Here's a quick post to let you know I've just had an article published online with The Philosopher. As some of you may know, I've written a speculative fiction novel about a company in the near future who has developed a cure for ageing. (It's tentatively called The Vitanauts and you can download a preview here.) As such, when Martin Hägglund came to Newcastle to discuss his widely praised new book This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, I offered to write a review for The Philosopher since they organised his visit. Martin enjoyed my review and we had a nice discussion about it in the pub afterwards. In his work, Hägglund sets his sights on taking down the fluffy visions of perfect immortality that many religions have for their afterlives. On this, I am in full agreement with Hägglund. However, I argue that this does not prove that the opposite is needed. Certain death doesn't give us the "spiritual freedom" that Hägglund desires, and I think this tells us something deep about the nature of freedom and the meaning of life. Here's the opening to my review:
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In 2005, Aubrey de Grey – a long-haired, long-bearded, Methuselah-looking scientist with a PhD from Cambridge – gave a TED talk called “A roadmap to end aging” that turned into a cult hit. By 2010, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jonathan Weiner had turned his eye on this research and published an intriguing and seductive book called Long for this World: The Strange Science of Immortality. It’s now less than a decade later, and hedge fund managers and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have thrown huge amounts of money at this research. Sergey Young created a $100 million Longevity Vision Fund. Google partners have invested over $2.5 billion in an anti-aging joint venture. Mark Zuckerberg recently donated $3 billion to wipe out all disease by the end of the century. And Bank of America predicts the longevity industry could be worth at least $600 billion by 2025.
While scientists and the moneyed elites are racing ahead with this project, philosophers have been reluctant to support it, to say the least. Simone De Beauvoir, for example, published her novel All Men are Mortal in 1946, which portrayed one such immortal man as living a terribly cursed existence. Bernard Williams wrote a much briefer essay along the same vein in 1973 called “The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality.” Now, it would appear that Martin Hägglund has joined this chorus of sceptics with a new book titled This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free.
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In 2005, Aubrey de Grey – a long-haired, long-bearded, Methuselah-looking scientist with a PhD from Cambridge – gave a TED talk called “A roadmap to end aging” that turned into a cult hit. By 2010, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jonathan Weiner had turned his eye on this research and published an intriguing and seductive book called Long for this World: The Strange Science of Immortality. It’s now less than a decade later, and hedge fund managers and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have thrown huge amounts of money at this research. Sergey Young created a $100 million Longevity Vision Fund. Google partners have invested over $2.5 billion in an anti-aging joint venture. Mark Zuckerberg recently donated $3 billion to wipe out all disease by the end of the century. And Bank of America predicts the longevity industry could be worth at least $600 billion by 2025.
While scientists and the moneyed elites are racing ahead with this project, philosophers have been reluctant to support it, to say the least. Simone De Beauvoir, for example, published her novel All Men are Mortal in 1946, which portrayed one such immortal man as living a terribly cursed existence. Bernard Williams wrote a much briefer essay along the same vein in 1973 called “The Makropulos case: reflections on the tedium of immortality.” Now, it would appear that Martin Hägglund has joined this chorus of sceptics with a new book titled This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free.
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