In his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein introduced a famous thought experiment about a beetle in a box. Its argument is seemingly easy to summarize, but any such summary "conceals, as we shall see, a very intricate discussion. Even among those who accept that there is a reasonably self-contained and straightforward private language argument to be discussed, there has been fundamental and widespread disagreement over its details, its significance and even its intended conclusion, let alone over its soundness. The result is that every reading of the argument (including that which follows) is controversial." Before I explain what this means for a conventional reading of the argument, let's look at one representation of Wittgenstein's parable.

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     "Ludwig and Bertie were two precocious little tykes. Like many children, they played games with their own private languages. One of their favourites, which mystified the adults around them, was called 'Beetle'.
     It started one day when they found two boxes. Ludwig proposed that they take one each, and that each would only ever look inside his own box, not that of the other. What is more, he would never describe what was in his box or compare it to anything outside the box. Rather, each would simply name the contents of his box 'beetle'.
     For some reason, this amused them greatly. Each would proudly say that he had a beetle in his box, but whenever someone asked them to explain what this beetle was, they refused. For all anyone knew, either or both boxes were empty, or each contained very different things. Nonetheless, they insisted on using the word 'beetle' to refer to the contents of their boxes and acted as though the word had a perfectly reasonable use in their game. This was unsettling, especially for grown ups. Was 'beetle' a nonsense word or did it have a private meaning that only the boys knew?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 67.
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This little story, which (as one of my readers said) hardly even seems like a thought experiment, was originally meant simply to introduce us to the idea of a "private language," just so it could then be rejected. In this case, Ludwig and Bertie have their own private language, wherein "beetle" clearly just means something like "my secret space", and this is kept hidden from the adults around them. But since the two tykes each understand this, their language is technically still "public." What Wittgenstein goes on to investigate though, is whether or not a single person can actually have a truly private language. For his argument, a private language must be "incapable of translation into an ordinary language - if, for example, it were to describe those inner experiences supposed to be inaccessible to others. ... A private language must be unlearnable and untranslatable, and yet it must appear that the speaker is able to make sense of it."

But such a speaker couldn't make any sense of it. As pointed out in the the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, "a language in principle unintelligible to anyone but its originating user is impossible. The reason for this is that such a so-called language would, necessarily, be unintelligible to its supposed originator too, for he would be unable to establish meanings for its putative signs." In other words, a private language would cease to be a language at all. Language, therefore, is social.

Why does this matter? As discussed in the Wikipedia entry on the private language argument, "this would have profound implications for other areas of philosophical and psychological study. For example, if one cannot have a private language, it might not make any sense to talk of private experiences or of private mental states." We must be careful here not to conflate (1) ideas that are private because they are *hidden* from others, with (2) ideas that are private because they *cannot* be shared with others. We are trying to concern ourselves with whether or not there is privacy in the second sense, with whether or not there are unsharable aspects of consciousness.

To put a finer point on this, it helps to know that Wittgenstein introduced his beetle in a box during his investigations of the nature of pain. "Pains occupy a distinct and vital place in the philosophy of mind for several reasons. One is that pains seem to collapse the appearance/reality distinction. If an object appears to you to be red it might not be so in reality, but if you seem to yourself to be in pain you must be so: there can be no case here of seeming at all. At the same time, one cannot feel another person’s pain, but only infer it from their behavior and their reports of it. By offering the "beetle" as an analogy to pains, Wittgenstein suggests that the case of pains is not really amenable to the uses philosophers would make of it."

I think the phenomenon of phantom limb pain also calls into question whether philosophers can use pain to collapse the distinction between reality and how it appears to you, but Wittgenstein's beetle story is a more direct challenge to his mentor Bertrand Russell. It was Russell who most openly described the use of a private language in the second of his published lectures, ‘The Philosophy of Logical Atomism’, where he says: "In a logically perfect language, there will be one word and no more for every simple object, and everything that is not simple will be expressed by a combination of words, by a combination derived, of course, from the words for the simple things that enter in, one word for each simple component. A language of that sort will be completely analytic, and will show at a glance the logical structure of the facts asserted or denied. … A logically perfect language, if it could be constructed, would not only be intolerably prolix, but, as regards its vocabulary, would be very largely private to one speaker. That is to say, all the names that it would use would be private to that speaker and could not enter into the language of another speaker." Although Wittgenstein does not specifically call out his mentor and this description of a perfect language as private, it is considered likely that this is the target of his beetle box argument.

