Immortality

Humankind's mortality and death generate reflections on immortality as a solution to the problem of death. In the following text, immortality will be analyzed in different types, the problem of immortality and personal identity/personhood will be explored, and arguments surrounding the value of immortality will be presented.

Types of Immortality

The immortality of humankind can be distinguished in two different types: (1) mundane immortality, where humans continue to exist forever without dying in the earthly world, and (2) transmundane immortality, where humans continue to exist forever in the earthly or transcendent world after dying. Transmundane immortality can be distinguished in personal, transpersonal, and impersonal immortality. Personal immortality implies that the person who existed before death continues to exist in some form after death. Transpersonal immortality implies that the person existing before death is transformed into another person after death. Impersonal immortality implies that the person existing before death is transformed into an impersonal existence after death that still in some relevant sense has a connection with the earthly person. This distinction is important to the question of the value of immortality and why immortal existence would be of comfort in the face of death, if indeed it is. It can be argued that if the problem with death is that I as a person dies, immortality would be a comfort to me to the extent I continue to exist in some relevant sense. However, what it is for me to exist in a relevant sense is open to a number of different interpretations.

Besides the different religious ideas around transpersonal or impersonal immortality, in terms of the migration of the soul into other people or creatures or by becoming part of the all-inclusive universe, we also find secular ideas about personal immortality that would not imply the continued existence of me in the normal sense. One concept related to Einstein's idea of time as a fourth dimension claims that we are immortal because every time segment of me continues to exist, forever, in the time dimension of our existence, and when we live our life we move consecutively through these different time segments. Hence, when I die, what continues to exist, forever or as long as time exists, is the former time segments of me.

Transmundane Personal Immortality

Within the perspective of a transmundane immortality, we find three basic types of personal immortal existence:

• 1.
  Humans continue to exist as nonbodily souls after death.
• 2.
  Humans' nonbodily souls continue to exist in new bodies after death.
• 3.
  Humans continue to exist as new unities of souls and bodies, where the soul is not a distinct entity separated from the body.

Transmundane personal immortality should confront two philosophical problems: the problem of personhood (i.e., what makes a human into a person) and the problem of personal identity (i.e., what makes a person at one time the same person at another time). When relating personhood or personal identity to only an earthly existence, death is seen as a radical change to a human's life that has to be dealt with.

Personhood and Personal Identity

Connecting personhood to a nonbodily soul that is unaffected by death and continues to exist after death will deal with both the problem of personhood and personal identity. This, however, presupposes a dualism or separation in humans between the soul and the body, giving rise to new philosophical problems. First, it has been questioned how a nonbodily soul could interact with a physical body. Second, important aspects of personhood, (i.e., how we experience the world and ourselves) seem intimately linked to us having a body to interact with the world through, and that our bodies are part of our personhood. Continued existence as a nonbodily person would then be either unimaginable or so radically different from our bodily existence that it would be difficult to claim we are the same person, which is a problem for personal identity.

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