How Not to Die

I just wrote a review for the New Statesman of Aleks Krotoski’s excellent new book, The Immortalists: The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life. This coming Wednesday, October 22, I am giving a talk in the “Neuroscience, AI, and Society” series at the University of Washington on several interconnected problems pertaining to consciousness-uploading, the moral dimensions of personhood, Locke’s theory of personal identity, Parfitian thought-experiments with teletransporters, and so on. Read the review when it comes out, and come to my talk if you are in Seattle. Otherwise, what follows here conveys at least some idea of the yield of my reflexions in these other settings.

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1.

Spinoza’s always a safe bet. Everybody loves him. The other day I gave a talk to the members of a psychedelic “church” in California, with its own ordained ministers and tax-exempt status and everything. Naturally, with such a crowd, “Buddhism” and “shamanism” are guaranteed to play well. What struck me this time, though I’ve seen it before and really should not be surprised anymore, is the way the crowd likewise perks up when it hears mention of the author of the Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Fashion (1677). You can insist all you want that it’s really more David Hume who, with his “bundle of properties” theory of the self, was giving voice to a distant European echo of the Theravāda doctrine of anattā, according to which reality consists of momentary events or dharmas, while “self” is only a convenient designation for a given stream or substream of these events. Keep insisting, you simply are not going to convince the psychedelic churchgoers to get into David Hume.

Yet not all of Spinoza’s commitments seem particularly well tailored to excite the imagination. How for example does he account for the common phenomenon whereby an individual entity remains the same entity from one moment to the next? The individual will preserve its nature, he says, so long as “the same ratio of motion and rest is preserved” (Ethics Part 2, Lemma 3). I can get up and cross the room without my glasses, if I wish; it’s a lot harder to leave behind my hands, or my head. These are only differences of degree, rather