10.13135/2036-542X/8124



It has been claimed, most emphatically by transhumanists, that individual death is the greatest evil and that we therefore need to do everything we can to defeat the disease of human senescence and mortality. In other words, we need to kill death. I have argued elsewhere that we actually benefit from death and that death is, all things considered, not an evil at all. However, in this paper, I am not disputing the claim that death is an evil. Instead, I suggest that it can only be an evil for us if we understand our existence as separate from all other existence, which is by no means inevitable. The independent, autonomous self whose annihilation we fear is the product of a particular self–conception, a particular way of seeing ourselves in relation to others. There is an alternative. If we understand our own lives as prolonged and extended in the life that surrounds us, then our own individual death loses its significance. When life is shared and being understood as shared, then there is no need to kill death.



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Michael Hauskeller
Trópos
Autonomy
Killing Death/Sharing Life
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos
9
Monografica
2016-06-12
2023-08-20
2016-06-12
2023-08-20
47-57
1
Michael Hauskeller
2016/06/12
10.13135/2036-542X/8124
47
University of Exeter
2036-542X
2
Autonomy
57
Killing Death/Sharing Life
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/tropos/article/download/8124/6833
9
                                                           trópos • anno IX • numero 1 • 2016 – ISBN 978-88-548-xxxx-x
                                                             DOI 10.4399/97888548xxxxx4 – pag. 47-57 (dicembre 2016)




                                               Killing Death/Sharing Life
                                                                        M H∗




    : It has been claimed, most emphatically by transhumanists, that individual
       death is the greatest evil and that we therefore need to do everything we can to
       defeat the disease of human senescence and mortality. In other words, we need
       to kill death. I have argued elsewhere that we actually benefit from death and
       that death is, all things considered, not an evil at all. However, in this paper, I am
       not disputing the claim that death is an evil. Instead, I suggest that it can only be
       an evil for us if we understand our existence as separate from all other existence,
       which is by no means inevitable. The independent, autonomous self whose
       annihilation we fear is the product of a particular self–conception, a particular
       way of seeing ourselves in relation to others. There is an alternative. If we
       understand our own lives as prolonged and extended in the life that surrounds
       us, then our own individual death loses its significance. When life is shared and
       being understood as shared, then there is no need to kill death.

    : Death, Ageing, Life Extension, Temporal Immortality, Transhumanism,
       Autonomy.




   Once upon a time, the planet was tyrannized by a giant dragon. The dragon stood
   taller than the largest cathedral, and it was covered with thick black scales. Its red
   eyes glowed with hate, and from its terrible jaws flowed an incessant stream of evil–
   smelling yellowish–green slime. It demanded from humankind a blood–curdling
   tribute: to satisfy its enormous appetite, ten thousand men and women had to be
   delivered every evening at the onset of dark to the foot of the mountain where the
   dragon–tyrant lived. Sometimes the dragon would devour these unfortunate souls
   upon arrival; sometimes again it would lock them up in the mountain where they
   would wither away for months or years before eventually being consumed.

   Thus begins the transhumanist Nick Bostrom’s Fable of the Dragon Tyrant
(Bostrom : ). It ends, naturally, with the dragon’s death. After cen-
turies of acceptance, centuries of hesitation and centuries of cowardly sugar–
coating supported by the empty rhetoric of those who think the dragon is
not so bad after all, the people on that planet finally find the means and the
    ∗
       Professor of Philosophy at Department of Sociology, Philosophy and Anthropology, University
of Exeter, UK (m.hauskeller@exeter.ac.uk).