So the beetle box in itself is a deceptively small argument placed into a larger discussion by Wittgenstein of attempts "to clarify some of the problems involved in thinking of the mind as something over and above behavior. Wittgenstein is trying to point out that the beetle is very much like an individual’s mind. No one can know exactly what it is like to be another person or experience things from another’s perspective (look in someone else’s box), but it is generally assumed that the mental workings of other people’s mind are very similar to our own."

From the perspective of an evolutionary philosophy, this is highly self-evident. For other philosophers to claim that our internal thoughts and feelings are ineffable, unknowable, and "private" from others in society, is to deny the billions of years of evolutionary history that we share, during which time the (essentially) same bodily structures were created everywhere in our species as we evolved to survive in the shared environment we exist within in this one universe. As neuroscientists unravel the functions of our brain structures, we don't find infinite varieties of beetles (or non-beetles) crawling around in our heads; we find 99.5% similarities in our molecular sub-structure. We are not so alone in our minds...even if other's thought experiments can sound awfully confusing at first blush.

Last week's thought experiment tried to get us to consider real world problems of poverty and what to do about it. This week, it's all about abstractions as we move on to the kind of language problem popular in the current dominant school of analytic philosophy.

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     "Ludwig and Bertie were two precocious little tykes. Like many children, they played games with their own private languages. One of their favorites, which mystified the adults around them, was called 'Beetle'.
     It started one day when they found two boxes. Ludwig proposed that they took one each, and that each would only ever look inside his own box, not that of the other. What is more, he would never describe what was in his box or compare it to anything outside the box. Rather, each would simply name the contents of his box 'beetle'.
     For some reason, this amused them greatly. Each would proudly say that he had a beetle in his box, but whenever someone asked them to explain what this beetle was, they refused. For all anyone knew, either or both boxes were empty, or each contained very different things. Nonetheless, they insisted on using the word 'beetle' to refer to the contents of their boxes and acted as though the word had a perfectly reasonable use in their game. This was unsettling, especially for grown ups. Was 'beetle' a nonsense word or did it have a private meaning that only the boys knew?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 67.
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At first glance, this hardly even seems to be a thought experiment, so I'd better add more from Baggini's explanation to show you why philosopher's concern themselves with such things. He says:

...all language use is a kind of game, in that it relies upon a combination of rules and conventions, not all of which can be explicitly stated, and which only players of the game really understand. ... Consider what happens when I say, "I have a pain in my knee." The box in this case is my inner experience. As with Ludwig and Bertie's containers, no one else can look inside it; only I can. ... All of the vocabulary of pain refers to sensations, and all of these are inside the boxes of our own subjective experience. ... For all we know, when we both say we are feeling pain, what is going on inside me is quite different from what is going on inside you.

What do you think? Have Ludwig and Bertie shown you our shared vocabularies aren't all that shared?

In Peter Singer's 1972 essay Famine, Affluence and Morality, the Australian philosopher "posits that citizens of rich nations are morally obligated to give at least some of their disposable income to charities that help the global poor. He supports this using the drowning child analogy, which states that most people would rescue a drowning child from a pond, even if it meant that their expensive clothes were ruined, so we clearly value a human life more than the value of our material possessions. As a result, we should use a significant portion of the money that we spend on our possessions and instead donate it to charity."

Singer is the most outspoken proponent of arguments like this, but several other philosophers have modified this analogy over the years in an attempt to probe just how altruistic or selfish we are when it comes to helping those in need around the world. This week's thought experiment provides yet another path of exploration down this line of thinking.

