Immortality has confounded mankind for all the distance traveled by The Arrow of Time. This is as it must be, because, as sentient beings, capable of imagining the impossible, we wonder why immortal life must BE impossible. The European explorer, de Leon, is reputed to have come to what is now Florida, in search of a fountain of youth. As far as we know, he never found it. Tim Leary thought cryogenics was the way. That too appears to have been a pipe dream (this was a metaphor, not a pun...). I have read Hume, along with Voltaire, Rousseau and others of those times. I got the distinct impression that they were realists when it came to such things as God, immortality and such. Should there ever be something resembling immortality, it will likely be a pale imitation of that state of which immortal men dream. I know: never say never. But I, like Hume and his contemporaries, am also a realist. One can dream impossible dreams, or one can make the best of the life we are given and call it good. Seems to me...

Most of what we call life never really dies. It reproduces and mutates, but thousands of years hence what remains is the same single-celled organism. Only multi-celled organisms that reproduce sexually die. The complexity of the organism means that only the reproductive cells transmit life. The remainder of the organism is too ?differentiated? to be a direct carrier of the life of the species. The individual, however psychologically or instinctively committed to survival, is biologically bound to death. Radical cell differentiation requires this. And this means that the more sophisticated the form the more bound it is to die, for the more extensive that cell differentiation that commits the bulk of the organism to take only a passing role in reproduction. But if that biological sophistication is accomplished in the commitment to die, it may be that something even more sublime is achieved. Life is more real committed to departure than reproduction by cell-division or fission. What becomes interesting is how that differentiation not only commits the organism to die, but achieves an articulation of roles in the organism as a whole that remains almost entirely mysterious. The bio-physics applied to understanding it is so crude, if not by the lights of our tremendous sophistication in science, but in light of the vastly more sophisticated capabilities of these tiny cells in any advanced organism. Old fashioned reasoning might be a more powerful tool than bio-physics can supply. When a cell divides in its developmental phase, and perhaps at any other stage in life, the resultant cells are each a little further along in the differentiation process. But which is which? Which is more differentiated, and how is this decided? Can it be that each cell is in some sense trying to be the most differentiated? The most committed the whole organism to that death articulated the meaning of its being alive? If so, this puts a new gloss on how systems come into being. For it is incongruous to conventional thinking that a system can be most perfected by an effort of every part to be the most different! And it certainly puts a new light on the question of immortality, for who then would want to live forever, even if psychologically predisposed to cling to life? Imaging an afterlife is merely a variation on the misapprehension that death is purely loss. It is not. It is the most intensive meaning the universe is capable of containing.

LIFE AFTER DEATH
Gary, your description of biological immutability while scientifically interesting (and probably accurate), illustrates clearly the irrelevance of science to philosophy. Science is about matter; philosophy is about consciousness, and the two do not intersect nor does either help understanding the other. Your interest is in ?how stuff keeps living after some host dies? which is a wonderful subject to investigate, especially around the ?host? question.
But I think you were misled by what I thought was an error in the topic of the show itself. The show was titled ?immortality,? when it should have been about ?consciousness after death.?  You describe biological immortality issues, but you don?t describe any philosophical questions. 
IMMORTALITY
What is the condition of one?s consciousness past the age of 90, say? The health directive is a scam to get hospitals off the hook for liability; I want my plug hard wired into the hospital wall. Keep me alive; that is how dearly I treasure my consciousness.  But I have witnessed deaths of people very close to me, who were fortunate to live to the point that they said ?I?m tired, I?m finished, I want to die now.? And, one way or another, they died then. Believe me, that is what everyone really wants. When someone says ?I don?t want to live to be 90,? I always say ?I will ask you when you are 90.?
The other question about immortality is like the question ?How old will I be in heaven?? When one thinks about heaven, they imagine themselves to be a happy, healthy, what, 30 year old? But if you die at 88, or if you get cryo-froze, you will be 88 when you get re-constituted, right? Ted Williams? old brain will not be able to hit a home run even if he gets grafted onto a 20 year olds? stem cell generated body. There really is no point for a human being to live longer than it wants to live; what we all want is to be able to make the decision about when the end is, at the end. There is no rational (philosophical) reason to expect anyone will want their life to end ?early,? and no one would say ?I want to die? at such and such an age. Everyone simply wants to live until they don?t want to live anymore; there is no sense in getting upset about not being ?immortal??that is not the issue at all.
LIFE AFTER DEATH
By this I mean, the issue of the survival of consciousness after physical death (not Gary?s survival of some biology after death of the host).
This is what the show should have been concerned with, because this is the real philosophical issue that underlies all that ?immortality-talk.? What the hosts and the guest should have been exploring is philosophical ideas about our relationship to the way we view our own future consciousness, and our rational thoughts about if, and what, consciousness transcends death. Alluded to briefly was the notion that probably 99.9% of humans believe in some form of ?life? (i.e., consciousness) after death: whether life in heaven or a nirvana state, or reincarnation, or some other form (best, I like the Jewish idea that a dead person?s consciousness ?lives? so long as the living remember him/her; they ?live on in our memory of them?). This belief is so universal that it could be called a human instinct. It is not a powerful argument for the actual transcendence of consciousness, but for the human instinct. Born of what? Ego, survival, confirmation, social membership?lots to think about here.
If one?s consciousness survives death, won?t that be interesting? What will it be like? What will it be like to be in heaven, or to be a cockroach, or to be in whatever state with some consciousness intact? How cool would that be?
Or, if consciousness does not survive death (and we really don?t know either way, despite what 99.9% believe), then let?s be optimistic: the closest analog to such a state is sleep, and sleeping ?forever? is just fine.
Because of all this, we don?t (or shouldn?t) fear death; but we should do everything we can not to die before we want to die.