                                                                                                                  
    Michael Hauskeller


courage to attack the evil scourge that has made their lives miserable for
so long, and they kill the dragon. The people are jubilant: now, finally, they
can live their lives without fear, the only regret being that they did not do it
earlier. So many lives wasted, for no good reason.
    The dragon does of course represent death, or more precisely human
senescence: the fact that we all age, that we cannot (as yet) halt the biological
processes that eventually, inevitably, will end our existence. We will all die
of old age if nothing else kills us before we reach it. We may die of other
causes, but ageing condemns us to death. Bostrom’s fable is intended to rouse
us from our complacency, to persuade us that there is no good reason to
accept this fate. Just as there is nothing good about the dragon, there is
nothing good about death and ageing (understood as a slow progression
towards death) either. It is simply evil. And while for a long time there was
nothing really we could do about it, this is no longer the case. We already
have a fairly good understanding of why we age, and it looks like it is only
a matter of time before we finally figure out how to stop (and possibly
reverse) the ageing process (or more precisely processes). However, we
have no time to lose because the longer we wait the more people will die.
So we need to pull our resources together and figure it out now. No more
excuses, Bostrom’s fable tells us: let us do it, let us kill death.
    Other radical life extensionists such as Max More (), Aubrey de Grey
(), or John Harris () fully agree with Bostrom’s assessment of the
situation. They all believe, and encourage us to believe, that death is “the
greatest evil,” and ageing, because it inevitably leads to death, the worst
disease. Max More even argues that as long as we have to die it is not possi-
ble for us to live a meaningful life. Mortal life is per definition meaningless
because there is no point really in trying to achieve anything if we are all
going to die anyway. Only the possibility of “boundless expansion” of the
self into an unlimited future can make our lives truly meaningful. Fighting
and eventually killing death must therefore be our priority. Everything else
can wait. “Death is a malfunction of the human experience”, says Zoltan
Istvan (who currently travels the United States in his Immortality Bus as
the presidential candidate of the Transhumanist Party): “It’s a reversible
error, a transitory cloak of emptiness, a curable disease — a highly curable
disease if dealt with properly” (Istvan : ). Various companies are
already working hard on it. In  Google announced a new company,
Calico (California Life Company) Labs, whose CEO is the biochemist and
biotech manager Arthur Levinson. Calico’s mission “is to harness advanced
technologies to increase our understanding of the biology that controls
lifespan.” (http://www.calicolabs.com/) They are now collaborating with
the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and with QB (the University of
California’s Institute for Quantative Biosciences) to advance the understanding
                                                             Killing Death/Sharing Life       


of age–related diseases and longevity. But the goal is not merely theoretical,
but primarily practical: to combat ageing and save us from the plight of
death. Other companies pursue a different, more unusual path to achieve the
same objective. Thus Australian startup company Humai (Human Resurrec-
tion through Artificial Intelligence) with its CEO Josh Bocanegra aspires
“to reinvent the afterlife”: “We want to bring you back to life after you
die. We’re using artificial intelligence and nanotechnology to store data of
conversational styles, behavioural patterns, thought processes and informa-
tion about how your body functions from the inside–out. This data will be
coded into multiple sensor technologies, which will be built into an artificial
body with the brain of a deceased human.” (http://humaitech.com/) If we
cannot keep people alive, then we shall do our best to raise them from the
dead . This is to be achieved by cryoconserving the brains of the freshly
deceased and then constructing an artificial body to house the brain, which
can then (it is hoped) be reanimated.
    Projects such as these are motivated by a moral imperative that transhu-
manists believe follows from the fact that death is wrong, something that
clearly ought not to be. “In the future”, writes Collin Duncan (), “death
simply won’t be a choice or a technologically eliminated disease. It will be
fundamentally, morally wrong at a very deep level. To allow death will be to
enable it, much as we see passively handing someone a gun to self–annihilate
as assisted suicide today.” Teaching children to believe in an afterlife and
accept death will be seen as tantamount to child abuse, and rightly so. A po-
litical reorientation is urgently recommended (“The proliferation of anti–AI
talk needs to stop. The advances of neo–ludditism upon the technocratic
future need to be rejected. This isn’t an alternative. This isn’t an option. This
is an imperative.”), and a supposedly purely rational utilitarian reasoning is
employed to derive the desired result: “Transhumanism produces an infinite
hedonic score at an infinite magnitude higher than the alternative to the
greatest number of individuals (death vs non–death).” Therefore, Duncan
argues, human life must be upheld “at all costs”. In pursuit of this goal, the
Australian branch of humanity plus just (in January ) launched a petition
“to deem ageing as a disease”, which we are encouraged to sign before it is
sent to “governments around the world” .
    Now if ageing is indeed a disease, then it is clearly by far the worst
disease ever. Not only has it the highest possible fatality rate, namely %
(so that if you have it, you will certainly die), but it is also a disease that