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     "Right," said Roger, the self-appointed captain of the lifeboat. "There are twelve of us on this vessel, which is great, because it can hold up to twenty. And we have plenty of rations to last until someone comes to get us, which won't be longer than twenty-four hours. So, I think this means we can safely allow ourselves an extra chocolate biscuit and a shot of rum each. Any objections?"
     "Much as I'd doubtless enjoy the extra biscuit," said Mr. Mates, "shouldn't our main priority right now be to get the boat over there and pick up the poor drowning woman who has been shouting at us for the last half hour?" A few people looked down into the hull of the boat, embarrassed, while others shook their heads in disbelief.
     "I thought we had agreed," said Roger. "It's not our fault she's drowning, and if we pick her up, we won't be able to enjoy our extra rations. Why should we disrupt our cosy set-up here?" There were grunts of agreement.
     "Because we could save her, and if we don't she'll die. Isn't that reason enough?"
     "Life's a bitch," replied Roger. "If she dies, it's not because we killed her. Anyone for a digestive?"

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 61.
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Well that's a bit harsh. And I don't mean Captain Roger's words, but the implication behind them that it is we who are Roger. Yet this is what Singer basically said in 2009, when he expanded his 1972 essay into the book The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty. In it, Singer presents the following philosophical argument (p. 15):

1.) First Premise: Suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care are bad.

2.) Second Premise: If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so.

3.) Third premise: By donating to aid agencies, you can prevent suffering and death from lack of food, shelter and medical care, without sacrificing anything nearly as important.

4.) Conclusion: Therefore, if you do not donate to aid agencies, you are doing something wrong.

Singer says that, "many of his readers enjoy at least one luxury that is less valuable than a child's life. He says his readers ought to sacrifice such a luxury (e.g. bottled waters) and send proceeds to charity, if they can find a reliable charity. ... He endorses GiveWell, a charity evaluator, as a way to identify the most reliable, effective charities."

But in a much-shared article from the New Republic last year, called Stop Trying to Save the World: Big Ideas are Destroying International Development, a long-time aid worker casts doubt on Singer's third premise and tells how organizations game these charity evaluations all the time by hiding overhead costs in the day-to-day work of already overstretched staff, making the whole operation even more inefficient. When I was in the Peace Corps, a book about how the international aid world was failing made the rounds among many of the volunteers in our country, but when I tried to find it online today for this post, I couldn't because any such search on this topic turns up dozens and dozens of similar books detailing failures in this arena.

In just one of these books, Dead Aid, the Zambian economist and author Dambisa Moyo argues we should, stop giving aid to Africa; it's just not working. Specifically, she says:

"As early as the sixties, Peter Bauer, the development economist, was describing development aid as 'a tax on poor people in rich countries that benefits rich people in poor countries'. ... My own family suffers the consequences of development aid every day. What are those consequences? First and foremost the widespread corruption. The people in power plunder the treasury and the treasury is filled with development aid money. The corruption has contaminated the whole of society. Aid leads to bureaucracy and inflation, to laziness and inertia. Aid hurts exports. Thanks to foreign aid the people in power can afford not to care about their people. But the worst part of it is: aid undermines growth. The economies of those countries that are the most dependent on foreign aid have shrunk by an average of 0.2 percent per year ever since the seventies."

In Ukraine, my wife and I witnessed this first hand on a much smaller scale, and were even chastised by U.S. government officials when we cautiously asked if money could be steered away from a known corrupt local. There is no doubt that good people exist who are doing good aid work, but it turns out it's really hard to know who they are. And that's not even trying to factor in unintended consequences of good acts.

Earlier this year, Singer published yet another book on this subject: The Most Good You Can Do. When University of Chicago Law School professor Eric Posner reviewed the book for Slate Magazine, he concluded:

"So what’s an effective altruist to do? The utilitarian imperative to search out and help the people with the highest marginal utility of money around the world is in conflict with our limited knowledge about foreign cultures, which makes it difficult for us to figure out what the worst-off people really need. For this reason, donations to Little League and other local institutions you are familiar with may not be a bad idea. The most good you can do may turn out to be—not much."

