So You Want to Live Forever?

2000 words, 8 minute read

If you’ve always craved immortality, your time has come at last…maybe! A group of individuals who call themselves Vitalists believe that death per se is humanity’s core problem. (And just like that, I’m back in middle school!)

Influencer Bryan Johnson, for example, speaks of plans to create a new religion in which “the (human) body is God.” At last, God made in our image and likeness! “Who’s a thunk it?” (Hairspray)

Recently, Johnson added psychedelics to his “God is us” tool kit. No, it’s not psylocibin or LSD; it’s venom from the Bufo Toad.  And you don’t smoke it, snort it, or shoot it; you lick it! Right off of the back of your new favorite amphibian. How fun is that!

Caveat: The licked frog does not turn into a member of a royal family. Apparently, ‘a lick is not a kiss’. However, you may find yourself living in a palace (i.e. you may find that your current residence is in fact a palace…and always has been and you just didn’t notice).

Molecule 5-MeO-DMT, the ‘active ingredient’ in the venom, does double duty: it reveals our spiritual divinity and it promotes our physical immortality. 

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Vitalism is gaining ground worldwide! A popup city in Montenegro (Zuzalu, 2023) was created by people who wanted to establish a “longevity state” - a jurisdiction dedicated to lifespan extension, which would also facilitate access to unproven but potentially life-extending drugs.

A similar effort in Próspera, Honduras, has created a permissive environment for biotech companies to perform unusual clinical trials. ZuVillage in Georgia (the country, not the state); and Zelar City in Berlin (Germany, not NH), offer their own spin on the original formula. And every May, ‘Vitalist Bay’ pops up somewhere in the SF area.

Putting the dubious science of immortality to one side for now, does the more realistic goal of ‘life extension’ make sense? “Of course it does,” you say. “Who doesn’t want to live as long as possible?” Well, you do, apparently; but most people don’t – but that’s another subject for another day.

Life is paradoxical. The longer we live, the shorter our lives seem. The problem? We don’t heed our own advice. We behave as though prior results do guarantee future performance. At 20 we cannot be convinced that we will not live forever. And who can blame us? The first twenty years went by so slowly that 80/20 → ∞. Subjectively, time seems inexhaustible.

20 years of adult living corrects our perspective: 80/40 = 2, but then 80/50 = 1 and 80/80 → 0. Believe it or not, this bizarre scenario can be expressed by a very simple mathematical function (where f(x) = subjective life span and x = the ratio of ‘average life span’ to ‘years lived’):

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Riddle me this: What do you and I have in common with every other human being who’s ever lived? Don’t say ‘death’ because death is not something we have; in fact death is defined precisely as the absence of a we. I don’t have my own death, and I certainly don’t have yours…and you certainly don’t have mine (I hope).

According to the local sage, Pop Wisdom, death is one stage in the process we call ‘life’. It isn’t! Death is the limit of life, not an aspect of it. Just as Achilles is forever infinitesimally short of the finish line, so you are always infinitesimally short of being dead. You cannot ‘be dead’ and be you; therefore you cannot experience death. The sentence ‘I am dead’ (or even ‘I will die’) is oxymoronic.

For Achilles to break the tape, or for you to be dead, it is necessary to employ a computational device called Calculus. Fortunately, the real world doesn’t obey the conventions of arithmetic. Less fortunately, when I explained this to Sister Mary Martha in 3^rd grade, I got something other than the Fields medal I was expecting.

No, the correct answer is not death. Give up then? Ok, here goes: “Every human being who’s ever lived had, has, or will have a lifespan of one day…or less.”  No, not all at the same time…at least I hope not.

Someday it will happen that you will have a lifespan of one day or less (of course you almost certainly won’t know it at the time). Most of us believe we have lifespans of more than one day. But no one born alive fails to have a life span of ‘one day…or less’.

Of course, by now you’ve realized that there’s nothing sacrosanct about one day: it’s just a placeholder. It would be equally true to say that every human being has a life span of ‘one second or less’…or ‘one millennium or less’. Whatever, it’s always true! The key is ‘or less’.

When it suits us, we think of periods of time as if they were beads on a string, one day following the next ad nauseum. But time is more like the Tower of Babel: each floor rests on the floor beneath it. Your top floor penthouse is essentially the sum of all the floors (and their occupants) below: Enjoy…and don’t worry about all the folks you had to climb over to get to the top. 

