Interview with Stephen Cave (author and philosopher)

Stephen Cave is a Senior Research Associate in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence. He studies the philosophy of immortality and technology, including the ethics of AI and life extension. He sat down with me to discuss his 2012 book, Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization, and recently co-authored Should You Choose to Live Forever? A Debate with John Martin Fischer. You can find my full review of Immortality here.

Can you summarize the premise of your book Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization?

The awareness of death is present in humans in a way in which it is in no other species. This awareness shapes our experience and is intrinsically terrifying if not managed. The good news, if you like, is that every culture in human history has had ways of managing it, of defying or denying death, which fall into four broad categories: 1) Staying Alive, 2) Resurrection, 3) the Soul, and 4) Legacy. These are our “immortality narratives.”

Staying Alive is obvious. We know what this life is like here in this body, in this world, and the idea of just keeping going is therefore the most straightforward way of defying death. It might seem implausible, given that death has a 100% track record, but vast numbers of cultures have had myths and legends about fountains of youth, immortal elixirs, etc. And nowadays, we’re very happy to tell ourselves the story that science and technology will defeat aging and disease if we take the right supplements and do our exercise. However, judging by the historic success rate, it’s very prudent to have a back-up plan.

The Resurrection narrative provides a kind of plan B, returning to this physical body in this world in some way. It’s the foundation of Christianity and fundamental to Orthodox Judaism and Islam. So billions of people on the planet, whether they’re fully aware of it or not, are signed up to something like physical resurrection. And again, we’re also telling this narrative through modern science and technology, for example, in cryonics, the idea that a person can be frozen when they die, and revived at a later point.

For many people, though, the biology of our bodies seems far too unreliable and inconsistent a vehicle for eternity. And so, they turn to an immaterial answer, and that is the Soul. The Soul narrative is very attractive because it suggests that this diseased, aging, fragile thing that is your body is not the real you… the real you is something that’s intrinsically immortal because it’s not material, not subject to degradation or harm. When your body dies, there’s no problem, your soul just moves on. This view is incredibly attractive and widely believed in the world today. I think there is something like a scientific or technological equivalent, which is the idea of mind uploading, which also suggests that you can leave the body behind and enter a kind of ethereal realm.

Unfortunately, all the evidence suggests that the ‘real you’ – your consciousness or mind – is dependent upon something very physical: the brain. It’s easy to make someone unconscious in a physical way, and we know that brain damage can destroy people’s emotions, sense of right and wrong, sense of humour, memories, values, etc. The question is: if a soul can take all those things forward into another realm, if the soul is the preserver of your consciousness and memories, and if it can do that without your brain… why do you lose these things when your brain is damaged? All possible answers seem very ad hoc and implausible, which is why belief in the soul has gone down as we’ve come to understand more about the brain.

What's left then for the would-be immortalist if they can't survive, and if resurrection or the soul is not very plausible? Well, we think about living on in less direct ways, not as a conscious individual. I call those ways Legacy, either living on biologically through your offspring, or living on culturally through your works. I think these are perfectly valid sources of personal meaning, but they’re not sources of personal immortality. I love my children dearly, there’s a sense in which I “live on” through them, but it’s not one of literal, conscious living on. These legacy modes can be very fruitful, but they’re not personal immortality. Here I like to quote Woody Allen, who said: “I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen, I want to live on in my apartment.” And that’s a nice quote at this moment because it brings us right back to the beginning and the first immortality narrative of Staying Alive. All four narratives are widespread, and all have flaws that push us to the next one, so it’s very dynamic.

What do you think produces our fear of death? Is it a strictly biological response to threat, or is it something more?

