How to Live Forever

Science Fiction and Philosophy

Stephen R L Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134800063
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Immortality is a subject which has long been explored and imagined by science fiction writers. In his intriguing new study, Stephen R.L.Clark argues that the genre of science fiction writing allows investigation of philosophical questions about immortality without the constraints of academic philosophy. He reveals how fantasy accounts of issues such as resurrection, disembodied survival, reincarnation and devices or drugs for preserving life can be used as an important resource for philosophical inquiry and examines how a society of immortals might function through a reading of the vampire myth.
How to Live Forever is a compelling study which introduces students and professional philosophers to the possibilities of using science fiction in their work. It includes extensive suggestions for further reading, both fictional and philosophical, and examines the work of such major science fiction authors as Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Larry Niven, William Gibson, and Colin Wilson.

Chapter 1
The end of summer

REASONS NOT TO WANT TO LIVE FOREVER

Are there good reasons not to want to live forever? Would we find, as I supposed ‘back then’, that the weight of memory and the loss of friends must make unending life a torment? That is probably a majority view among modern moral philosophers. Bernard Williams’s meditation on the Makropoulos Secret (devised by Karel

apek) would have given me a more familiar title for this opening chapter. Swift’s Struldbruggs, or Tithonus himself, could also have provided a familiar title, to a slighdy different effect. Instead I have chosen to begin from Algis Budrys’s short story ‘The End of Summer’.

Its plot is as follows. The world has for many millennia been immersed in a field that promotes cellular regeneration. All ageing or injured cells are self-healing, constandy recreating the condition they were in when the field was first established. Among the unfortunate consequences is that long-term memory is impossible. Without the help of computerized memories, played back into the sluggish minds of early morning, everyone would constandy awake to the self-same memories that they had back at the beginning. The young never grow up, and no new lives are born. The central character, one of the many drifters in this far-future world, accidentally kills a child’s dog, and his wish to make amends (the child’s memories, of course, can easily be edited to exclude the dog) leads him to investigate the explanation for the field, and what it has done to human life. He discovers (partly by deciding not to listen to his tapes, and so to awaken to the earliest memories, long suppressed) that it was he who established the field, and that its result has been a long slow death of humankind. No one takes risks, or dares new knowledge; no new lives are born and the old ones the accidentally, too deeply injured for regeneration. He decides that there must be an ‘end to summer’, and turns off the field.

Several of the standing themes of science-fictional analysis are already present: edited memories, regenerated cells, sterility and ‘race suicide’ as the price of individual deathlessness, our own absolute responsibility for the mess we are in. The story is also an example of a common kind: imagined differences, vast explorations, culminate in a restoration of this world-here. Maturity, after all, lies in acceptance of the world we find. Those time-travel stories that allow for changing history almost always decree that the one real time-line must be ours, that all the changes ‘should’ be reversed, or change itself outlawed (witness Asimov’s End of Eternity or Brunner’s Times without Number). There is another sort of story, which allows the transformations but denies the return: I shall argue in a later chapter that those stories are the better guide (witness Leiber’s The Big Time, Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth). Maturity does not always lie in acceptance, any more than the pious inhabitants of Dante’s Limbo are in Paradise.¹

What reasons against Wanting Immortality are suggested by Budrys’s story, and by the many others that take a broadly hostile line? The first and most obvious reason may be simply that it cannot be achieved. Budrys relies on an undiscovered ‘field’ that promotes cellular regeneration (but somehow doesn’t ever promote cancerous growth instead), and even his imagined field cannot prevent accidents forever. Living forever, or until the end of time, is something far beyond the most wildly imagined science, though there are some transhumanists who seem to expect it:² my own early story required an alien (so standing in for gods) to make it possible. Every complex entity sometime dissolves: even Epicurean gods, far distant from sublunary agitations and immune to mortal illnesses, will dissolve at last. That the thing cannot be had does not mean that we cannot wish for it: wishing for impossibles is what we do quite well. But who would seriously plan her life around the achievement of impossibles? What we cannot have we had better stop wishing for.

But though this reply is, in a way, a finally convincing one, it should not halt the debate. Perhaps something that is practically indistinguishable from pure immortality is possible after all: living for an extra ten millennia is indistinguishable now from ‘living forever’ (though it won’t be as the end draws near). Ten millennia, or ten million years, or ten billion (all depending on the reach of our imagination, or our greed) will suffice to transform us into something that we cannot imagine. Time enough to wonder whether we should, at the end, still hope to live much longer when we’ve lived as long! And maybe a deeper immortality is possible after all.

