Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization by Stephen CaveI just finished it and Sweet Baby Darwin this book is biased. It is basically three hundred pages about why death is awesome and not wanting to die is stupid. I started making a list in the back of the book to tally the fallacies the author uses to justify why death is good. I count well over thirty. I’ve never seen deathism in such a condensed form.
Besides the strawman arguments, cherry picking, confirmation bias, arguing from fictional evidence etc. the book completely ignores or ridicules all counter arguments. Not taking counter arguments seriously is not rational. Cave doesn’t even seem to be aware that scientific and philosophical fields like lifestyle medicine, connectomics and pattern identity theory exist. All in all this is just a particularly extensive collection of some of the hundreds of wrong ideas people tell themselves to make themselves feel better about the fact that they’ll eventually kick the bucket.
And look, I’m not saying anyone can be immortal with current technology, or should be immortal if they don’t want to but staunchly declaring that people are immoral and stupid for simply wanting to stay alive instead of getting old, getting sick and finally dying in horrible pain just shows a lack of empathy and critical thinking.
0/5 stars.
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