Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Transhumanist immortality: Understanding the dream as a nightmare

2021; Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.12775/setf.2021.006

2300-7648

Pablo García‐Barranquero,

Paranormal Experiences and Beliefs

This paper offers new arguments to reject the alleged dream of immortality. In order to do this, I firstly introduce an amendment to Michael Hauskeller’s approach of the “immortalist fallacy”. I argue that the conclusion “we (normally) do not want to live forever” does not follow from the premise “we (normally) do not want to die”. Next, I propose the philosophical turn from “normally” to “under these circumstances” to resolve this logical error. Then, I review strong philosophical critiques of this transhumanist purpose of immortality in the literature. There are two key questions related to the possibility of fulfilling this goal: the hard problem of consciousness and the personal identity dilemma. Finally, I defend a specific type of indefinite life and justify that it is more desirable than our current limited life.