers have considered three main criteria for personal identity: soul, body, and mind.
Mystical Approach
While empirical science has little to offer here, the field of parapsychology has attempted to provide evidence for an afterlife. Immortality has recently been presented by secular futurists in terms of technologies that can stop dying indefinitely (for example, “Artificial Negligible Aging Strategies” and “Mind Uploading”), which opens up the prospect of a kind of immortality.
Despite the huge variety of beliefs in immortality, they can be summarized in three main models: the survival of the astral body, the immaterial soul, and resurrection. These models are not necessarily mutually exclusive; in fact, most religions adhere to a combination of the two.
Survival of the astral body
Many primitive religious movements suggest that human beings consist of two body substances: the physical, which can be touched, hugged, seen and heard; and astral, made of some mysterious ethereal substance. Unlike the first, the second has no durability (for example, it can pass through walls), and therefore cannot be touched, but it can be seen. Its appearance is similar to the physical body, except that it maythe color tones are lighter and the figure is blurred.
After death, the astral body breaks away from the physical body and persists in time and space. Thus, even if the physical body decays, the astral body survives. This type of immortality is most often represented in films and literature (for example, the ghost of Hamlet). Traditionally, philosophers and theologians have not enjoyed the privileges of this model of immortality because there seem to be two insurmountable difficulties:
- if the astral body really exists, it should be considered as departing from the physical body at the time of death; yet there is no evidence that explains this;
- ghosts usually appear with clothing; this would mean that there are not only astral bodies, but also astral clothing - a statement too extravagant to be taken seriously.
Immaterial Soul
The model of the immortality of the soul is similar to the theory of the "astral body", but people in it consist of two substances. It suggests that the substance that survived the death of the body is not some other body, but rather an immaterial soul that cannot be perceived through the senses. Some philosophers, such as Henry James, have come to believe that in order for something to exist, it must occupy space (although not necessarily physical space), and therefore souls are somewhere in the cosmos. Most philosophers believed that the body is mortal, but the soul is not. Since the time of Descartes (17th century), most philosophers have believed that the soul is identical with the mind, and whenever a person dies, histhe mental content survives in the intangible state.
Eastern religions (such as Hinduism and Buddhism) and some ancient philosophers (such as Pythagoras and Plato) believed that immortal souls leave the body after death, can temporarily exist in an intangible state, and eventually receive a new body during birth. This is the doctrine of reincarnation.
Resurrection of the body
While most Greek philosophers believed that immortality meant solely the survival of the soul, the three great monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) believe that immortality is achieved through the resurrection of the body at the time of the Final Judgment. The same bodies that once made up people will rise up again to be judged by God. None of these great denominations has a definite position on the existence of an immortal soul. Therefore, traditionally Jews, Christians and Muslims believed that at the moment of death the soul is separated from the body and continues to exist in an intermediate immortal state until the moment of resurrection. Some, however, believe that there is no intermediate state: with death, a person ceases to exist and, in a sense, resumes existence at the time of resurrection.
Pragmatic Arguments for Belief in Eternal Life
Most religions adhere to the acceptance of immortality based on faith. In other words, they do not provide any evidence of human survival after the death of the body; in fact, their belief in immortality appeals to somedivine revelation, which is said to require no rationalization.
Natural theology, however, attempts to provide rational evidence for the existence of God. Some philosophers argue that if we can rationally prove the existence of God, we can conclude that we are immortal. For God, being omnipotent, will take care of us and thus will not allow our existence to be destroyed.
Thus, the traditional arguments for the existence of God (ontological, cosmological, teleological) indirectly prove our immortality. However, these traditional arguments have been deliberately criticized, and some arguments against the existence of God (such as the problem of evil) have also been put forward.
Practices for achieving immortality
In myths around the world, people who achieve eternal life are often considered gods or have god-like qualities. In some traditions, immortality was granted by the gods themselves. In other cases, a normal person discovered alchemical secrets hidden in natural materials that stopped death.
Chinese alchemists have been looking for ways to achieve immortality for centuries, creating elixirs. The emperor often commissioned them and experimented with things like mercury, gold, sulfur, and plants. The formulas for gunpowder, sulfur, s altpeter and carbon were originally an attempt to create an elixir of immortality. Traditional Chinese medicine and early Chinese alchemy are closely related, and the use of plants, fungi, and minerals in longevity formulas is still widely practiced today.
The idea of using liquid metals for longevity is present in alchemical traditions from China to Mesopotamia and Europe. The logic of the ancients assumed that the consumption of something fills the body with the qualities of what was consumed. Because metals are durable and appear to be permanent and indestructible, it was only reasonable that whoever ate metal would become permanent and indestructible.
Mercury, a metal that is liquid at room temperature, fascinated ancient alchemists. It is highly toxic, and many experimenters have died after working with it. Some alchemists also tried to use liquid gold for the same purpose. Apart from gold and mercury, arsenic has been another paradoxical ingredient in many elixirs of life.
In the Taoist tradition, the ways to achieve immortality are divided into two main categories: 1) religious - prayers, moral behavior, rituals and observance of commandments; and 2) physical diet, medications, breathing techniques, chemicals, and exercise. Living alone in a cave, like hermits, brought them together and was often seen as ideal.
The main idea of the Taoist diet is to nourish the body and deny food to the "three worms" - disease, old age and death. Immortality can be achieved, according to the Taoists, by maintaining this diet, which nourishes the mysterious power of the "germ body" within the main body, and by avoiding ejaculation during sex, which retains the life-giving semen that mixes with the breath and maintains the body and brain.
Technologicalperspective
Most secular scientists don't have much affinity for parapsychology or the religious belief in eternal life. Nevertheless, the exponential growth of technological innovation in our era has suggested that bodily immortality may become a reality in the not-too-distant future. Some of these proposed technologies raise philosophical issues.
Cryonics
This is the preservation of corpses at low temperatures. While not a technology designed to bring people back to life, it is aimed at keeping them alive until some future technology can reanimate corpses. If such a technology were ever really developed, we would have to rethink the physiological criterion for death. For if brain death is a physiological point of no return, then the bodies that are currently cryogenically preserved and will be brought back to life were not truly dead after all.
Engineering negligible aging strategies
Most scientists are skeptical about the prospect of resuscitation of already dead people, but some are very enthusiastic about the possibility of delaying death indefinitely, stopping the aging process. Scientist Aubrey De Gray has proposed several strategies for artificial non-significant aging: their goal is to identify the mechanisms responsible for aging and try to stop or even reverse them (for example, by repairing cells). Some of these strategies involve genetic manipulationand nanotechnology, and hence they raise ethical issues. These strategies also raise concerns about the ethics of immortality.
Mind Upload
However, other futurists believe that even if it were not possible to h alt the death of a body indefinitely, it would at least be possible to emulate the brain using artificial intelligence (Kurzweil, 1993; Moravec, 2003). Thus, some scholars have considered the prospect of "mind uploading", i.e. transferring the mind's information to a machine. Therefore, even if the organic brain dies, the mind can continue to exist once it is loaded into a silicon-based machine.
This theory of achieving immortality raises two important philosophical issues. First, in the realm of the philosophy of artificial intelligence, the question arises: can a machine ever really be conscious? Philosophers who hold a functionalist understanding of the mind will agree, but others will disagree.