Oh and... as for me, I'll leave it just like that..

~~Mirugai,
Thank you for addressing me by name. I do believe 'avatars' are inappropriate in a philosophy discussion.
I am not suggesting reproduction, having kids, as a mode of immortality. I am suggesting that immortality is an inadequate mode of being. It is worthless. What nominally lives forever does not live at all, any more than rocks or 'dark matter', whatever that is. (Actually, dark matter is nothing more nor less than an aporia in the calculation of the momentum of an expanding universe)
Another thread asks for a Kant joke, here's a good one, aside from his ridiculously regular habits. It is his square of opposition. Am I the only one to notice that ?A' and ?not A? are not contradictories, but merely contraries? That it requires quantifiers to be contradictory a priori? In other words, a contradiction is not a sentence pair both of which cannot be true, but a sentence pair of which, one, proved false, proves the other true. The only possible real term of such a proof is departure. Death sets up or enables what I call the community in contrariety. It is a system constituted as the opportunity of belonging whole that comes of each part being the differing of it.
What philosophers refuse to face since time immemorial and as much today as ever, is that the logical discernment which one is which is not the same 'one', and is infinitely incompatible with the numerical 'one', whether conceived cardinal or ordinal. It is therefore impossible to do logic and arithmetic within a unified conceptual scheme. It is the community in contrariety which resolves this aporia, by the merit left the remainder through departure and loss. And, by the by, supplies, I believe, the best explanation of what consciousness, and indeed person, is.
The notion of immortality in creating offspring is nonsensical, since, because of the way genetic material gets mixed up between mating pairs, the fellow in the street you never met might have more genetic similarities to you than your children do.
One point off the topic, but still with Hume. Does anyone wonder about Hume's intentions is inviting Rousseau to England? Rousseau seems to have concluded mischief was afoot, and left to study English botany. Does anyone else smell a plot to mislead him down the garden path of English politics?

After Leaf
A leaf goes out in a blaze of color, in a soft breeze that drifts it slowly away. How perfect!  As for after leaf, so be it a rake, a leaf blower, a plastic bag, or a garbage heap, heaven God bid or even hell God forbid, surely it matters not to a leaf, for a leaf has no uncertain beleaf. =  

Logically One is One when is or = unite them. The power of equality unites everything even when One measures not   = is

Gary and MJA, now we really have joined the philosophical issues.  For instance, the question: is death an end, or a continuity? Gary, you probably would say "both," and MJA, you would probably say "one." And in each of your posts, you have posited what "both" and "one" mean. This is good stuff! And I might propose if it is "both" and/or "one" then thinking and talking about consciousness/death is just "endless speculation." But that is just what doing philosophy is, at its best. (A scientist criticized philosophy-without-science as "endless speculation.") Gary, your characterization of proof of consciousness issues as flowing from the contrary nature of all conceptual systems, as measured by what you (and I) call a community, is brilliant and so instructive.
TS Eliot:  
"It would be the same at the end of the journey,
 If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all ...."