For all his talk, Singer only settles on recommending a standard of giving of "at least 1% of net income", which truly isn't very much. So sifting through these arguments back and forth, we find that things aren't so clear as rowing a boat over to pluck a drowning woman from the sea. This week's thought experiment is therefore a very weak analogy. Our path forward in trying to find solutions to a very complex problem should, as is often the case, take a clue from evolution by tinkering around the edges with small scale trial and error processes as we work towards the admittedly obvious goal of increasing human flourishing everywhere.

In the FAQs for Bridging the Is-Ought Divide, I wrote a little bit about this that I think still stands. I said:

Q. Does this concern for all of life mean we can’t enjoy many of the things that make us human? Singer already tells us we should morally give all our spare money to other poor people across the globe. Do we have to do the same for birds and flies and plants and bacteria now too?
A. Singer stated that we should have “equal concern for all human beings” but that lead him to conclusions about charity and largesse that were out of touch with our actual moral urges. While all human beings originally have equal standing for claims, especially from the point of view of the veil of ignorance, the actual force of their claims on us is variable depending on many things such as our ability to satisfy their claims, their reputation from prior actions, or their possibility of reciprocating aid over repeated interactions in the future. Moral concerns are a force that behaves somewhat like gravity with stronger pulls by larger bodies at close distances often overshadowing the background tugs of fainter objects far away. As long as we remain sensitive to the possibility that the collection of those tugs from fainter objects may occasionally outweigh those from more obvious sources, then there is no reason we can’t enjoy many of the localized concerns that make us human.

But what do you think? Do you agree with the argument that only giving 1% is enough to make us human?

Ready to feel a little uncomfortable? Time for this week's thought experiment!

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     "Right," said Roger, the self-appointed captain of the lifeboat. "There are twelve of us on this vessel, which is great, because it can hold up to twenty. And we have plenty of rations to last until someone comes to get us, which won't be longer than twenty-four hours. So, I think this means we can safely allow ourselves an extra chocolate biscuit and a shot of rum each. Any objections?"
     "Much as I'd doubtless enjoy the extra biscuit," said Mr. Mates, "shouldn't our main priority right now be to get the boat over there and pick up the poor drowning woman who has been shouting at us for the last half hour?" A few people looked down into the hull of the boat, embarrassed, while others shook their heads in disbelief.
     "I thought we had agreed," said Roger. "It's not our fault she's drowning, and if we pick her up, we won't be able to enjoy our extra rations. Why should we disrupt our cosy set-up here?" There were grunts of agreement.
     "Because we could save her, and if we don't she'll die. Isn't that reason enough?"
     "Life's a bitch," replied Roger. "If she dies, it's not because we killed her. Anyone for a digestive?"

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 61.
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It's a pretty obvious metaphor, isn't it? But as Baggini says in his discussion of this experiment:

The UN has set a target for developed countries to give 0.7 percent of their GDP to overseas aid. Few have met it.

So what do you think? Are we all being as callous as Roger?

In 1983, Benjamin Libet conducted what is perhaps the most famous experiment in neuroscience, the results of which called into question the common beliefs we have about free will and whether or not we are in control of our decisions.  What kind of experiment could do that? Did Libet give people difficult choices and ask them to do the opposite of what they really wanted to do? Or maybe he asked them to plan an action, wait, and then attempt to carry it out precisely. No, Libet's research methods were much simpler:

"Researchers...would ask each participant to sit at a desk in front of the oscilloscope timer. They would affix EEG electrodes to the participant’s scalp, and would then instruct the subject to carry out some small, simple motor activity, such as pressing a button, or flexing a finger or wrist. ... During the experiment, the subject would be asked to note the position of the dot on the oscilloscope timer when "he/she was first aware of the wish or urge to act" (control tests with Libet's equipment demonstrated a comfortable margin of error of only +/-50 milliseconds). Pressing the button also recorded the position of the dot on the oscillator, this time electronically. By comparing the marked time of the button's pushing and the subject's conscious decision to act, researchers were able to calculate the total time of the trial from the subject's initial volition through to the resultant action. On average, approximately two hundred milliseconds elapsed between the first appearance of conscious will to press the button and the act of pressing it.

