Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates Read online

  Another problem with the cryogenic route is also related to faith, the faith that some person in the future—possibly somebody who never knew you—will decide it’s worth her time and expense to thaw you out and fix whatever ailed you. Exactly what is going to motivate her? Perhaps lawyers could work out a contract that would impel this future thawer to open your freezer door, but somehow it doesn’t feel like a sure thing. Unfrozen people change, you know.

  A guy buys an expensive talking parrot that has a large vocabulary. This bird is quoting Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas all the way home to the guy’s house, but once inside the bird lets loose with a tirade of foul language. “You #@&*! You call this @%# a house?” On and on he goes, swearing like a sailor, and whenever the guy tells him to stop, he just gets more foulmouthed. Finally, the guy says,“Okay, into the cooler for you until you can talk decent,” and he grabs the bird and stuffs him in the freezer. After several minutes of ranting, the bird suddenly falls silent, and the guy opens the freezer door.

  The parrot hops out onto the man’s shoulder. “I am so sorry, Master, please forgive me,” he coos. “By the way, what did the chicken do?”

  THE GRIM REAPER’S UNEMPLOYMENT PROBLEM AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

  Among the more down-to-earth questions raised by the possibility of down-on-earth immortality are the moral considerations of Environmental Ethics, a recent subdivision of Applied Ethics—most pressingly, Where the hell are we going to keep all these immortals? In a world already stressed by scarce resources for a burgeoning population, what are we going to do when our basic population stabilizer—the Grim Reaper—hangs up his scythe?

  The obvious solution is to cut down at the other end—reduce or even terminate the production of new bodies to make room for very old bodies.

  Arguably the greatest political satirist in the English language, Jonathan Swift, submitted his own version of this particular solution to overpopulation in his famous 1729 essay, A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick. In, well, Swiftian prose, Swift proposed that the Irish reverse their economic misfortunes by selling the children of the poor as food for the rich. Well, that is one way to do it.

  Reform Judaism attacks the immortality-sans-reproduction solution in a more earnest manner in a poignant meditation for the Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) memorial service:If some messenger were to come to us with the offer that death should be overturned, but with the one inseparable condition, that birth should also cease; if the existing generation were given the chance to live forever, but on the clear understanding that never again would there be a child, or a youth, or first love, never again new persons with new hopes, new ideas, new achievements; ourselves for always and never any others—could the answer be in doubt?

  Of course, even if the prospect of biological immortality were entirely realistic, the prospect that it would be available to one and all is totally improbable. Most of the world ’s population cannot afford or obtain basic medical care, so the possibility of search-and-heal nanorobots being available to anyone who asks for them strains credulity. The far greater likelihood is that nanorobots or telomerase therapy would be reserved for the likes of Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Tiger Woods, folks who can afford an expensive hobby like Eternal Existence.

  If this sounds patently unfair, that’s because it patently is. It gives the concept “survival of the fittest” an entirely new meaning—eternal survival of the fittest.

  STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE EONS

  On the fuzzy border between phenomenology and psychology lie questions about how biological immortality would change our experience of being human. Are these changes that we really bargained for?

  Say you’ve got nanorobots busily repairing all the decaying parts of your mortal coil so that disease and normal wear and tear no longer lead to the Big Sleep. Still, those busy little robots have their limits; they’re no help if you are obliterated by a grand piano falling out of a building or if you happen to hitch a ride with Thelma and Louise on their trip to the Grand Canyon. Now the only way you can die is by such a catastrophe. What’s this going to do to your mind-set? Your situation is no longer whether you are going to die now or later; it’s whether you’re going to die at all. You might say the stakes have just gotten bigger—way bigger. Under the new setup, won’t we be prone to live lives that are totally devoid of risk—say, sequestered in a bomb-proof box buried under the ground?

  “Better safe than sorry, son.”

  ENOUGH ALREADY

  The problem of ennui—that’s Existentialist French for extreme boredom with life accompanied by lots of weary shrugs and sighs—reaches a new dimension with the prospect of eternal life in, say, the same old café in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In his essay “The Makropulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality,” the twentieth-century Cambridge moral philosopher Sir Bernard Williams argues that death is necessary if life is to remain interesting. Williams’s reference point is the play The Makropulos Affair by the Czech writer Karel Capek (and the subsequent opera by Czech composer Leos Janáček), in which the heroine is granted an extraordinarily long life (342 years and counting) by way of an alchemic elixir. But by the play’s end she decides against re-upping for yet more centuries because she has realized that perpetual life only offers endless apathy. Writes Williams, “Her unending life has come to a state of boredom, indifference and coldness. Everything is joyless.”

  How so? Williams believes that after a person has lived a certain number of years (this number apparently varies from one individual to another) she is incapable of having new experiences—it ’s the old been-there-done-that problem. Ipso facto, she becomes bored out of her gourd. The good life, says Williams, is one that ends before repetition and boredom inevitably set in.

