For my Philosophy class on the meaning of life and death, we were assigned a project to demonstrate the topics that we’d learned in the first half of the semester. My group and I were rather fascinated by the topic of immortality and set out to discover what people outside of the class thought of the prospect of immortality. The link to a YouTube video above was one of the two projects that my group and I did to gauge how people felt about immortality. Our main focus was on college students so we had several members of our group bring in some friends and started off by asking them how they felt about the prospect of immortality. After their response, we read them a quote by a philosopher we studied in class named Kagan, that believed that immortality would be somewhat of a nightmare because life would never end and life would inevitably get boring. From there, we re-asked the participants how they felt about immortality after hearing Kagan’s thoughts and to our surprise they all were steadfast in their response and didn’t view immortality any differently than before.
I really enjoyed this project because it allowed me to demonstrate the things I had learned in class in a creative way. However, I wish we could’ve asked some questions regarding extended existence, which is similar to immortality but extended existence is merely living for another few hundred years rather than forever. I would’ve liked to see how people’s views would change if given the opportunity to live a few hundred years longer than usual as opposed to living forever and understand why people might find an extended existence more appealing than immortality. Along with this video we had created a survey that we all sent to friends to see how people would view immortality and using those statistics we tried to find a correlation between things like gender or religion and see if that played a hand in the outcome.