A defense of the view that (i) to be alive is to be actively undergoing (not merely capable of undergoing) certain vital processes, that (ii) to die is cease to be capable of undergoing those processes (not to cease undergoing them), and that (iii) organisms in cryptobiosis (suspended animation) are not undergoing those processes but are capable of doing so, and are neither alive nor dead.

Being alive throughout all history need not save you from dying, even if history extends infinitely into the past and future. Infinitely-long lives can fall short of genuine immortality and suffer all an ordinary mortal’s diminution in experience. Adapting David Lewis on time travel, Roy Sorensen imagines quasi-immortal ‘spore gods’, whose finite personal lives are distributed across infinite external time. While criticising the ‘Eleatic’ terms in which Sorensen presents spore gods, this paper argues his essential claims are correct: ‘spore god’ (...) worlds are logically and metaphysically possible. Indeed, going beyond Sorensen, spore gods are even nomologically accessible within General Relativity. (shrink)

The standard definition of an instantaneous temporal part cannot properly deal with cases involving time travel. This paper provides a new definition of an instantaneous temporal part by appealing to David Lewis's distinction between external time and personal time. The new definition avoids the problems because it does not allow more than one instantaneous temporal part of an object at each moment of its personal time. We argue that this new definition, combined with our new perdurantist semantic thesis, deals with (...) cases of time travel successfully. (shrink)