Technology Defeating Death: From a Metaphysical Issue to an Engineering Problem?

Abstract

Contemporary Western research is increasingly characterised by the move from thinking of ageing and, consequently, death as metaphysical issues to thinking of them as engineering problems that can, and even must, be solved. And an increasing number of millionaires funds science and technology whose objective is the extreme extension of life, i.e. prolongevity, and possibly the defeat of death, as if winning over ageing and death is the highest success one can possibly achieve as a highly successful human being. From a philosophical perspective, the following two questions arise. First, what may be the meaning of the ever closer correlation between the idea of human (individual) success and (social) progress and the idea of defeating ageing and death? Second, what may be the meaning of the ever closer correlation between the idea of defeating ageing and death and the idea of (even ultimate) scientific and technological development? Their possible answers start with the following insights. First, that constitutively, and not by accident, we have a drive to transcend our humanity as it is. Second, that we have possible alternatives to transcending our humanity by transcending our ageing and death, i.e. trying to remove time from our ontology: indeed, ageing as moving from life to death may not be thought of as the worst kind of individual failure, but as a kind of individual success, i.e. the individual capability to think of it as one great existential experience of whose values and opportunities we would otherwise be deprived.