     . The idea of bringing back the dead through technology is not entirely new. It was already
promoted more than a century ago by the Russian proto–transhumanist Nicolai Fedorovich (Burdett
: –).
     . http://www.transhumanism.com.au/petition.
     Michael Hauskeller


everyone suffers from right from the moment they are born (so everyone
will die from it). There are other terrible diseases out there, but at least you
have a good chance to avoid them. From this one, there is no escape.
    But is death, or the certainty of it, really the greatest evil? I have argued
elsewhere (Hauskeller ) that death is not really an evil at all. While our
own death is not bad for us (from which it does not follow that we cannot
be harmed by having our life taken away from us), the death of others is
actually good for us, so that on the whole we benefit from our mortality
(the fact that everyone will die sooner or later). Death, as a basic fact of
life, is nothing to be feared, but, on the whole, something to be welcomed.
We ourselves only exist because of the death of others. Our lives have been
made possible by the death of others, just as our death will make other lives
possible. However, since this is not the point I wish to make in this paper,
I am not going to reiterate the arguments for these claims here. Instead, I
want to propose a different way of looking at life and death altogether.
    Davide Sisto () has convincingly argued that death is part of the very
fabric of life. It is an agent of change and renewal, deeply embedded in
our biology, and it is therefore misleading to see death as the opposite of
life, which can then be removed from the process of life without thereby
destroying what life actually is. “Death begins before death and life goes
on after life.” (Sisto : ) Yet we can easily concede this point and still
insist that real death, the kind of death that we fear and wish to overcome, is
something different entirely, namely the total annihilation of the individual
self, and that it provides little consolation that life goes on after life because
that life is not really my life; it is somebody else’s life. But is it? Is the
distinction between my life and your life really as clear–cut as it appears to
us? Is it a fact of nature that your life is not my life and my life not your life?
Or is it a question of how we look at ourselves in relation to others, how we
understand our own life in relation to life as a whole? When we decry death
as the greatest evil, we are actually not thinking about the end of all things
or the end of life as such; we are thinking about the end of our personal life,
the end of this particular individual self, not death in general, but, ultimately,
my death (or for you, your death). We are not so much concerned about the
fact that people have to die, but about the fact that we (or more precisely,
I) have to die. But life (we suppose) goes on without us. Life goes on after
life. We do not doubt that, at least not on a theoretical level, but it doesn’t
help to calm our fear because we conceive of ourselves as separated by an
ontological gulf from all other life.
    It is the belief that there really is such a separation that lets us cling to
our individual life as long as possible and that explains and justifies the way
medicine is largely practiced today: as a determined effort to prolong life as
long as possible, no matter what the costs. If there is a chance that a medical
                                                   Killing Death/Sharing Life   


intervention can help us live only three months longer, even if we have to
spend those three months alone in a hospital or a nursing home, away from
those we care about and “cut off from all things that matter to us in life”
(Gawande : ), it is considered worth it, because nothing can be more
important than being alive as long as we can. We are no longer allowed to
die at home and in peace. We are no longer allowed to become and be old
or ill or disabled and at the same time continue to live our lives in the midst
of others, in mutual support and appreciation, not only because it is too
demanding for those who live with us and who have to take care of us, but
also because it is simply too risky. It might kill us. Safety has priority here.
Continuing to share our life with others, and to take part in their lives, has
not.
    Yet while, as a society, we work on the assumption that our individual
death is the worst that can happen to us so that we have (or the medical
profession does) a moral duty to postpone it as much as we can, we on the
other hand treat the elderly and severely disabled as if they were already
as good as dead, as if they had already lost what makes life worth living
in the first place, as if they had no business anymore to hang around and
occupy space in the world of the living. So off they go to hospitals and other
institutions where they can be properly taken care of and where they can
then safely continue the rest of their lives for as long as possible while at the
same time being cut off from anything to live for, anything that may still
make their lives meaningful and worth living. As the American surgeon
Atul Gawande in his latest book, Being Mortal, observes, “it seems we’ve
succumbed to a belief that, once you lose your physical independence, a life
of worth and freedom is simply not possible” (Gawande : ).
    There is not really a contradiction between those two attitudes: the
prolongation of individual life at all costs and the (attitudinal and practi-
cal) devaluation of the life of those with diminished capacities. Both are
grounded in what Gawande calls the “veneration of the independent self.”
(Gawande : ) When we get old, we increasingly become weaker
and frailer, and thus gradually lose our independence. And because the
increasing dependency of the old on other people also infringes upon the
autonomy of those who they become dependent on, we cart them off to
nursing homes where they no longer stand in the way of our own trea-
sured self–realization. Dependency is widely considered bad because it
undermines our self–conception as an autonomous subject, just as death is
considered bad because it terminates our existence as such a subject.
    Ironically, though, the independent, autonomous self that we fancy our-
selves to be and that, in our modern society, we aspire to develop and
protect as much as we can, does not really seem worth protecting if that is
all we have got in our life. If nothing matters to us but our own individual
      Michael Hauskeller


