Is art the key to immortality?

The human soul is immaterial and immortal. Read Plato you disgusting plebeian.

And yet, our soul is immortal.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

>no, read The denial of death

could you imagine a woman asking this? if yes then its pointless.

Who are you quoting?

*Whom quoteth thou?

Not immortality but longer than most

AND IT ALL STARTED WITH A BIG BANG! YEY

was debunked many times

Yeah read Sailing to Byzantium

This but unironically

Explain

Procreation is.

No.

I would say that art must be experienced, either by perception of external reality or by internal rendering/impression/understanding. Because it is experiential, it is necessarily transitory. Experience is only defined as separate from the totality of our lives by the fact that it begins -and ends- definitely. Art may be remembered, but this memory is also transitory. The person remembering it is transitory.

Let's take this in a wider context. Let us say that art is one's legacy, a gift to the next generation. This does not entail immortality, because the countdown to oblivion has only been extended, not erased. Your name may exist for another 4 generations, but after that? Likely silence.

Let us instead suppose that it is the art itself that transcends 'mortality' as the physical object never had life. Humans attribute meaning, action, life to art but it is not itself alive, and is all the more totally dead when it is not observed. It will degrade into dust. If it does not, all its observers will. It would be lost to history, buried, forgotten, bombed in a war a millenia from now.

Shelley is a good reference for this, but he was speaking more to the human conception of power immediate. Note, the art is still there. Note, the traveler is there to observe the beauty of the art and remember Ozymandias.

I think that's an illusion we construct in the face of inevitable death, that our legacy, genetic or otherwise, makes us immortal. It does not. You will die, your name will be forgotten. The only metric is the number of years. I think we should focus instead on living a better life while we're here. That's what I'm going for.

One of these can give you the key.
1) Procreation
2) 'Publish or perish'
3) Turritopsis dohrnii
4) Digital conscience upload

The Sistine Chapel is already 500 years old. I doubt it will make it to 1000, though.

Can't you and all your genetic ancestors be classified as one object that has lived for 3 billion years? You are a part of this object, and this object will continue to be immortal as long as it procreates.

Sood

We're still reading Gilgamesh after more than 4K years. But who knows how many other stories from then are lost forever.

1. Illusory. You are not immortal through this. You just have a kid. The kid has a kid. Your percentage of the genetic pool will be one irrelevant drop within a thousand years.

2. Paper yellows. Contributing to the wider human body of knowledge though.... That's pretty good, I'll have to give that one more thought. We don't remember who invented the wheel, but we certainly have them.

Does the supplement of knowledge lend itself to your immortality? I don't see how it does. You still die, the technology merely exists for others. I'd call it a good thing to do, like feeding the hungry or clothing the naked, but it doesn't make you immortal.

3. Not an option for us, at least until genetically engineering human embryos is socially acceptable. Also, Ship of Theseus.

4. Computers rust. Hard quartz storage is a lot slower to degrade, but the most dangerous aspect is actually digital obselesence. Let's say my soul is rendered in the future equivalent of windows 95. If windows 10 comes along and I'm not compatible, I'm dead.

Do you have a cassette tape player in your house? What about VHS? Same thing but with souls. Bill Gates believes image format change to be a serious threat to the existence of photographs. They've got a massive operation in (i think) colorado, just printing pictures so that we have hard copies, and scanning pictures we don't have digital versions of.

I would say that any one strand of my DNA is an object.

By your definition, stars are immortal because their hydrogen is in our bodies. The separation from one thing from another is a priori to our conception of mortality and therefore immortality. One thing does not die if all things are plural and cyclical, and if you want to go the buddhist route our conversation pretty quickly becomes useless. I am an entity, an organism, not an object. This thing that I am, I will someday not be.

Cool. I mean, you want to tell me why I'm wrong I'm all ears.

Did you just assume my gender?

Actually, we're reading excerpts from parts of Gilgamesh. Much of it is "lost to time." Which is the point.

Idk tho, I'm not the guy you responded to.

What's your mereological basis for saying that one strand of dna is an object? Are you yourself not an object? Is your family an object?

>We're still reading Gilgamesh after more than 4K years

lol I'm not

I would say that it is an object in that it is not itself classified as being alive, and is an existential entity. Biologically speaking, the cell is the smallest divisible entity that can be called alive. In my conception, a rock is an object, a proton is an object, a penguin is an organism. My being alive, and all the cells of my body being separate and distinct from other bodies, makes me an individual organism and not an object. .

What it seems to me is that you are classifying any existential thing or concept as an object. I say concept, because the notion of a family is a social, cognitive, concept, not a physical thing. Genetic inheritance can be demonstrated. Genetic inheritance is not a family, nor does the entire line of it constitute an "object" any more than the entire line of humanity does. If we are to take this in the pluralistic sense as you suggest, my individual mortality is not even part of the question. You're eliminating the question of mortality by expanding the entity beyond the individual. "I can't die because I'm part of the world system." Perhaps, but we were talking about you and your mind, not the family, not the lineage: You.

Oh, and your family is all going to die too. Rapture, Armageddon, or whatever.

Ah, a way to phrase it is that my existence is not merely objective. It is subjective, in that I perceive myself as subject. Note, a family would be objective, and subjective in a sense of a variation from objective view. However, this variation would be further varied by each individual in the family, making them distinct. Their propensity for variance in subjectivity would be enough as to make their subjectivity equivalent to any other family's subjectivity, which makes their group subjectivity background.

Did I miss anything? I feel like I'm rambling.

I follow your channel, when are you going time post more videos?

big if true

Kinda. You won't get immortality by creating great works of art, but art- the practice of realising the intelligible in the things we make- exercises the 'immortal part' of ourselves, that is, the rational part. The rational part of us unites us to and allows us to participate in the intelligible, that is, the abstract and universal, which is unlimited by time and space. This gives us what aptness we have for eternity.

Eternity, of course, is unattainable for finite reasoners on their own powers. The finite universals we grasp through reason are themselves derivative and only in the end pointers to that which truly is immortal. So from a merely human perspective art is ultimately in vain, even if it is among the higher things we do.

It does one's appetite for first things, and properly done can prepare one to receive the grace of immortality when it is given.