Abstract
Being alive throughout all of history need not save you from dying, even if history extends infinitely into the past and future. Infinitely-long lives can still fall short of genuine immortality and thereby suffer all of an ordinary mortal’s diminution in experience. Adapting the terminology that David Lewis used to define time travel, Roy Sorensen defends the above propositions by imagining quasi-immortal ‘spore gods’, who live finite personal lives distributed across infinite external time. While criticising the ‘Eleatic’ terms in which Sorensen presents spore gods, this paper argues that his essential claims are correct: ‘spore god’ worlds are logically and metaphysically possible. Indeed, going beyond Sorensen, spore gods are even nomologically accessible within General Relativity.
Original language | English |
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Article number | anx042 |
Pages (from-to) | 98-104 |
Journal | Analysis |
Volume | 77 |
Issue number | 1 |
Early online date | 22 Mar 2017 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | E-pub ahead of print - 22 Mar 2017 |
Keywords
- immortality
- Roy Sorensen
- time travel
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Alasdair Richmond
- School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences - Senior Lecturer
Person: Academic: Research Active