Mortality Matters: Meaning & Death Matthew Jernberg

Would it be a letdown if you discovered that your near-death experience of an Afterlife turned out to just be a dream? That what you took to be an Afterlife isn't real and that the experience was something like a hallucination? You might be surprised to learn that Fischer argues that the unreality of the Afterlife in no way diminishes the significance of near-death experiences for those who are sincere about them. He argues that near-death experiences can provide us with emotional understandi...

Are near-death experiences evidence of an afterlife? What are we such that an afterlife could be possible for beings like us at all? In this episode, I discuss Fischer's criticisms of the evidentiary role near-death experiences have for belief in an afterlife. While he doesn't deny that they are experienced, Fischer likens near-death experiences to dreams and would only constitute evidence of an afterlife if there were something supernatural about the mind, namely, that the mind could exist w...

In this episode, I focus on the second half of Fischer's response to Williams' pessimistic criticisms of immortality in which he concentrates on supernatural conceptions of the afterlife. I first consider whether the afterlife is even possible for beings like us. Notably, any who believe that there is an afterlife (whether that be good or bad) must also think that death is a transition of some sort, typically a separation of soul from body, and that the transmigration into heaven or hell pres...

Would immortality be a curse of eternal boredom, were it even possible? If so, then you might think that we're better off as mortals and that death is a blessing of a kind that prevents us from being depleted of whatever makes life worth living, as it will eventually run out. Fischer rejects this line of thinking, arguing instead that not only is death unnecessary for life to be meaningful but that immortality would be no worse or much different from mortality. Specifically, he argues against...

You might think that death is part of our nature or that mortality is essential to our nature as human beings. If so, then immortal beings would be radically different than us, so different in fact that they would not be recognizable as beings like us. So if you were offered a Faustian bargain to trade your humanity for the promise and reality of immortality, it wouldn't be worthwhile. In this episode, I discuss Fischer's defense that immortality is worthwhile against a battery of object...

In this episode, I discuss what Fischer means by 'immortality.' At this point in his book, he has taken himself to have established that death does harm the one who dies, even if the details about when or how it is harmful aren't fully worked out. It is natural then to consider an objection: if all else being equal it is always bad to die, it would then be best to live forever, yet living forever is bad for this immortal, so death must at some point not be so bad. This is why I think Fischer ...