That first objection is one that we can put aside, and so is the second. Gulliver’s third voyage was to the islands of Laputa, Balnibarbi and the rest. On one such island he learns of the Struldbruggs, rare mutations who are doomed to ‘live forever’. He is exhilarated by the thought, and fantasizes how he would himself behave if he had been so fortunate. But Struldbruggs age, acquire all the faults of age and are denied (for the sake of their mortal descendants) any of its privileges. They are the least fortunate of human beings, destined to outlive their times, their friends, the very language of their youth, and subject to all the little pains and humiliations of age. If they were allowed to own any property they would accumulate it greedily, past any sensible use of it—as Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth imagine in Gladiator-at-Law. Living forever, on these terms (like Tithonus’), is a long-drawn-out death. Plainly no one would wish it for anyone she cares for. Aldous Huxley’s bitter descant on the theme (in After Many a Summer) suggests that even a healthy long life (brought about by prolonged consumption of the long-lived carp, the Chinese emblem of immortality) would only allow ‘the neotenic ape’ the opportunity to mature. As neotenic apes we reproduce while we still have the childish traits our grown-up cousins put aside: a matured human being would be as lacking in intellectual energy as a gorilla.

This problem too can be set aside. On the one hand, living forever is plainly intended to be living healthily, or youthfully, forever (with whatever caveat about youth or health proves necessary). On the other, we might as well imagine that the neotenic ape grows up to be one of Niven’s Protectors (on which more hereafter). It would be too easy to make immortality sound worthless if we guaranteed unending pain, or deprived the immortal of her wits. The question is: would living forever be essentially a bad idea, even if all ordinary advantages of health and good sense were added?

A much more serious problem (already hinted at) is that a solitary immortal will always be losing friends, homes, civilizations. Swift’s Struldbruggs cannot even communicate with later-born immortals, since their mother tongues have changed so drastically, and they have lost any capacity to learn a new one. That failing we can perhaps think away. A healthy immortal could be assumed to be capable of learning a new language (especially as language changes only slowly). They might find it as difficult in the end as their descendants to understand the language they knew long ago, but as long as they remember to translate their own memoirs once a century they will lose little. What of friends, and families, and familiar worlds? Maybe immortals must keep company especially with each other: mortal mayflies could not hold their attention long. Or would immortals be the worst company of all, with thousands of years to find each other’s habits more exasperating? As Poul Anderson’s immortals discover, in The Boat of a Million Years, they have nothing in common but their immortality. Would they cultivate mere mortals to occupy familiar slots, surrounding themselves with good examples of a type they once knew well? Would they notice which individuals fulfilled those roles, or would they care? Consider the immortals of Frank Herbert’s Eyes of Heisenberg. Calapine, an immortal, has just killed her favourite security officer (one clone of very many), and is already beginning to forget:

Which Max was…erased? she asked herself. We’ve had many of him…a successful model for our Security. She thought of the others, Max after Max after Max, each shunted aside when his appearance began to annoy his masters. They stretched into infinity, images in an endless system of mirrors.

What is erasure to such as Max? she wondered. I am an unbroken continuity of existence. But a doppleganger doesn ‘t remember. A doppleganger breaks the continuity.³

Here Herbert creates some answer to the threat of loss: immortals can retain, with care, the company of immortals, and keep careful track of their mortal companions or servants so as to create the illusion of a familiar place. In so doing anodier serious problem emerges: boredom. What can occupy this endless, hurrying time, which must be managed to seem familiar even at the cost of being stiflingly the same? Take another set of Herbert’s immortals: the Chem in The Heaven Makers. This race discovered deathlessness unimaginably long ago, and seek their amusements from the contrived dramas of their mortal children: us. Anything that fills their time is eagerly demanded, at whatever cost. The longer they live the faster the time passes (as even ageing humans know), but they come no nearer to an end or transformation. Only a tiny percentage of these immortals can find anything of such interest to do more than ‘kill time’. Without any frame about their lives they are incapable of living coherently or sanely. They have done everything so many times before that nothing is worth doing. Julian Barnes’s dream of the afterlife, in History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters, makes a similar point. People, his dream suggests, ‘get the kind of Heaven they want…a continuation of life… But better, needless to say. Sex, golf, shopping, dinner, meeting famous people and not feeling bad?’ They die the second—and final—death when they decide they’ve had enough, that they’ve done everything they wanted to do as well as they possibly could. Similarly, in Michael Scott Rohan’s Winter of the World, 1,000-year-old heroes are trapped in a spurious immortality, whose burden of pointless feasting, art and ceremony they eventually surrender, to become amnesiac, short-lived creatures adapted to life within the woods (a valuable gloss on legends of elves). And on Astrobe, R.A.Lafferty’s dystopia in Past Master, ‘nine out of ten persons ask for termination long before their normal lifeterm is due. They find life so wearying, the Golden People’.⁴