well–being and survival, or if nothing matters as much as that, then there
is, frankly, not much that matters, and, for most people, it is actually too
little to live on. When the transhumanist Max More claims that only a life
of “boundless expansion” is ultimately meaningful and worth living, he is
in fact partly right. The error consists in seeking this boundless expansion
diachronically in the unlimited prolongation of the existence of the atomic
self, instead of synchronically in the enlargement of that self, in such a way
that it includes more than just itself. The individual self, when perceived
as being isolated from the rest of the world, as ontologically self–sufficient,
has nothing but itself to hold on to. The consequence is that, for it, life
does not go on after life. The end of the self becomes tantamount to the
end of the world: it is the worst possible outcome. However, we can also
see our own life as being embedded and extended in the life that we share
with others. Then what I am is not limited by the boundaries of my sub-
jective consciousness and my body, but extends beyond it. This not only
gives meaning to our lives, but it also makes our own death appear less
important to ourselves. As Gawande points out with reference to Josiah
Royce’s philosophy of loyalty: “The only way death is not meaningless is to
see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society.
If you don’t, mortality is only a horror.” (Gawande : ) The more we
identify with the life that surrounds us and the more we find value in the
world rather than ourselves, the less of a horror our own death becomes. It
becomes a matter of little concern because our death is no longer the death
of everything that matters. It is after all, just I who dies, the individual self
that I have learned to identify myself with first and foremost, but this I is
not everything I am. To put it paradoxically, I am, or can be, more than just
me.
    That is why I have always been intrigued by the philosophy of the Ger-
man philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, especially his philosophy of death,
which he develops in paragraph  of the first volume of his masterwork
The World as Will and Presentation, published in  . I find myself very
much inclined to believe that what Schopenhauer argues here must be true:
that we don’t die, that death is not real, that it is, ultimately, just an illusion.
For Schopenhauer this conclusion follows logically from his metaphysical
premises, according to which the world we know and we live in is merely
an appearance. What we perceive is not the world as it is, but rather what
our cognitive apparatus makes of it. It is a representation. Of what? Of the
will, which is the true nature of all things, ourselves included. The world
is the way the will appears to itself. If we imagine the will to be looking

    . As well as, in a more comprehensive form, in chapter  of the second volume (published 
years later, in ).
                                                           Killing Death/Sharing Life         


into a mirror, then the image reflected would be the world. And we are
that will, just as everything else is. “Since will is the thing in itself ”, writes
Schopenhauer (: ),

   the inner substance of the world, that which is essential to it, while life, the visible
   world, the phenomenon, is only the mirror of the will, the latter will accompany
   will as inseparably as its shadow accompanies a body; and if will exists, so too life,
   the world will exist. To the will for life, life is thus certain, and so long as we are
   filled with the will for life, we cannot be concerned for our existence, not even at
   the sight of our death.

