![]() Or you might be endlessly anxious about your status in their eyes. If you are part of a group, you would have company, but you might get sick and tired of the others. ![]() You might have to hide your immortality in order to avoid being seen as a freak or a savior or a medical specimen. If you are the only immortal person you might get quite lonely after a while. Are you the only immortal person, or are there others? Is everyone immortal, or only some of you? These scenarios are fodder for science fiction, of course, but they bear on the question. Oh, but wait, there are more things to consider. Given such a state, wouldn’t it be rational to live forever in it? You are extremely fit you can complete triathlons in record time with ease. ![]() Your bones are so strong as to be almost unbreakable, and if they did break, they would heal very rapidly. And you choose your state of health, which most likely would be quite robust. And, of course, even though you seem to be 27, you are still you on the inside with all your memories and knowledge of the world, which accumulate over time. You could seem to be, say, 27 even after living hundreds or thousands of years.) So you choose an age at which your health and mental acuity were at their peak 27 or so sounds good to me, but you get to choose. (Biological age is how old your body seems to be, no matter how old you really are chronologically. Let’s imagine the best case: you get to pick your biological age and how healthy you will be. It would perhaps be more tempting if we could get “frozen” at a certain biological age and state of health. What if we lived forever but just kept getting sicker and more frail, eventually hanging on endlessly by a thread and in pain? Such a life would not be at all appealing. In order to answer the question, we need more details of what this hypothetical immortal life would be like. But what if we could? Would it be rational to choose to do so? Obviously, nobody (that we know of) lives forever, although some live quite a long time. The idea of immortality is a counterfactual. In order to do so, we sometimes look at counterfactuals, things that are not true but could be, to see what follows from our assumptions. But the point of philosophy is to examine such unreflective attitudes to see if they really make sense. I suppose that if, without thinking much about it, you fear being dead, then, sure, you would want to avoid that state. (1) Is living forever something you would really, after some thought, want to do? In the jargon, is it choiceworthy? But what if it didn’t? What if we could live forever? As it happens, a lively topic in current philosophy is whether it would be desirable to be immortal. That essay assumes that death will come to all of us eventually. My essay “ Fearing Death” examines whether we have any reason to fear being dead.
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