Was reading the debate on immortality and decided to look at some philosophies on immortality and stumbled across this just wanted to know what you think. Its kind of....I don't know just read it.
http://home.vol.com/~dustylibrary/Controve...immortality.htm

How boringly predictable, a whole essay on what christianity thinks about the subject. Why does nobody post interesting mythologies for discussion? Forget all that jesus stuff, lets debate whether valhalla or reincarnation would be more fun!


As for the question, of course we're not immortal. You live for a few years, and then you die and become plant food. If you doubt this theory, simply shoot yourself in the head and discover that you are not immortal.


Or, if you happen to like the many worlds idea of alternate timelines, then you are immortal. Every possible outcome exists. Therefore, for every possible way for you to die, there is a universe in which you do not. Therefore you are completely immortal, as you will never be aware of these death possibilities. Only a timeline in which you continue to live for eternity, while everyone else around you dies. Pleasant thought, isn't it?

This cuts it rather close to a religious debate, don't you think? So perhaps we should just stay on philosophical ground by debating if a human has an immortal soul or not (but not from a religious viewpoint or with religious arguments).



If you refer to your body, then yes, our bodies are not immortal or indestructible. But then the question arrises, if we are only bodies or if human beings have something like a spirit or soul, which could be immortal.

Now, I am aware that I do not have any proof that we do have a soul. But then again, there is nothing to prove that we haven't, so it is still possible. There are certain things which could be better explained if humans had a spirit/soul, like what our psyche really is, how the process of thinking really works etc. The symptoms of feelings are not feelings themselves, they are only reactions of the bodies caused by the actual feelings. So feelings in themselves cannot be thoroughly explained chemically. When you feel for example "anger" then what does happen exactly? Your body certainly reacts, but where does the actual "feeling" occur? This feeling is not defined by its symptoms. You feel angry, but you do not define this feeling by the symptomes seen in your body. The feeling itself is something deeper, more in the inside. But what is it and what causes it?

Questions, questions... Take the DNA. DNA is information. Information, on which your body is built on. But how is this information used? How does it come that out of a pure string of information, a living being comes into existence? What causes life to exist? Information cannnot do anything by itself. Information must be used. But by what? Take a computer. On your harddisk, the information is stored. So you could compare your harddisk to the DNA. But the harddisk alone cannot produce anything at all, it only provides information.

Do we have answer? I don't believe so. And perhaps it is good like it is. If everything could be explained, what mysteries would life hold for us? What could we wonder about? What could we admire with puzzlement?

Darnoc, have you ever read up on the phenomenon of emergence? Two books I would recommend are

Emergence: From Chaos to Order by John Holland

and

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software by Stephen Johnson

I think many of the questions in your post can be, if not explained, at least better understood in terms of emergence.


Not only are our bodies not immortal, but even within their lifespan cell turnover means that during the space of a few years every cell in your body is replaced.

As for 'souls' etc.. I think discussion of this would veer into the religious, and so is not really appropriate for these forums.