Episode 52: Immortality

The HBS hosts talk about the striving to live forever in physical, psychical, and social dimensions.

Immortality seems to be a spoken and unspoken obsession within contemporary culture, whether through the obsession with maintaining youthful looks through diet, exercise or, medical procedure or the hope for a future where people can live on as memories or even as digital intelligences. We talk about the underlying motivations for this hope, what it may say about the underlying dynamics of our culture in regard to existential/metaphysical concerns or the ways we struggle with certainty/uncertainty. How are these ideas examined in both popular and philosophical contexts?

In this episode, we raise and discuss the following news items, texts, thinkers, creators, works, and ideas: