What is the point of living if we're going to die?

On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 03:14:51
Bill asked this question:

Hey so my question is what the point of living if we are just going to die, normally the answer would be because we only have one chance to live, but if we are constantly changing doesn't that mean that we are constantly dying and are a new person every moment and doesn't that kind of nullify my first answer?

I agree with a lot in Bill's question, or at least with what it implies. I agree that 'we are constantly dying and are a new person every moment'. I'll give the argument in a minute. I also agree, or at least half agree, that there doesn't seem to be a 'point of living if we are just going to die'. Although I'm not sure things would be any better point-wise if we knew we were not going to die. At least, it's a moot question. I will talk about that too.

First, something to look up which I am not going to talk about. You can Google, Heidegger PLUS "possibility of impossibility", Levinas PLUS "impossibility of possibility". Much ink has been spilled on the so-called 'debate' between Heidegger and Levinas on the subject of death and our attitude to it. The one point of agreement between both philosophers is that human beings are necessarily finite beings. Finitude requires death. Even if you could live as long as the universe, the universe itself is doomed to die.

I am not so sure of this. 'How do you know?' would be my response. How do you know that you are a 'human being'? how do you know that you are just one of the transient aspects or parts that make up a transient universe?

What is certain is that more often than not, death involves suffering, decline, agony. None of us, or at any rate few of us, know how we are going to die, and that process of dying could itself be unspeakably awful. Nor has any human being yet been observed who was immune to death. It is very unlikely that you or I are exceptions to the general rule.

And yet, it takes only a moment's thought to realize that none of us really knows what will happen at, or after, 'death'. That after all is the point of Pascal's Wager. From a logical point of view, there is no experience (driving your car off a cliff, being tortured to death by the Inquisition, dying of lung cancer) which is such that it could not be followed by another experience (waking up in heaven, waking up in a pod in the Matrix, waking up in hell). If we define life, from the subjective standpoint as a sequence of connected experiences, then logically there is no point at which that sequence must end.

How then should we view things from the objective standpoint? To define an entity as 'finite' presupposes that we are able to measure its limits. Spatial finitude is easy enough to define. The desk on which I rest my hands is finite. If I stretch out, I can feel its width. But temporal finitude is more problematic, if we allow that one and the same entity could be reconstituted at some time in the future.

Again, take this desk as an example. Solid and well-made though my desk may be, in a hundred years from now its burned or smashed remains might be found in a land-fill site somewhere. In million years, there might be nothing left but the scattered molecules or atoms of which it was composed. But, logically, there remains the possibility that those parts could be somehow re-assembled. According to the best theory of identity over time for artefacts — such as spatio-temporal continuity under a suitable covering sortal concept (as per Wiggins) — we might well discount this as a case of identity. But things are not so clear when you consider the analogous thought experiment applied to a human being.

What makes a sequence of experiences mine? Here is a thought experiment which I first aired in my book Naive Metaphysics. The thought experiment has links with the well-discussed problem cases of 'fission' in the problem of personal identity, but has the advantage that we do not need to go into any of the technical details. You can do the fission, or the body duplication, or whatever you like to call it, any way you like.

I am interrupted while I am having breakfast by a ring at the door. On the doorstep is a man in a lab coat. He asks me 'how I'm doing'. 'Very well thank you, why did you want to know?' Then he tells me his story — an absurd, tall story of how yesterday I was incinerated in a car crash and then last night a perfect replica of me was placed in my bed. This morning, I woke up unaware that anything untoward had happened. You can fill in the details. The fatal road accident is reported on the TV news. I'm shown video footage of the cloning process. At some point I would be fully convinced that I am not GK, even though it seems subjectively to me that I am.

The subjective sense of 'being' some individual is what makes me different from my desk. My desk doesn't have a view about its own identity, whereas I do. But this subjective sense has no authority to override the patent objective facts. I died. Or, rather, GK is no more. That's the objective truth. I am not GK. Whether I am a clone assembled in a lab and programmed with GK's memories, or, more unlikely, materialized out of nowhere as a result of a giant cosmic accident, it makes absolutely no difference.

At this point, I'm inclined to say that I don't really care. I'm just glad to be alive. The legal stuff (such as how to fill in 'my' tax return) we can sort out. But, in any case, this still leaves a loophole for possible objective conditions, including objectively ascertainable facts about my psychological states, which would satisfy the best available theory for personal identity over time. If you could find a way to revive the dead, as in the Biblical story of the resurrection, that would be (with suitable tweaks) a way to preserve identity and make me the 'real' GK, rather than a mere copy or clone.

But now comes the crunch question: What matters for survival? Last week, I marked an essay by one of my University of London students on the question, 'Is a person's survival different from, and more important than, a person's continuing identity?' The idea that 'survival' rather than 'identity' is what really matters is a view which seems to be gaining increasing support (e.g. from philosophers such as Derek Parfit).

But what is survival without identity? My daughters will survive me, potentially to continue the sequence of generations. That's one way in which I can see an aspect of myself as 'continuing' after my death into the indefinite future. Or, imagine I am a crewmember of K19: The Widowmaker, and I have a twin brother in the same crew, a nuclear technician like myself. My brother and I are very close, we share everything, know everything about one another, even share girlfriends. Then the time comes for one of us to go into the reactor chamber to repair the radiation leak. According to Parfit it shouldn't matter to me in the least if I, or my twin brother goes to face certain death. Because what 'matters', what 'survives' will be exactly the same in both cases. The only difference, is the sheer difference in identity. I am I, and he is he. Yet surely, if I volunteer that would be an act of courage, of unforced altruism or fraternal love, to give my life up so that my twin can live.

If identity doesn't matter, then nothing matters or anything matters: take your pick. Define 'survival' as the fancy takes you, it doesn't alter the facts. Anyone is free to make his or her own decision about what to 'care' about.

On the other hand, if survival implies identity then, logically, I can see only two alternatives. Either, I do not 'survive' from one moment to the next, ever, or else nothing would count as my failing to survive. If we are prepared to make the jump and assert that something, an entity with an identity, survives over time, then whether you look at the matter subjectively in terms of continuity of experience or objectively in terms of the logically necessary and sufficient conditions for identity, you will not encounter death, but only a more or less temporary cessation of life which can never be finally extinguished.

Recalling Pascal again, to me this is an object potentially of far greater fear than death. Think of the times you've been unhappy at being woken up when you just wanted to sleep. Now imagine that nothing, in this universe or any universe could guarantee that you will not be revived, again, and again, ad infinitum. What point would life have then?