I think we as a species are distinctive – distinctive in our ability to conceive of the future, to make generalizations, and distinctive in the sense in which we have a conception of ourselves as individuals. It might be that some other large-brained species have those attributes and conceptions as well, like elephants, dolphins, and other great apes, but that’s a tiny number of species – we can be fairly sure that beetles don’t have sophisticated conceptions of the future! There’s always a gradation, but we have an advanced ability to imagine the future, to plan, to generalize and learn, and of course a sense of “self” that allows for language and social cooperation. But what’s the consequence of this? We look around and see other creatures dying, including other humans, and we generalize: “I’m going to die. I’m alive now, but in the future I won’t be.” And we have this sophisticated sense of self as well, such that the idea of personal death is very real and meaningful. In other words, I think these traits that have evolutionary benefits (imagining, planning, generalizing, etc.) come with one massive downside, which is the awareness of our own death.

But is the fear of death purely biological? I think the fear of death is both visceral and intellectual. It’s visceral in that it’s a kind of fight or flight response, that panic induced by imminent danger. The thing about us is we can also summon that fear at any time… just by thinking about it. So, it’s physical, it’s visceral, it’s biological, but it’s mental inasmuch as it’s only because of our mental abilities that we’re able to summon danger from the comfort of our armchairs. There’s no predator here now, but I still stick myself with fear by thinking about the inevitability of my demise.

Is the hope for immortality a simple response to this fear, or are there ways we are predisposed (or otherwise motivated) to believe we might live forever?

What makes this complicated and interesting is a contradiction, which I call the “Mortality Paradox.” On the one hand, our faculties tell us that death is inevitable and unavoidable… at the same time, it's unimaginable. We can't imagine what it's like to die – as conscious beings, the light is always on. We can imagine our own funeral, maybe, but it’s through our own eyes. The mentally conscious being is still there. Non-existence is not a feasible object for a mind that does exist. So, we have this sort of tension that is dynamic and generative. And you can see how the four immortality narratives build on this. The Soul narrative is a great example, it allows us to imagine that the observed inevitability of death is just for the body and the continuation of the mind is because we have a soul. Problem solved. Paradox resolved! There’s a long history in philosophizing of thinking that if we can imagine something it must be possible, and if we can’t then it can’t exist… as if the limit of our imagination is the limit of the world. That simply isn’t so.

Is belief in immortality a socially valuable myth? In what ways is it damaging?

It’s a complicated answer. I think immortality beliefs can be extremely important for social cohesion, and they can equally be damaging. The reason they can be both to extreme is because they're so powerful. You can mobilize people by promising to help them live forever or to have a good afterlife rather than a bad one. It’s very powerful even today, and there’s a long history of using that tool to create pro-social behaviour before there were police forces, which are a very recent invention in judicial systems. You tell people that if they comply with your commandments, they’ll have a happy ever after, and if they don’t, they’ll burn in hellfire. If you keep hammering that message home, they start believing it, and the effect can be extremely important in social cohesion – I mean, it depends on what you think human beings would do unregulated, but particularly for people who are geared toward egotism, individualism, and self-interest, it gets them to buy in to pro-social behaviour. So, I'm sure there have been societies that have been stable and productive and pleasant partly because of the ways immortality has been instrumentalized.

But at the same time, it can be very dangerous in lots of ways because people are willing to go to extremes for their immortality beliefs. It can make these beliefs very conservative. If you think of a secular worldview where morals are decided through a participatory democratic process, you can change morals. Think of how in the last 60 years in the UK being gay has gone from being criminalized to it now being illegal to discriminate against anyone for it. For me as a liberal progressive, this counts as moral progress, and it can happen rapidly in a liberal democratic society. Whereas, if you’ve written in your magic book that if you do such-and-such you’ll go to hell, and such-and-such you’ll go to heaven, and you’ve been preaching your magic book for hundreds of years, moral change becomes very difficult. People are willing to fight and die and do other desperate things if they think it will make them live forever. So, there are benefits, but there are also risks.

In Immortality you said: “A meaningful life and productive society require limitations that define them.” What is the value of finitude?