  Of course, there are some, like the comedian Emo Phillips, who argue that appreciating endless repetition is an acquired taste:

  “A friend of mine gave me a Philip Glass record. I listened to it for five hours before I realized it had a scratch on it.”

  The nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche raised the boredom question to a new level with his notion of Eternal Recurrence. According to Freddy N., the best symbol of the futility of an eternal destiny is history repeating itself over and over, ad infinitum. To some, like Woody Allen, this prospect seems worthy of an eternal Oy! Says Professor Allen,“[Nietzsche] said that the life we lived we’re going to live over again the exact same way for eternity. Great.That means I’ll have to sit through the Ice Capades again.”

  Think again, says the Fredster. Don’t let eternal recurrence get you down—rise above it! The heroism of the Nietzschean Superman is shown by his ability to assert his will to power in spite of that futility. Well, fine for the Superman! But what about ordinary folks, like Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, not to mention you, Daryl, and us? For us, eternal recurrence sounds more like Groundhog Day, and that profound exchange of dialogue that has sent shivers down many a moviegoer’s spine: Bill Murray character: “What would you do if every day was the same, and nothing you did ever mattered?”

  New friend in a bar: “That about sums it up for me.”

  TRY TO REMEMBER THAT DAY IN SEPTEMBER

  The 1998 Japanese film After Life gives Nietzsche ’s idea of Eternal Recurrence a novel and surprisingly thought-provoking interpretation: Newly dead clients shamble into a drab office building where social workers inform them they have three days to select their most cherished memory. Once this memory is chosen, it will become the only experience each new arrival has for all of eternity. Talk about decisions that have big-time implications for the future!

  The setup seems Hollywood “high-concept,” but in the hands of director Hirokazu Koreeda it is a profound exploration of—not to put too fine a point on it—the meaning of life.

  Should I choose the experience that is most emblematic of my entire life? The most
dramatic one? The most intense one? (Many of the old men start off by choosing their most fiery sexual experience, but upon reflection decide that an eternal orgasm lacks a certain nuance.)

  Along the way, one young girl wants to relive a day at Disneyland, only to reconsider after a social worker gently informs her that thirty others had made the same choice that year; a tortured middle-aged man chooses the breeze felt on a tram ride the day before a school summer vacation; an old woman opts for her memory of dancing for her older brother’s friends in a red dress. Banal as their final decisions may sound, the deliberations that precede them are deeply moving.

  TIME FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

  Tedious as ennui may be, we ’re not ready to throw out the prospect of an infinite number of experiences, no matter how repetitious they are. It still sounds a lot better than the eternal cessation of all experiences.

  For a radical solution to this eternal desire for more experience we turn to the contemporary Viennese-Australian polymath Manfred Clynes, who is known for personally packing several lifetimes into one: he has made his mark as a neurophysiologist, inventor, and concert pianist. So leave it to Manfred to come up with a strategy for extending life indefinitely without actually adding any “clock time” to our life span.

  Clynes proposes that we expand life, not by adding seconds onto the end, but by speeding up our time-consciousness so that each second has way more “moments” in it. He informs us that computers have a certain “tick rate,” the speed at which they process information, and that rate, in theory, can be speeded up indefinitely, so that one day we, too, may be able to usean expanding time consciousness, a speeding-up adjustment using nanotechnology, or picotechnology; thinking could be say 10,000 times faster than we are used to. What would happen then? A year would last 10,000 years. The seasons would not change for 2,500 years. Aging will be eliminated as we know it.2

  It makes us wonder what the experience of living in this super-fast lane would be like. Would it merely be like the guy who took a speed-reading course and reported: “I read Moby Dick in its entirety in twenty-five minutes! It’s about a whale.”

  Or would our enjoyment of the book simply speed up too, Dr. C.? And what exactly would that mean?

  Oh, Daryl, is this your wife? Yes, Mrs. Frumkin, you have a question?

  What does speeded-up time consciousness do to foreplay?

  Uh, maybe that’s a discussion you and Daryl would like to have in private.

  Meantime, let’s get back to Manfred’s jam-packed life. Where does meaning fit into his picture?

  In David Ives’s ten-minute play Time Flies, Horace and May, two mayflies, fall madly in love at first sight. (“I was born just this morning.” “So was I.”) They watch a nature show on their first date and discover they have a life span of only one day: their lives are already half over! After some moments of confusion and panic, they decide to make the most of what they have and fly to Paris, where they anticipate a dandy time, a happy ending, as it were.

  Horace and May have managed to find meaning in their very short lives, despite—or maybe because of—their awareness of the end. Would their lives have been richer with the aid of speed-living? What if they could have crammed London and Paris into the same time? How about London, Paris, and Rio? Okay, throw in Vegas, that ’s our last offer, and you get to assume that Céline Dion isn’t sold out.