    By distinguishing the will, which is the only really real thing, from its
representation, which is a mere shadow, Schopenhauer, drawing very much
on Kant’s transcendental philosophy, manages to separate reality from its
forms of appearance, which include causality, space, and most importantly,
time. So in other words, time is an illusion. But if time is an illusion, then
change must also be one. And if change is an illusion, then death is too. We
don’t die. It just looks (to others) as if we did.
    Now if we had to accept Schopenhauer’s metaphysics and its corollary,
that time is not real, to appreciate his argument for what he calls “temporal
immortality”, then it would perhaps be of little interest to anyone. It is just
too difficult to believe that time does not exist. I doubt that it even makes
sense to claim that. However, it seems to me that Schopenhauer’s argument
for temporal immortality does not require us to believe in the non–existence
of time. It is in fact very complex and draws on many different sources and
reflections. Much of it is based on peculiarities of the way we experience
life and death. For one thing, although we don’t really, on a theoretical
level, doubt that we, too, will one day have to die, we are also, deep down,
convinced of our own personal immortality. It is just impossible to imagine
that one day we could have ceased to exist, that the world will continue to
be, but we will no longer be in it. How can there be a world if we are not
there to perceive it? From our perspective it will be as if the world had never
existed. It will end when we end. So if the world (the object) continues to
exist (as we suppose), then we (the subject) must too.
    The main point, though, is this: our individual existence is linked to
our consciousness. This particular consciousness (with its specific attitudes,
beliefs, and memories) can cease to exist, but that is only part of what we are,
and perhaps a very superficial part. What makes us alive in the first place
is not subjective consciousness, but something deeper and less fleeting: a
material urge, a force that pervades physical nature, an élan vital (as the
French philosopher Henri Bergson called it) or will to live (as Schopenhauer
calls it). This force of nature, this will, continues to exist when “we” die,
and in fact it does already exist in many other forms and ways. This force is
      Michael Hauskeller


active in me, as it is active in you and every other living creature. And to the
extent that each of us ultimately is this force, this will to live, we always exist
not only in this particular form, which we call our individual self, but also in
everything else. When you look into the world with your eyes, perceive it
with your senses, live in it with your body and your mind, then I look and
perceive and live with you, because you are only another version of myself,
just as I am only another version of yourself. Accordingly, when I die I will
live on in you, and when you die, you will live on in me. In any case, the
presence cannot be lost: “Above all, we must distinctly recognize that the
form pertaining to will’s phenomenon, thus the form of life or reality, is
only the present, not future nor past: these exist only in concepts, exist only
in the context of cognizance so far as it follows the Principle of Sufficient
Ground. No human being has lived in the past, and none will ever live in
the future; rather the present alone is the form pertaining to all life, but
it is also its sure possession, which can never be torn from it. The present
always exists, together with its content; both stand firm, without wavering,
like the rainbow on the waterfall. For life is sure and certain for will, and
the present for life.” (Schopenhauer : )
    In his book Death and the Afterlife (), Samuel Scheffler speculates
that the prospect of humanity’s imminent extinction shortly after our own
death (“doomsday”) would affect us more than the knowledge of our own
mortality currently does. If we knew that all human life would disappear
from the face of the earth  days after we die, then this would render
much of what we do today meaningless. We would react with ennui and
despair, which, Scheffler believes, shows “the limits of egoism” or in other
words that we not only care for things that do not directly affect us (we
won’t, after all, be there to experience the end of humanity), but also that
we actually care more for what happens to humanity than for what happens
to ourselves as individuals (in the sense that we find the idea of all human
life coming to an end in the foreseeable future more disturbing and more
destructive of life’s meaning than the idea of our own certain death).
    I don’t want to go into the details of the argument here (which relies
rather heavily on the plausibility of Scheffler’s prediction of certain reactions
to hypothetical situations such as the doomsday scenario), nor the problems
that it faces . Suffice it to say that I find what I take to be the core of
Scheffler’s “afterlife conjecture”, namely that we do care about the ongoing

    . For a more recent version of this argument see Zuboff . Zuboff argues, without recourse
to Schopenhauer, that your self and my self are in fact the same self, that, based on the logic of
experience, there is in fact only one self.
     . For a precise analysis of the argument’s logical structure and a helpful discussion of some of
the objections raised, see John Danaher’s blog post on the issue: http://philosophicaldisquisitions.
blogspot.co.uk///meaning-value-and-collective-afterlife.html.
                                                   Killing Death/Sharing Life   