~~Does the logical A=A mean the same thing as the arithmetic 1=1? if so, then 1+1=1! Ask yourself, do you still know what ?one? means?
If you learn the calculus from a physicist rather than a mathematician it should be explained to you how Newton justified the reductive logic of the derivative. It is a matter of reducing the numerically indefinable difference to the infinitesimal. George Berkeley argues (cf, The Analyst) that this amounts to using the same value as a positive number through most of the calculation, but as zero where it becomes convenient. A further flaw is that the infinitesimal is not only never really made definable, it is a value as much within as without the calculation. It is a logical contrariety not really one thing or the other (and not really both either!). What it is, is ignored evidence of the incompleteness of the calculation. It is the kind of sleight of mind that is rife in philosophy today. It is rigor truncated just short of teaching us something upsetting. It is in fact displacing the unknown with a flood of the, presumptively, known. It is, as I have said elsewhere, throwing out the baby the better to keep the bathwater.

I love your discussion of the "problem" of calculus, Gary. But, first, I miss spoke when I said "one"; what I really meant to say was, as one who has learned much about the subject from MJA, "all" or "entirety." "One" puts a quantifier in play, when there is none. As I said, I am more of a dualist, as in "matter" and "consciousness." As for the calculus, I understand your distinction between the physics and the mathematical representations of the unreachable, yet  approachable. In either case, I think of doing philosophy as a dialog (even with one person doing the dialog) in which the problem is never answered, but the process brings the philosopher continually closer to the answer.  This is the "endless speculation" that science condemns, and which you call a "flaw." It is the success of philosophy, to me. You seem to need that there be "definition," which many philosophers use as their method; but I think "definition" is self-serving sophistry and advocacy. Philosophy should not engage in "defining," it should be looking for "meaning" instead. May I say that, lastly, I love the poetics of your post.
 

~~Logic requires us to ?construe? different meanings of ?is?, but never supplies an adequate justification of this, such that it is hard to read much that passes for philosophy without becoming bewildered in the effort to keep track of what one is supposed to forget. Texts that begin and proceed throughout as a comparison of sentence forms as embodied in a list of examples to refer to overlook one very essential truth, contrary to what some of us learned in school (for my part so long ago that things may be very different today) that ?a sentence is a completed thought?, a sentence is in fact nothing of the sort. There is no such thing as a completed thought. We do not think in 'thoughts', and we certainly do not speak so. The assumption that we have a right to be construed as we believe we have constructed our sentences is a deep conceit that is a brick wall I have been beating my head against for fifty years or more. We are so far from having a right to be understood that the whole project of language is the drama of responding to signs, often not oral, that we precisely do not understand each other precisely. It's how we respond to to signs of incomplete understanding that makes language what it is. It is never unilateral.
I am ?Western? enough (in fact through and through) to relate my perceptions to that tradition, but this hardly means an uncritical embedding in it. It is revealing, or at least responding to the inadequacies of one's received terms that makes the more hidden come to life. Life is differentiation, not replication. But difference per se is anomaly unless it is opportune of a response through which another is freer to itself be differentiating what the system as a whole wold be if replication were the criterion or unifying principle. But if difference is life, the capacity of systems (such as an organism, consciousness, or a political or cultural tradition) to constitute themselves as that anomalous act and anomalous response that, like the infinitesimal in calculus, is neither defined within nor outside the law or logic of the replicating calculation or judgment, and, though neither that act nor response is itself in synchrony to each other as that evidence of the incompleteness of the replicating logic, the completeness of the system in difference, of the community in contrariety, is the completion of that evidencing. But the more completed system is not united or in units, since each part in it is, in a poetic sense, if you will, recommending, not itself the differing, but the differing made welcome therein. Differentiation could be stated as the lost replicate. The system, body mind society, finds its belonging whole as a responsibility of being recognized that loss, and of its worth. Logic doesn't do so well when it comes to recognizing worth. This, obviously, because it is a conviction in the hermetic continuity of the replicate. That is, to number.
That's a mouthful enough, but to continue the motif it needs to be put in the context of the controversy of time over the past two and a half millennia. It has some surprising convolutions and odd alliances, but would take too much space to cover here. But the main theme I would urge is that the quantifier is throughout used as a means of subordinating change to the logic of replication. But if time is the lost replicate, however weird it is to say it, there is no one time is, either as a unitary epoch or as a unity of countable units. Differentiation, as the most articulating term of real systems, is the lost enumerator found that loss as the extremity of rigor proved its logic or rationality or law uncompleted. In a real sense, person is no one.
 

