Jose Carillo's Forum

TIME OUT FROM ENGLISH GRAMMAR

This section features wide-ranging, thought-provoking articles in English on any subject under the sun. Its objective is to present new, mind-changing ideas as well as to show to serious students of English how the various tools of the language can be felicitously harnessed to report a momentous or life-changing finding or event, to espouse or oppose an idea, or to express a deeply felt view about the world around us.

The outstanding English-language expositions to be featured here will mostly be presented through links to the websites that carry them. To put a particular work in better context, links to critiques, biographical sketches, and various other material about the author and his or her works will usually be also provided.

Our earnest quest for eternal life and the downside of realizing it

What would happen if it became possible for people to live forever?

British philosophy and science writer Stephen Cave closely examines some of the familiar disquieting answers to this monumental question in his book Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization (Crown, 336 pages). As we ourselves must have already realized, Cave says that if we become immortal, our life would lose its purpose and time would lose its value—suddenly we’d have nothing to do but have endless eons in which to do it. In pondering this unnerving prospect, however, Cave comes up with this powerful argument: that it is humanity’s very preoccupation with trying to defy mortality that actually drives civilization.

Immortality

Cave observes that although we might be able to cope materially with immortality, it would psychologically be the end of us: “The problem is that our culture is based on our striving for immortality. It shapes what we do and what we believe; it has inspired us to found religions, write poems and build cities. If we were all immortal, the motor of civilization would sputter and stop.”

He then challenges us to ponder these mind-bending implications of immortality: How long would people live if they did manage to acquire a perfectly disease-free body? What would happen if a super-being tried to round up the atomic constituents of all who’ve died in order to resurrect them?  Or what would our loved ones really be doing in heaven if it does exist?

Says David Boyd Haycock, author of Mortal Coil and A Crisis of Brilliance, in a review of Cave’s book: “Immortality plumbs the depths of the human mind and ties the quest for the infinite prolongation of life into the very nature of civilization itself. Cave reveals remarkable depth and breadth of learning, yet is always a breeze to read.”

Read Stephen Cave’s “Imagining the Downside of Immortality” in The New York Times now!

Read Sophie Roell’s “Immortality junkies,” an interview of Stephen Cave, in Salon.com now!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Stephen Cave holds a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge University and, before turning to full-time writing, worked as a diplomat for the British Foreign Office. He writes regularly on philosophical, ethical and scientific subjects for the Financial Times and also contributes to The New York Times, the Guardian of UK, and Wired.

OTHER INTERESTING READINGS:

On breasts. In “Your Breasts Are Trying To Kill You,” an essay and review of Florence William’s Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History in the May 4, 2012 issue of Jezebel.com, Linda West discusses the five surprising things she learned about breasts from the book. “I worried a bit going into Breasts that all this feminist advocacy for women’s health might make breasts less sexy… But thanks to Williams’ indefatigable good humor and conversational candor, I’m inspired to believe that maybe sexy, sexy breasts can help make feminism more sexy!”

Breasts

Read Linda West’s “Your Breasts Are Trying To Kill You” in Jezebel.com now!

On memorization. In Part I of “If we remember more, can we read deeper–and create better?”, her blog in the June 1, 2012 issue of Scientific American, New York City-based writer Maria Konnikova describes her experience as a participant in the Rubin’s Brainwave series of immersive memory workshop conducted by memory grandmaster Ed Cooke. She says:  “We were putting into effect the most extreme method for storing memories: not just a memory palace…but an actual physical embodiment of each idea we were to memorize. And at the moment, we were committing to memory the six realms of existence, according to Buddhism.”

Read Maria Konnikova’s “If we remember more…” in ScientificAmerican.com now!

Click to read or post comments

View the complete list of postings in this section

Copyright © 2010 by Aperture Web Development. All rights reserved.

Page best viewed with:

Mozilla FirefoxGoogle Chrome

Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional

Page last modified: 10 June, 2012, 9:10 a.m.