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Essay / Debate on personal immortality: that of Weirob and Miller...
This definition is clearly vague, as he admits, however his idea raises many questions about the logistics of this conception of immortality. I believe that when approaching the idea of the immortality of the spirit or “soul,” many questions can be asked, all without a definitive 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...and then there has conceptions…we merge with the flow of being.” (Perry, page 66), adds to my argument against the plausibility of immortality. I believe this wide range of ideas about what immortality is shows that it cannot be possible, because if Miller's idea of immortality were true and it was possible to exist again in the physical world, we would naturally inherit the knowledge necessary to propose a more unanimous and coherent theory across the world. This view also shows flaws in that if all souls are immortal, then we must ask the question of when a soul is born and whether new souls are rapidly being created with the growing population of our world. Weirob brings up the idea of identification several times during his argument, claiming that if the two were to meet again, this identification would have to be outside the knowledge of the soul, which being immaterial and senseless seems implausible. I agree with Weirob that it would not make sense if it is possible to identify people in the physical world after your soul has attached itself to a different physical body or in a metaphysical world. The dimensions of the soul seem to exceed our physical ability to identify them, which makes me believe that there is no real truth on this subject.