Debate on Personal Immortality: Weirob and Miller's Insights

Personal immortality seems to be a paradox that many people address and distinguish in different ways. Through outlets such as religion, science, or personal belief this topic is often argued and habitually facilitates strong arguments. Weirob and Miller explicitly explain their dualist/physicalist outlooks on personal immortality as they have a conversation at the hospital where Weirob slowly succumbs to her injuries received in a motorcycle accident. As Weirob patiently awaits death, Miller explains how due to Weirobs realist view on life he will not try to “comfort [her] with the prospect of life after death” (Perry, pg. 65). Due to Weirobs state of unavoidable demise she asks Miller to entertain her with the argument for life after death,

This definition is clearly vague, as he admits, however his idea imposes many questions to the logistics of this conception of immortality. I believe that when dealing with the idea of the mind or “soul” being immortal there are vast amounts of questions that can be asked, all with no definite answer. The reality that there are immensely different versions of an afterlife as Miller mentions, such as “[the] Greek idea that the body is a prison, from which we escape at death…then there are conceptions … we merge with the flow of being” (Perry, Pg. 66), adds to my argument against immortality being plausible. I believe this large spectrum of idea’s of what immortality consists of shows that it cannot be possible, because if Miller’s idea of immortality were true and it is possible to exist in the physical world again, naturally we would inherit the knowledge to come up with a more unanimous theory that is consistent across the globe. This conception also shows faults in the way that if all souls are immortal then we have to beg the question of when is a soul born, and if new souls are rapidly being created with our worlds growing population. Weirob brings up the idea of identification several times during her argument, saying that if the two of them were to meet again that this identification would have to be off the knowledge of the soul, which being immaterial and senseless seems to be implausible. I agree with Weirob in the way that it would not make logical sense that it is possible to identify people in the physical world after your soul has attatched to a different physical body, or in a metaphysical world. The dimensions of the soul seem to be beyond our physical capacity to identify, which makes me believe that there is no real truth to the subject all