Researchers also analyzed EEG recordings for each trial with respect to the timing of the action. It was noted that brain activity involved in the initiation of the action, primarily centered in the secondary motor cortex, occurred, on average, approximately five hundred milliseconds before the trial ended with the pushing of the button. That is to say, researchers recorded mounting brain activity related to the resultant action as many as three hundred milliseconds before subjects reported the first awareness of conscious will to act. In other words, apparently conscious decisions to act were preceded by an unconscious buildup of electrical activity within the brain."

Since then, Libet's experiments have been offered as support of the theory that consciousness is merely a side-effect of neuronal functions, an "epiphenomenon" (a secondary phenomenon that occurs alongside or in parallel to a primary phenomenon) of our brain states.

This brings us to this week's thought experiment: Land of the Epiphens.

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     Epiphenia was a remarkable planet. So like Earth in appearance, and yet its inhabitants were different in one remarkable way. As one of them, Huxley, explained to the visiting Earthling Dirk, the Epiphens had long ago 'discovered' that their thoughts did not affect their actions. Thoughts were the effects of bodily processes, not the other way around. Dirk found this baffling.
     "You can't really believe this," he protested to Huxley. "For instance, when we met in this bar, you said, 'Gee I could kill for a beer,' and ordered one. Are you saying that the thought 'I want a beer' had no effect on your actions?"
     "Of course it didn't," replied Huxley, as though the question were idiotic. "We have thoughts and these often precede actions. But we know full well that these thoughts aren't causing the actions. My body and brain were already gearing up to order a beer. The thought 'I could kill for a beer' was just something that popped into my head as a result of what was happening in the physical brain and body. Thoughts don't cause actions."
     "For Epiphens, maybe," replied Dirk.
     "Well I can't see what's different about humans," said Huxley. And for a while at least, nor could Dirk.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 61.
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Unsurprisingly, there have been several criticisms leveled at the Libet experiment and the conclusions that have been drawn from it. There's the "disconnect criticism" (this doesn't really apply to real life), the "timing criticism" (the choosing self and reporting self aren't perfectly synched), the "spontaneous activity criticism" (this is just lowering a choice to the random noise in our motor system that is always operating below the normal threshold of a decision), and the "only deterministic on average criticism" (28% of the original experiments actually showed at least one instance of brain activity after the reported decision).

Each of these criticisms are enough to cast serious doubt on the Epiphens' discovery that their thoughts did not affect their actions, as well as on the belief of free will determinists like Sam Harris who think their position has been scientifically proven correct. I've already written two different blog posts (1,2) about my compatibilist position in the free will debate, so I'll just add another criticism to the Libet experiment that I haven't seen before.

At the beginning of the experiment, participants were instructed to “let the urge [to move] appear on its own at any time without any pre-planning or concentration on when to act.” To me, this is precisely the beginning of when the brain would begin to prepare to act. This is basically an instruction to the subconscious thinking system 1 that Daniel Kahneman wrote about in Thinking, Fast and Slow. If our neuroscience was sophisticated enough to pick this up, I imagine some change would show up in the brain as soon as this instruction was given—long before the only change Libet was looking for in the secondary motor cortex. The fact that Libet (sometimes!) found a change bubbling up from the subconscious before we made a final decision isn't really surprising at all. This can and does happen all the time. But just as instructions coming from experimenters could cause this chain reaction to begin, so can instructions from ourselves after conscious, rational, system 2 thinking sessions. This isn't "free will" in its most extreme definition—it just brings me back to the compatibilist position I've taken where we have freedom to choose from among the many influences we have experienced—but it is another strong argument against the most extreme determinism that is out there in the land of the epiphens.

Feeling like you haven't had a good conversation with an alien in a while? Unable to think about anything else?Well, you're in luck. It's time for this week's philosophy thought experiment!

