PHILOPE

*one point per slide*

Materialist conceptions of Immortality

o Materialists believe mental activity is nothing but cerebral activity and thus,
death brings the total end of a persons existence.
o Materialists limits the prospects for immortality: if the mind is not a separate
substance from the brain, then at the time of the brains death, the mind also
becomes extinct and hence, the person does not survive death
o Materialism need not undermine all expectations of immortality, but it does
undermine the immortality of the soul.
o Since materialist believe that death is the end, they offered up their own
conceptions of immortality to help reconcile us to our physical demise. These
are projections into the future offered as something like consolations to
which we can cling.

Social immortality
o A belief that somehow we can leave something of ourselves behind when
we die, through our genetic offspring.
o It is common for children to feel repressed and pressured by their
parents to become appropriate vehicles for their immorality.

Cultural immortality
o Sydney J. Harris: All our efforts to attain immortality- by statesmanship, by
conquest, by science or the arts- are equally vain in the long run, because the
long run is longer than any of us imagine.

Cosmic immorality
o When I die, I want to be buried in a pine box, or in no box at all. I want to rot
fast, because then my molecules can enter the earth, and then enter plants
and the animals who feed on those plants, and I will be disbursed, spread
around to the point that, ultimately, Ill be blended in with the universe, and
have a sort of cosmic immortality.
o The more molecules I can spread around, the more cosmic immortality it
seems I can have.

Scientific immortality
o Address our desire to live on, not just in the memories of others, in the
products of our, or in our molecules, but with conscious experience.

Bottom line
o There is no materialistic scenario under which immortality could ever be
literally available.
o No one can console people who aspire to an endless horizon of possibilities
for living, experiencing and creating.
o Because of that, we are forced to ask the question of whether any case can be
made that we may in fact have the metaphysical wherewithal to survive
bodily death in a form that can experience true eternity.