Personal time, as opposed to external time, has a certain role to play in the correct account of death and immortality. But saying exactly what that role is, and what role remains for external time, is not straightforward. I formulate and defend accounts of death and immortality that specify these roles precisely.

Unamuno believes that longing for immortality is what motivates nearly all of human behavior. Unfortunately, in a world in which many people despair of ever achieving true personal immortality, we increasingly turn to what he calls mere “shadows of immortality” for comforting ideas about how our names, energy, or basic material substance will carry on in our absence. Unamuno advocates fighting against such despair, staying out of the shadows, and longing for personal immortality even when it seems impossible. Unamuno’s approach (...) to this issue resembles, in a few significant ways, Kierkegaard’s struggle for the cultivation of subjective selfhood. At the same time, it also runs afoul of Nietzsche’s derisive claims about immortality-seekers. Whereas Nietzsche sees longing for immortality as a sign of being too weak to make the most of mortal life, the more Kierkegaardian Unamuno counters that it is a sign of strong appreciation for life to demand, without surrender, that there be more of it. Given the proper understanding of Nietzsche’s claims about the eternal recurrence, I think he and Unamuno might not be quite as far apart as it initially seems. However, exploring the latter’s critique of the former suggests an intriguing way of seeing the contemporary analytic debate about the desirability of immortality. Building on Unamuno’s position, one could argue that pessimism about the value of immortality is actually indicative of a flawed character and an impoverished relationship with life. (shrink)

This article explores theoretical conditions necessary for “quantum immortality” as well as its possible practical implications. It is demonstrated that QI is a particular case of “multiverse immortality”, which is based on two main assumptions: the very large size of the universe ; and a copy-friendly theory of personal identity. It is shown that a popular objection about lowering of the world-share of an observer in the case of QI does not succeed, as the world-share decline could be compensated by (...) merging timelines for the simpler minds, and because some types of personal preferences are not dependent on such changes. Despite large uncertainty about the truth of MI, it has appreciable practical consequences for some important outcomes like suicide and aging. The article demonstrates that MI could be used to significantly increase the expected subjective probability of success of risky life extension technologies, such as cryonics, but that it makes euthanasia impractical because of the risk of eternal suffering. Euthanasia should be replaced with cryothanasia, i.e. cryopreservation after voluntary death. Another possible application of MI is as a last chance to survive a global catastrophe. MI could be considered a Plan D for reaching immortality, where Plan A consists of survival until the development of beneficial Artificial Intelligence capable of fighting aging, Plan B employs cryonics, and Plan C is digital immortality. (shrink)