18 Against Immortality: Why Death is Better than the Alternative Iain Thomson and James Bodington 1 To be or not to be - forever? ri f £.,111&t':.1c.r kc. s In his saga A Song of Ice and Fire, <5@s i! R.ll. Mattia stark but simple choice: "What do you say? North or South? Shall I atone for old sins or make some.new ones?" (Martin 2011: 24) Imagine facing the following choice, no less stark or simple. Either you can undergo a quick and painless procedure that will grant you immortality, thereby making it impossible for you to cease to exist subsequently. Or else you can refuse the procedure and continue to exist with your inevitable death in your future, as well as the ineliminable possibility of dying at any moment. 1 Which would you choose?. We think this overlooked question is crucial for determining whether you are for or against immortality. 2 Why? Imagine any techno-scientific proce- dure that might actually be able to grant you an immortal existence one day. You might be able to upload your neural net, for example, in some suffi- ciently dispersed way that you could exist online without the possibility of being accidentally or maliciously deleted. Or you might be able to back up your consciousness continually and store it in a secure location so that, in the event of a catastrophic destruction of your current body (or avatar), your Intelligence Unbound: The Future of Uploaded and Machine Minds, First Edition. Edited by Russell Blackford and Damien Broderick. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Against Immortality 249 saved consciousness would be downloaded automatically into cloned, syn- thetic, robotic, or cybernetic replacement bodies (or parts) which have been made ready for that purpose, allowing you to pick right up where you left off. (Lots of other scenarios remain possible too, though variants on these two seem to be the most popular.) Let us grant, concesso non data, that some such science fiction scenario for achieving immortality could one day become commonplace, a feasible and affordable part of our everyday reality. We would not concede this point ourselves without considering the seemingly insurmountable empirical, ethical, economic, ecological, and other difficul- ties all such scenarios entail. 3 For the sake of argument, however, let us set such doubts aside so as simply to ask whether such immortality would be desirable if we could achieve it. Even granting that some techno-scientific procedure capable of bestowing immortality could one day become real, here is the rub. All such procedures could guarantee you immortality (completely banishing the threat of invol- untary death or non-existence) only by making it impossible to permanently delete your dispersed or backed-up self, whether accidentally or deliberately, by malicious strangers or by you yourself. Think about it: If, after undergo- ing such a procedure, you could ever delete yourself - that is, if. you could choose to bring your existence to an end subsequently - then someone else could delete you too, or it could happen by accident. This' possibility is ine- liminable in principle. If it remains possible for you ever to wipe out your existence, then it remains possible for someone else to do so or for it to happen by accident. In that case, however, you would still be subject to the threat of death and so would not truly be immortal. For, "immortal" simply means "not mortal," not subject to death, mars. And you are either subject to death or you are not. That mortals are subject to death in varying degrees of intensity, immediacy, etcetera, does not change the fact that, conceptually, there is a fundamental mortal/immortal dichotomy. An "immortal" who can die or permanently cease to exist is not truly immortal. 4 In sum, if you could ever choose to undergo a procedure (such as mind uploading) that would give you true immortality by banishing the threat of death, then after such a procedure you would be unable to die or cease to exist. This means you cannot be rid of the threat of involuntary death while also keeping voluntary death around as an option, should you become hopelessly sick of an existence without end. True immortality, once granted, cannot be rescinded. So, your choice about whether or not to undergo any techno-scientific procedure capable of granting true immortality would be a once and for all time decision. 5 Given this, would you choose mortality or immortality, an existence with or without death? In thinking about this question, consider the following. Are you so con- cerned to avoid the apparently eternal nothingness of death that you would