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     Epiphenia was a remarkable planet. So like Earth in appearance, and yet its inhabitants were different in one remarkable way. As one of them, Huxley, explained to the visiting Earthling Dirk, the Epiphens had long ago 'discovered' that their thoughts did not affect their actions. Thoughts were the effects of bodily processes, not the other way around. Dirk found this baffling.
     "You can't really believe this," he protested to Huxley. "For instance, when we met in this bar, you said, 'Gee I could kill for a beer,' and ordered one. Are you saying that the thought 'I want a beer' had no effect on your actions?"
     "Of course it didn't," replied Huxley, as though the question were idiotic. "We have thoughts and these often precede actions. But we know full well that these thoughts aren't causing the actions. My body and brain were already gearing up to order a beer. The thought 'I could kill for a beer' was just something that popped into my head as a result of what was happening in the physical brain and body. Thoughts don't cause actions."
     "For Epiphens, maybe," replied Dirk.
     "Well I can't see what's different about humans," said Huxley. And for a while at least, nor could Dirk.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 61.
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Yet another way of looking at the concept of free will as well as the mind-body problem. What do you think of the Epiphen's perspective? Is it persuasive to you? Or would you say something to persuade Huxley he's wrong?

This week's thought experiment provides a simple story that allows us to contemplate the idea of living forever. Is that a good idea or a bad idea? The thought experiment is a brief adaptation of one of the traditional parables for the anti-immortality side, so let's read that quickly.

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     Vitalia had discovered the secret to eternal life. Now she vowed to destroy it. Two hundred years ago, she had been given the formula for an elixir of immortality by a certain Dr Makropulos. Young and foolish, she had prepared and drunk it. Now she cursed her greed for life. Friends, lovers, and relatives had grown old and died, leaving her alone. With no death pursuing her, she lacked all drive and ambition, and all the projects she started seemed pointless. She had grown bored and weary, and now just longed for the grave.
     Indeed, the quest for extinction had been the one goal which had given some shape and purpose to her life over the last half century. Now she finally had the antidote to the elixir. She had taken it a few days ago and could feel herself rapidly weakening. All that remained now was for her to make sure that no one else was condemned to life as she had been. The elixir itself had long ago been destroyed. Now, she took the piece of paper that specified the formula and tossed it into the fire. As she watched it burn, for the first time in decades, she smiled.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 58.
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Ugh. I may not be bored with life, but I am very bored of this fear of boredom. (A small tip of the hat to Baggini though for naming his protagonist Vitalia since vita is the latin word for life. That entertained me.) We have plenty of examples of old people with highly developed personality traits for curiosity and openness to new experiences to know that boredom is not a predetermined outcome of aging. Boredom only happens to those who have given up on living with a purpose. And of course one solitary immortal would become very sad over time—we're a very social species! But if all our friends and family were living agelessly.....  I would like to say more, but there is far too much to say about this topic to be contained in a single blog post. In fact, the questions that surround the prospect of immortal life make up almost the entire structure of the plot for my next novel. As such, I've done a lot of research on the previous treatments of this topic, which you can get a sense of here in an early paragraph from my upcoming book:

Since the first moment we became aware of death, mankind has dreamt of defeating it. From our oldest legends to our latest pop fiction, we have created innumerable heroes and villains who have sought to cheat death in one way or another. From Gilgamesh walking underwater to find his plant that granted youth, from Knights of the Round Table searching for the Holy Grail, and from Ponce de Leon exploring the West for a Fountain of Youth, we have seen epic quests for immortality fail. The curses of bargaining for everlasting life were shown to us by Tithonus who received immortality from Zeus, but without everlasting youth; by Dorian Gray whose portrait portrayed each misdeed of his misguided steps with permanent scars on his painted self; and by Voldemort, who splintered his soul and lost all the pieces when his horcruxes were destroyed by Harry. We wrestled with boredom for hundreds of years alongside Ann Rice’s lonely vampires, Jorge Luis Borges’ inert City, and the existential angst of Simon de Beauvoir’s Raimon Fosca. And of course our highest heroes of all—the gods of our religions—all promised us eternal bliss in the myths and teachings of Jesus, Buddha, and Muhammad. For as long as immortality has been out of our reach, we have striven for it mightily and learned much from our poets and priests about what it might be like if we obtained it. Now science has placed it in our grasp and we must become ready to deal with all these pitfalls using the wisdom of the ages.