All that can alleviate the tedium, or (more positively) give life some meaning, we are sometimes told, is to put that life at risk. In Niven’s imagined future some of his long-livers, nursed on boosterspice, ‘run out of things to do’, and take greater and greater chances until one kills them (‘Grendel’). In Anderson’s World without Stars, it is suggested that only those who risk their immortality deserve or bear it.

What this comes down to is the thought that every finite intelligence or personality will at last be exhausted, and should then be put aside. Two replies are possible. In the first place, as before, we may be willing to agree that after 50 million years or 50 thousand we might be bored, yet still insist that three score and ten is far too few. We could deal with the acute boredom of long-term immortals when we suffer from it. And in the second place, is it so clear that boredom is inevitable? Marcus Aurelius could believe that an ordinarily well-informed 40-year-old had seen everything worth seeing in the world. That is not so obvious. Immortals in a finite world might at last grow bored, but why assume the world immortals live in is a finite one? The physical world is, no doubt: were there infinitely many stars the night sky would be a blaze of light. Or rather: the level of electromagnetic and gravitational energy would be infinite at every point. But it does not follow that the human world is finite.

Is the rejection of death like the rejection of a necessary change? On those terms a desire for ‘immortality’ would be a desire to remain unchanged, tied down within this world, and its achievement, as in Richard Cowper’s ‘The Tidionian Factor’, would be a personal and spiritual disaster. That is a question which I shall defer.

Are there odier, ediical arguments against wishing to live forever? ‘More! More! is the cry of a mistaken soul’, so Blake assures us. If we are never to be satisfied with what we have, how can we even, sanely, want to have it? If there is no amount of something that we can recognize to be ‘enough’, then no amount of it will fill our need. Having such insatiable desires is a mark of immaturity, or wickedness. Correspondingly (as I hinted before), however long we live it will seem only a moment in the face of genuine eternity: better accept the moment that we actually have than demand a notionally ‘longer’ one that is bound to be as unsatisfying while we go on demanding. Wanting to live forever is as foolish as wishing to get bigger all the time, or to find new worlds to conquer. There is a point beyond which any increase in size would eidier be impossible (the growing entity would break apart) or require so great a transformation that the survivor would not, could not, be herself. Maybe there is a similar point beyond which any increased length of life would be as foolish an idea.

It is a powerful argument. Greek ediical theory identified pleonexia, the wish for ‘more’, as the root or essence of injustice. Modern translators often fumble, supposing that the word means, vacuously, ‘wanting more than it is just to want’. The thought that ‘wanting more’, which is the desire for ‘progress’, could itself be bad is rarely recognized. But perhaps the vice is not to be found in the wish for immortality. It is not that would-be immortals always want something else, which they do not yet have, and without which their life has no sufficient meaning. Would-be immortals wish to maintain the good they have already, and not merely add year upon year in an unmeaning quest for something unobtainable, a journey nowhere. The Chem are going nowhere, but it does not follow that all immortals suffer from their disabilities. The same Greek moralist who condemned pleonexia also urged us not to think mere mortal thoughts, but to immortalize ourselves. Quite what he meant must be, for now, another story.

But even if the mere wish to maintain one’s life is not necessarily an example of a vicious pleonexia, maybe there does come a point where it would be wrong to continue. This emerges most clearly when we consider what civil society would be like were there immortals. I shall consider part of that problem in a later chapter. The most obvious and immediate problem must be that if no one dies the young can never become mature. In C.J. Chenyh’s Merchanter’s Luck rejuvenation means that a would-be starship pilot in a family ship must wait for responsibility until her great-great-grandmother’s, great-grandmother’s, grandmother’s, mother’s generations have all, at last, left office. In that world there are occasional chances to get out, to make a responsible life elsewhere. In other imagined worlds there is no such luck. Struldbruggs hang on to anything they are allowed to own, but even more agreeable characters, with the best of intentions, get in the way of youth. In Cherryh’s Cyteen the physiological and psychological technology to reproduce abilities and personalities is used to recreate people who have already controlled things—in the common interest, as they see it—for a hundred years. In Clarke’s The City and the Stars, the great city Diaspar, last and greatest of all human cities, is inhabited by perennial...