existence of humanity (what Scheffler calls the “collective afterlife”), rather
persuasive. It may of course be difficult to predict how exactly we would
react if we knew that the human world would definitely come to an end very
soon after our death. Some people might despair, some might rediscover
the value of human solidarity, some might feel licensed to live even more
ruthlessly (freed of any concern for the well–being of future generations),
some might remain largely unaffected and continue to enjoy their life,
ignoring what they cannot change and what doesn’t directly affect them,
and some might even positively welcome the eradication of human life as
an opportunity for Mother Earth to heal her wounds or something to that
effect. But I think whatever our reactions may be, it is pretty clear that few
of us are entirely indifferent to the fate of humanity. We do care about the
collective afterlife. The question is why.
    Now it may be the case that when contemplating the doomsday scenario
and feeling disturbed by it, we are actually suffering from a delusion that
is similar to the one that Epicurus thought was responsible for our fear
of death. Just as we may fear death mostly because we imagine ourselves
being dead and somehow experiencing our own state of being dead (lying
in our coffins, in the dark and cold, for all eternity), which of course we
won’t, we may also fear doomsday because we imagine ourselves still being
there when it occurs, and either being destroyed in the process or, perhaps
even more disturbingly, being the sole survivor, the one who witnesses
it all and is left all alone in an empty world. However, even though such
a confusion may play a role here, I don’t think that is all there is to it. It
seems to me that by emphasising the “limits of egoism” in the context of
his afterlife conjecture, Scheffler really is on to something. We not only care
for ourselves, for our loved ones, and perhaps for particular people that we
happen to know. We also care for people in general. To a certain degree we
tend to identify with humanity as a whole, tend to see ourselves in others.
We tend to perceive humanity as a project that we all take part in.
    At least that is how I feel, and since I have no reason to think that I am
unique in this respect, I am assuming that many others share those feelings.
When I look at my eight–year old son, I see myself in him, as I was when I
was a boy, and it gives me comfort to think that he still has his whole life
ahead of him, with all its opportunities, its rich fabric of experience, its joys
and wonders. And although I am well aware that there will also be suffering,
that there will be real losses and frustrations and disappointments, I cannot
help feeling that on balance life is well worth living, an adventure well
worth having, and that it is imperative that it continue, as Hans Jonas argued
in his The Imperative of Responsibility (). And it seems to me, when I look
at my son, that in him I am getting another opportunity at life, that he will
be living my life for me, that in him I will have a part in the future of the
      Michael Hauskeller


world. Now this feeling is not restricted to my son or my children in general.
I also have it, though perhaps less poignantly, when I see other children at
play, or lovers embracing, people chatting and laughing, students engaging
with new ideas, the old couple on our street walking along the road hand
in hand, my dog chasing a ball, fully immersed in the sheer joy of running,
of being alive. I identify with all of them, in the sense that I feel my own life
extended in and through them. I feel that, in some way that I cannot fully
understand (though Schopenhauer helps in this respect), they are me. Even
my dog, or any other dog, or indeed any other animal. So perhaps it is not
humanity alone that we feel connected with and in whose survival we take
an interest. Perhaps the project of humanity is itself part of an even larger
project, the project of life. And if we imagine another doomsday scenario,
one in which not only humanity vanished from the face of the earth, but all
living creatures, so that not only the history of humanity came to an end,
but the history of life itself, then we may find this even more disconcerting,
even more destructive of meaning than if it were only humanity that came
to an end.
    So why do we care about doomsday? I think the reason is that we realize
that with the extinction of humanity (or even more so life itself ), we would
die all over again, and this time for good. As long as life goes on after life,
our own individual death is nothing to be feared. There is no need to kill
death. What we need to learn instead, or to re–learn, is how to share life.


Bibliographic references

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B M S., Contextualizing a Christian Perspective on Transcendence and Human
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H M., Is Aging Bad for Us?, “Ethics and Medicine”, /, , pp. –.
I Z., The Transhumanist Wager, Futurity Imagine Media .
J H., The Imperative of Responsibility. In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, The
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                                                             Killing Death/Sharing Life       


S S., Death and the Afterlife, Oxford University Press, Oxford .
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S D., Moral Evil of Sculptor of the Living? Death and the Identity of the Subject, in G.
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Z A., One Self: the Logic of Experience, “Inquiry”, , , pp. –.