I once came across a footnote in a book on the nature of economic rationality by Jon Elster, something like ‘it’s well known that it’s not possible for a society to decide rationally how to apportion its resources given an infinite time frame; it’s therefore necessary to impose some kind of finite limit.’ It was just a throwaway remark in the footnotes, but of course it’s true! How can you apportion any resource over an infinite period? It doesn’t make any sense. That certainly helped me think about the problems with making decisions about an immortal life, and since then I’ve come up with a few other ways of thinking about it. To use an example from my new book (with John Martin Fischer), Should You Choose to Live Forever?, let’s imagine someone called Nellie… Nellie dreams of being a pediatrician, but she finds schoolwork boring and would rather play video games. If Nellie was your daughter, what would you say? You’d say, “Nellie, you’re wasting your life playing video games! The clock is ticking.” But what if Nellie is immortal? At what point does Nellie decide to suffer the pain of medical school? She can always do it in the future. Time isn’t limited… she’ll always have an infinite future ahead in which to be a pediatrician for an infinitely long time. What I’m trying to convey is the sense that time is precious and valuable because it is finite, and as soon as we take away that finitude it becomes impossible to make rational decisions about how to spend it. We end up getting stuck. Procrastination becomes endemic. It’s not like we don’t find it hard enough now to focus on what really matters… as if an infinite amount of time would make it easier to make decisions about what to do and not harder.

Is there any way to divorce ourselves from the desire to live forever, or is convincing ourselves of the implausibility of immortality the best we can hope for?

There has been lots of good writing about how we distract ourselves. But one of the key questions is, ought we to be distracted? A very different point of view suggests we should embrace mortality because only then will we make the most of life. That's the direct consequence of what we were just talking about. If you think you've got infinite time or even just lots of time, it's easy to waste it. You know, it's a kind of cliché among those who have been given a terminal diagnosis or survived a tight scrape, that they have a very clear sense of the preciousness of time that causes them to prioritize and do what matters most. Which suggests that our lives are already so long that we're not prioritizing and not doing what matters most! Many schools of thought have this idea that embracing awareness of mortality will help us lead the best possible life. The Dalai Lama, a Tibetan Buddhist, meditates on his mortality every morning. Elements of Stoicism have this too, and you can find it in Ecclesiastes in the Bible.

Now, of course what mortality awareness doesn’t do is help us manage the fear of death, that’s different. And I guess if one is prone to panic attacks in the face of mortality then thinking about it for an hour every morning might not put one in a helpful frame of mind to get on with one’s day, and that’s exactly why some people do push it aside… but then they risk wasting their time. So, is it possible to embrace mortality and live with it? Well, there are wisdom traditions with long histories that do try to help us overcome the fear of death. Epicurus was a pioneering thinker in this regard. He said the idea of death should be nothing to us because when we are here, death is not, and when death is here, we are not. It seems to me that’s exactly right. Lucretius and other subsequent Epicureans developed this idea, that it’s irrational to worry about death because we are insensate when we are dead, we can’t suffer good or bad. But it's hard work to find that helpful, to genuinely accept and internalize it. So, it's of some help but perhaps not as much help as we would like.

There are still other tools and tactics. Bertrand Russell, who lived to a very ripe old age, talked about increasingly investing oneself in projects beyond oneself – feeling yourself merging with a great stream of history and projects you're involved in, until your own death seems less important. It's like trying to take the best of the Legacy narrative and I'm very sympathetic to that. In Immortality I recommend a sort of threefold approach. First, focus more on things outside yourself. Second, focus on the present, which is really taking the Epicurean insight that if you can focus on the present it’s because you’re still alive… I’m not worrying about death because death is not here right now. And the third one is gratitude, because being alive is great, hopefully, for most people most of the time. I’m not saying that these three approaches will dispel all fear of death, but I think they can help us to manage it in a way that allows us to maintain consciousness of our mortality. And, you know, fear of death isn’t just fear… it’s a sense of loss as well, which reflects how much we want to be here. We wouldn’t want to be indifferent.

Could you talk more about the struggle to singularize ourselves, “to project this individuality into the undying cultural realm and fix it there”? And why does establishing the “self” as a value base actually aggravate the threat of death?