  Or consider a Buddhist monk who spends 90 percent of his waking hours sitting in the lotus position emptying his mind of all thoughts except for one: communing with the Oneness of the Cosmos. Not a whole lot of variety of experiences for this chap. Does this mean he’s having a blah life?

  Clynes is raising none other than the perennial phenomenological question of the relativity of lived time. One man’s (or turtle ’s) minute of living is another man’s (or turtle’s) month of living, so just who or which is having the richer life?

  Some turtles went on a picnic. It took them ten days to get there, and when they arrived, they realized they’d forgotten the bottle opener, so they told the littlest one to go back for it. He said, “No, as soon as I go, you’ll eat the sandwiches.” They promised him they wouldn’t, so he left. Ten days passed, twenty days, thirty days. Finally, they were so hungry, they decided to eat the sandwiches. As soon as they took a bite, the little turtle came out from behind a rock and said,“See? That’s why I’m not going.”

  SEND IN THE CLONES

  If speed-living sounds too labor-intensive, consider the sexiest—if totally asexual—biological technique for immortality through not dying: Clone yourself. In fact, not only clone yourself, but clone yourself as a very young person; then as you age, do it again . . . and again . . . and again, ad infinitum.

  Of all the biotechnical schemes for creating human immortals, human cloning not only appears to be eminently possible in the near term, but may very well have happened already, although nobody’s telling. (That’s because it’s against the law.) Certainly the technique, known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, has already produced Dolly the sheep. (Rumors that Dolly keeps muttering to herself “Every day feels like the same old shit” have been unsubstantiated.)

  Here ’s how cloning works: the cytoplasm (the material between the nuclear and cell membranes) is removed from a donor’s egg cell; then another cell with the genetic material that will be cloned is melded to the original egg cell. Voila!— an identical copy of the original is in the cooker.

  One reason we’re sure that human cloning is possible is that it already happens frequently in nature: it ’s called having identical twins. Identical twins are produced when a single fertilized egg splits into two cell masses and becomes two people with identical DNA. They are only confused with fraternal twins (two different eggs that are fertilized separately but come to full term from the same womb at the same time) by people like Merle Haggard, who, when asked if his twin nephews were identical, replied, “One’s identical, but the other don’t look like anybody.”

  JOKES NOT WORTH CLONING

  Human cloning has produced almost as many bad jokes—mostly about cloning’s parallels to redneck reproductive practices—as the subject of sex with aliens. But one bit of wit stands out from the herd:The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behavior control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.3

  But does cloning create a perfect replica of the original? Ask a natural identical twin: she doesn’t think she is the same person as her exact DNA copy for the simple reason that she’s had different experiences from her copy. She ’s had different influences on the development of her personality; she has different memories, different reference points; she ’s made different connections, found different meanings. In developmental psychology, this provides a fascinating experimental model for investigating the old nature vs. nurture conundrum, as in the pair of developmental psychologists who had twins: one they called John, and the other, Control.

  So just how identical do identical twins turn out to be? Not so much. Certainly not so much that in critical situations an outside observer can’t distinguish one from the other.

  Reggie married one of a pair of identical twins. Less than a year later, he was in court filing for a divorce.

  “Okay,” the judge said, “tell the Court why you want a divorce.”

  “Well,Your Honor,” Reggie began, “every once in a while my sister-in-law would come over for a visit, and because she and my wife are so identical-looking, every once in a while I’d end up making love to her by mistake.”

  “Surely there must be some difference between the two women,” the judge said.

  “You’d better believe there is a difference,Your Honor.That‘s why I want the divorce,” he replied.

  More critical for our purposes are the experiential differences between identical twins.

  Consider these two men sitting next to each other in a Boston pub. After a while, one
looks at the other and says, “I can’t help but think, from listening to you, that you’re from Ireland.” The other guy responds proudly, “Yes, that I am!” The first guy says, “So am I! And whereabouts from Ireland might you be?” The other guy answers, “I’m from Dublin, I am.” The first guy responds, “Sure and begorra, and so am I! And what street did you live on in Dublin?” The other guy says, “A lovely little area it was, I lived on McCleary Street in the old central part of town.” The first guy says, “Faith and it’s a small world, so did I! And to what school would you have been going?” The second guy says, “St. Mary’s.” The first guy gets really excited, and says, “And so did I. Tell me, what year did you graduate?” The other guy answers, “Well, now, I graduated in 1964.” The first guy exclaims, “The Good Lord must be smiling down upon us! I can hardly believe our good luck at winding up in the same bar tonight. Can you believe it, I graduated from St. Mary’s in 1964 my own self.” About this time, another guy walks into the bar, sits down, and orders a beer. The bartender walks over shaking his head and mutters, “It’s going to be a long night, the Murphy twins are drunk again.”