These works I listed are just a few of the most famous ones considering immortality though. It's a popular subject! Perhaps the best treatment I've seen cataloguing the worries and possibilities that arise during the quest for long life came in the recent non-fiction book by Jonathan Weiner called, Long For This World: The Strange Science of Immortality.

For a taster of what's in there, you can watch an excellent TED talk by 
Aubrey de Grey called "A roadmap to end aging." de Grey is featured heavily in Weiner's book as he's such a strong and charismatic force in the current fight for immortality. de Grey's 22-minute talk (linked below) displays this charisma well and his arguments have influenced my thoughts on this subject heavily. So much so, that the topic became the final entry of my ten Tenets:

10. Evolution describes the rules that govern the way that life survives. The end product of evolution therefore would be immortal life. Humans may have the intellectual capacity to achieve this end.

When I wrote my blog post for this tenet, I titled it, "Do Evolution and Philosophy Point Towards Immortality?" and this final paragraph from that blog answers that question with an obvious rhetorical one:

We have longed for this goal [of immortality] since the first comprehension of death. Our myths tell tales of it, our gods exhibit it, our artists tell cautionary tales about it, our scientists strive to create it. Surely we can admit that deep down we do want this, even if it's just for one more day at a time. Maybe not when the vagaries of existence wear us down over the years until the struggle becomes too much for our imperfect bodies, but while we are truly alive, we never want that to end. All life feels that way. And if we can understand our bodies and our environment to the point where we can engineer a permanence of that spirit - why wouldn't we?

Of course, that's a big *if* that I'm asking for. An understanding of our bodies and our environment commensurate with the undertaking of living for hundreds or thousands of years would be an incredible thing. Perhaps, as this opening epigraph for my next novel tells us though, the massive wisdom required for this massive undertaking would be available once we started the journey.

Reason itself does not work instinctively, but requires trial, practice, and instruction in order gradually to progress from one level of insight to another. Therefore a single man would have to live excessively long in order to learn to make full use of all his natural capacities. --Immanuel Kant

But with the ability that humankind has evolved to hold and share culture down through the ages, I'd like to think it won't require a single man to live an excessively long time to learn the lessons necessary for immortal life not to be a condemnation. I'd like to think those lessons have accumulated and are already known to us. But you'll have to wait for me to complete my next novel to see exactly why I think that. Since this week's post generated more (and better) comments than almost anything else I've put up here before, I'd better get to it!

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In the meantime, for more in this subject, watch Aubrey de Grey's TED talk:

I'm a bit scared to share this week's thought experiment as it deals with the exact subject of my next novel. See what you think of this.

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     Vitalia had discovered the secret to eternal life. Now she vowed to destroy it. Two hundred years ago, she had been given the formula for an elixir of immortality by a certain Dr Makropulos. Young and foolish, she had prepared and drunk it. Now she cursed her greed for life. Friends, lovers, and relatives had grown old and died, leaving her alone. With no death pursuing her, she lacked all drive and ambition, and all the projects she started seemed pointless. She had grown bored and weary, and now just longed for the grave.
     Indeed, the quest for extinction had been the one goal which had given some shape and purpose to her life over the last half century. Now she finally had the antidote to the elixir. She had taken it a few days ago and could feel herself rapidly weakening. All that remained now was for her to make sure that no one else was condemned to life as she had been. The elixir itself had long ago been destroyed. Now, she took the piece of paper that specified the formula and tossed it into the fire. As she watched it burn, for the first time in decades, she smiled.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 58.
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Any thoughts? Would you want to kill yourself too? Or do you think you could be happy living forever?