Dear Gary, "Is" is a complete thought as = is a complete equation.
Logic led me to: A = B, and B = C, then A = C, but what about B, what can it B? Equal or different, what should it B? To B or not to B? That is the question and philosophy of Aristotle, Shakespeare, and me.
In the above poem, do you see A ,B, and C different or united by an equal sign, One or the same?
Do you not understand the power of equal and is? They are synonymous as equal is One or the same.
And when it comes to equality, equal like truth has the power to unite even the most different, A, B and C. black and white, everything, even contrary you and me.
Surely you must know that equality is synonymous with freedom and that truth or is will set you free.
Just beyond that wall you bang your head against is freedom!
Truth is, much more simple than thought,
= 

~~You think that way because for the first thousand years of the Christian Era Aristotle was the only philosopher available in translation. His biases were culturally entrenched by the time other thinkers became available. (cf Oakley or Ullmann)
Predication, identity, existence, equivalence. No potential for confusion here? If you had a better grip on what a category is (read Plato and nix Ari!) you wouldn't be so sanguine.
Surely I know no such thing! Hermetic 'equality' is the obligating term, not the emancipator! The rigor of that hermeticism, between the universal qualifier is and is not, in all its senses, is entailing the loss of it as its most extreme term in rigor. That is, its entailing that extremity is its needing its other free of that equality. The only sameness is a transiency revealed as a comparable difference. Same difference cannot be a fundamental equality. This does not imply inequality or subordination. It means freedom is not an equivalence but a need in rigor of its alternative being emancipate of it.

I think this way because I found measure to be the flaw in us all. =

measure = "the flaw in us all"?????
How do you measure that?
My point is that person, 'psychologism' and all, is an agent of such greater rigor that only its idiosyncrasies can bring '=' to the point of being recognized its inadequacy in rigor, its uncompleted reason.
 
Hamm. Did you ever think one thing?
Clov. Never.

I just thought of a wired philosophy its were when you die you just get reborn instantly saying your born in 2014 you are born again in 2134 and you dont know it because your conscience dies but you still do the same things in a loop or it . you can die in 2014 and be born instantly in 2890 or in 1893 or it an only go foreword and you can be born into something els like a cell or a virus

David Kuhn, of Closer to Truth, had a conversation in the episode aired this week in my area in which it was noted that the Hebrews did not believe in and afterlife, that death was just the end, but they evolved a kind of hope in some form of resurrection. The resurrected would not be continuity with the previous life, but a life new and other. Christ makes certain allusion to such a notion in which, if we believe, we are said to await such resurrection 'at the end of days?. That is, that the intervening time we are indeed dead, there is no immediate ascendance to transcendence, as it were. But in Mark, he promises the ingratiating thief a ticket to paradise ?this very day?!

Aristotle was not much respected by his contemporaries. It is evident he was kicked out of the Academy as soon as he was no longer under the protection of Plato. Contrary to conventional belief, the ancient texts were not lost to the early Christian era, they were suppressed, and largely rediscovered long before the usual date assigned to the Renaissance. It was Augustine who resurrected Aristotle to reinforce his contention that humanity is a corrupt invention needing transcendent forms to elevate it to anything worthy of being at all, immortal of otherwise. For a thousand years thereafter institutions vied for the ascendancy once embodied by Rome, and divided between clerical civil and scholarly forces, all of which claimed to be the conduit of that transcendent authority, and all of them speaking in the language of the ancients in a very concerted effort to suppress the naturally democratic instincts of the vast majority of the people. Aristotle's logic or ?dialectics? was, as I seem to recall (from my reading about, not from my presence at the time!) the only text preserved until the abbeys emerged with their insatiable appetite for copying. During the interim the only Plato text available was an abridged version of Timeus, read, of course, as a flat ?idealism?. By the time other texts began to be rediscovered, many of them never really lost, the habit of mind had been set (see Oakley), and learning became the war against democracy it remains to this day. The question of immortality is but a motif in this war discerning, as Jeremiah Burroughs put it, between saints and 'worldlings'. The measures of the worth of a person, and of being deserving of paradise, was the signs of transcendence apparent in one's estate in the world. The poor were but fodder to that mystical authority of the formalism that reigns supreme today. And whether it is the divine authority of sacred tradition, the evident power of civil authority, or the sublime implacableness of impeccably reproduced texts, the right to differ is suppressed and lost. Socrates would not approve. But who minds him?