I mean, what are we afraid of in death? We are afraid of the destruction and dissolution of this particular individual, and the more one's value system is structured around this particular individual, the more apocalyptic death seems. Now, if we look across cultures and through history, we see this isn't the only value system. There have been plenty of people who have been willing to give their lives for something greater, or find meaning in something greater. In fact, I would say that individualism as a kind of underlying philosophy or ideology is very rare in history. It's a relatively new invention! The term “individualism” comes from the French individualisme, and it was coined as a kind of critique and a parody of people who put their individual interests before those of the whole. Now individualism has been normalized by capitalism, which relies on perception of self-interest and so on. Obviously, it's brought prosperity to many, but it's certainly not the only way we humans are capable of thinking about ourselves. And I would suggest that the vast majority of cultures have conceived of us much less as individuals and more as parts of greater wholes, as nodes in networks, if you like – profoundly connected to our family or our tribe. For some people it’s connection to all of humanity, to the land, or to the web of life. And the more we’re part of a greater whole, the less bad our own individual death becomes, the more it doesn’t matter. So, the benefits of individualism are in driving economic prosperity and encouraging human rights and respect for each individual. But there’s a massive downside, which is that the relentless focus on the self exacerbates the fear of death and creates a sense of being alienated and detached. I think that underpins a lot of the existential crisis of modernity.

What immortality narratives do atheists and skeptics subscribe to? What forms do they take?

Certainly there are secular versions of all main immortality narratives. The idea that we can live forever in this world because of life extension, that’s a huge industry. Never before has so much money been poured into the industry of people striving to live longer. And the idea that science and technology can deliver us from death has been absolutely instrumental to narratives of what science and technology are for from the very beginning. When those godfathers of science and technology, like Francis Bacon, were advocating for the scientific method, what they were going out and selling was immortality! So that’s one. Cryonics is another, this idea that science can preserve you so you can be resurrected. We talked about mind uploading, and of course, legacy. You know, there are more people pursuing fame now than ever before… more influencers and celebrities, more YouTube stardom. I could go on and on about the nature of fame and its relationship to immortality. I’ve got three teenage daughters, and the number of selfies that get taken in my household! They are, in a sense, immortalizing themselves hundreds of times a day in a way that two thousand years ago was available only to kings and queens. Back then, most people wouldn’t even have known what their own reflection looked like. It could only be captured by portrait painting or similar, an incredible luxury. And there have been times where that was restricted by law. So, it’s considered an incredibly powerful, very potent technology, this capturing of someone’s self in a sort of culturally stable form like portrait or statue. And now people do it hundreds of times a day, all over the world.

So yes, secular people are still at it.

Could you explain your proposed alternative to the four immortality narratives, this fifth Wisdom narrative, and what we might hope to gain by accepting our mortality? 

The first part of the Wisdom narrative is the realization that it doesn’t make sense to fear death. This is an intellectual realization that’s hard to internalize and to live, but the idea is that if you take death seriously, then you understand you can’t suffer… can’t be bored, can’t suffer hellfire, and won’t be floating around in the void. Inasmuch as fear only makes sense when we are fearing some kind of unpleasantness, then fearing death doesn’t make sense. The next phase of the Wisdom narrative is to think about the three virtues I mentioned earlier for helping us to live with the reality of mortality: focusing on things beyond the self, focusing on the present, and focusing on gratitude.

Then, I think the final stage is to recognize the extent to which finitude and mortality help us lead a better life. For reasons we’ve touched on, an immortal life would be boring and meaningless and paralyzed by procrastination. That’s one way of flipping mortality – it can appear at first like we have the worst of all possible worlds because we have a passionate desire for life like all living beings do, but also this painful awareness that we’re going to die. Other species, they die too, but they don’t have to live in the fear of it – they’re free. It may seem that we have the worst of all worlds, but the Wisdom narrative tries to invert that and say, well, maybe we have the best of all worlds because our awareness of death allows us to lead the best possible life. Maybe that which sets the limit, which creates the finitude, isn’t something to be feared. The immortal shouldn’t be envied because immortal life would be boring and meaningless. And the other species aren’t to be envied because within the absence of an awareness of mortality it’s easy to squander time.

So then, perhaps we do have the best of all worlds.