Although the circumstances of our births may differ, O Prince, the being born of it is the same for both of us…and for every other human being (every other living organism?) that ever lives. We diverge from a shared singularity into a solipsistic multiplicity, from undifferentiated potentiality into unique actuality. I am other than others. I am not not! YHWH’s  “I am what am” = “I am not what’s not.” (Exodus 3: 14)

The circumstances of our deaths may differ. You may die, surrounded by loved ones with flights of angels singing you to your rest; I may bleed out in a ditch somewhere, waiting in vain for a good Samaritan to rescue me. Regardless, in the end we will once again be equal, identical, one. The becoming dead of it is the same for both of us. 

So ‘being born’ we diverge and live out our respective lifespans in perfect isolation only to remerge when ‘becoming dead’. Being born and becoming dead are limits and we all converge toward those limits. Shorter lifespans continually succeed longer ones; gradually, lifespan differentials (actually, all identifying differentials) collapse as we approach our common singularity.

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My life is defined by its limits: I am by I am not. What is ‘being’ other than ‘not-not-being’? Once upon a time I did not exist and someday I will exist no more. You too! In between our birth day and our death day we will each have what we call ‘a life’, and every such life is radically unique (i.e. no elements in common). But, as our respective lifespans shorten, our common fate begins to eclipse our unique experience.

Two prayers are foundational in Roman Catholic spirituality: the Lord’s Prayer and the Hail Mary. There we pray to ‘Mary, Mother of God ’, asking her to ‘pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death’. In fact this is that hour! The hour of our death is always now and every now is that hour.

There is but one birth and one death and every human being (certain mystical figures potentially excepted) approaches both as a limit. The end of all process (doxa) is identity (Aletheia) – Parmenides

At the beginning and at the end we are not just equal, we are identical (but of course we are no longer we); and if we are identical, then we are one, i.e. a single entity. The limit of every unique ‘I’ is a common ‘not-I’. There is but one ‘not-I’ but every ‘not-not-I’ is unique.

You and I are entangled organisms (like Bell’s entangled particles). Birth is our Big Bang, death our Heat Death. Between these universal Bigs, each of us lives ‘my so-called life’. No two lives are the same. In fact, no two lives have even a single element (event) in common, but all lives diverge from and converge toward a common limit.

Exception: God! By definition God stands outside the warp and woof of spacetime. If God is an element in any life, then God is an element in every life and constitutes our single, common point of contact with ‘the transcendent other’; that shared contact accounts for the Solidarity of the Universe (aka the Mind of God).

Intellectual History consists primarily of the search for analogies across lives…and of course analogies abound - they form the basis of language, art, society, and all culture - but there are no identities (other than being born and becoming dead).

We do not intersect, i.e. we share no experiences. From the moment of birth each of us lives out a totally unique, subjectively isolated life…right up to the moment of death; along the way we are comforted – and alienated - by our reflection as seen in the billions of surrounding mirrors we call ‘other people’.

All of which makes the contemporary Vitalist movement especially perplexing. I mean, life extension to what end? Live an hour or less, live a century or more, ultimately you share a common (albeit infinitesimal) lifespan with every other human being who has ever lived. Does the long lived Sea Turtle experience life differently from the May Fly? (They experience different lives, but their experience of life is the same.)

The arrow of mortality goes in one direction only. All our ‘lifespans’ continually shorten until they converge at non-entity; but what of our so-called lives? Do they count for nothing? Just so…unless you believe that experience somehow transcends death, i.e. entropy, spacetime.

No matter how varied our lives may have been, dying is the ultimate leveler. Death is the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (which is not to say that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is death, Comrade Lenin).

Any experience, by definition, must differ from an alternative (real or imagined). That’s what experience is: differentiation. Those aspects of being that are common to all (e.g. birth and death) are not ‘experienced’; they simply constitute the human condition.

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“We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” (Shakespeare, The Tempest)

Dreams can be complex experiences, crammed full of action and emotion and inter-personal relationships, yet within a second of waking up, all that has vanished without consequence and often without memory. If being is ‘difference that makes a difference’ (Bateson) then our dreams do not necessarily meet that criterion…neither do our lives!

So life extension? What’s to extend? Dream time? Unless events transcend spacetime, they are nothing but ‘ice cream castles in the air’. All dreams are the same at the moment we awaken; likewise all lives converge at the moment of death.

If you were a precocious preschooler, some well-meaning buttinsky might have tried to comfort you following the death of a loved one (or pet) by analogizing: “Now we are caterpillars, but when we die, we become butterflies!”

Exactly so! Caterpillars (generally) do not ‘grow’ into butterflies; their genetic material totally reorganizes. They undergo the equivalent of a phase change. They both are, and are not, what they were (or what they will become). Nothing is added, nothing is taken away, but nothing is the same.

But does the butterfly know that once upon a time it was a caterpillar? Does the caterpillar know that it is on its way to becoming a butterfly? When the butterfly emerges from the chrysalis, does it even know that anything has changed? Will we?