I don't expect that I can help you understand because understanding is all about Oneself.
But I should try anyway, because try is all we can do.
Measure is the problem and the solution is measureless. Once you remove the uncertainty from the equation the solution becomes crystal clear. Truth is absolute. = 

Sounds like the ancient thematics between "limit and unlimit". The problem is, the most limited is the most unlimited. The least measure is the measureless. The least term of time is all the differing it is. Humanity is more worthwhile than any transcendence, or its supposed maker.The god with the compass is an idiot scribing only its own demise. And nothing is unilateral or alone. Isolation is the derangement of measure, not its perfection.

The limits of the unlimited: We are all surely bound by One infinite immeasurable Universe that unites our finite mortality and infinite immortality into the just and beautiful One.  God as is the Universe, as is you and me, is just another name for One, The immortal One with no limits at All. Free at last!  =

Obey and be free! Where have I heard that before? Spinoza? The Koran?
 
Actually, the universe is measurable. Where have you been? It is mortality that is unlimited and immortality limited, and rather uninteresting.

The Hebrews had no belief in an afterlife. Life is material and vanishes altogether in death. The Christian era began with this sense of mortality, adding only a distant expectation of a divinely ordained resurrection of the corpse, not of a new life of a "soul substance" already inhabitting the body. There was no such belief at first. It was introduced by Augustine, via Aristotle, in order to counter Pelagius. As the Roman Empire adopted Christianity and, soon thereafter, succumbed to invasions, the newly Christianised Norman and Gothic regimes employed the top-down lawgiving this thesis afforded them. The Church, nobility, and academic guilds, each in ts own peculiar way, adopted the crude and sparse Latin literature as a means to suppress the spontaneous democratic instincts of the people (See the works of Francis Oakley). Even by Hume's time it was still dangerous to be open in one's lack of faith. Even today a public career, outside Europe but most certainly in America, can be ruined by the accusation of "godlessness." So it is remarkable that Hume would be so at ease about it, though many others chafed or otherwise hinted at irritation at the difficulties in being honest about the matter.
 
Just thought I'd remind anyone interested in this discussion of its initial issue.
 
A question for the moderators: Does the 'spell-checker' installed in this system use the Cambridge standard? I remember "Morse" opening a book and identifying its author as a Cambridge man, rather than from the more respectable Oxford, saying "Not a 'zed' in sight!"

An interesting thing to consider when it comes to mortality, is the sociopolitical effect it will have. This pending predicament can be seen in science fiction movies such as Elysium, yet it seems to still evade most philosophical conversation. Today, modern medicine that merely prolongs life has yet to reach the sickly bodies of many humans in the developing world. Thus, if we in fact introduce the "cure to death," I think it safe to assume that only the rich would be able to afford such a cure, and it would take decades if not centuries for immortality to be a given for all citizens of the world. How would such a world be organized? Would it even be moral to introduce it, once put in these terms? There are a whole slew of problems that seem to be still untouched, but in great need of being seriously discussed and thought through before it may be too late.

Longevity is rather a different issue from immortality. Malthusian alarmism is usually missing countervailing factors. The rich already get better healthcare, and not just in rich countries. But, oddly, or not so oddly, some of the most long-lived are in the poorest communities.
Compare unending immanence to eternal transcendence. Which is preferable? One would have to make rather vapid assumptions to get started, and so never conclude....,

Have not taken time to revisit this. Some of our living philosophers are well past the threequarter century mark now, and only a few say much about immortality. Thinkers (I think) try to take a pragmatic approach: better to do the things that are more useful, not less. I still study and write philosophy. I would not presume to offer some new or different reasoning that promised eternal life of any sort. The metaphysics are too tenuous and faith, after Davidson, is propositional. Questions without answers are moot. Pascal's Wager offers nothing comforting.