Excerpts

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist…When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he thinks is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments.” (33-4)

The cockles of Billy’s heart…were glowing coals. What made them so hot was Billy’s belief that he was going to comfort so many people with the truth about time. (35)

…Billy told [a boy whose father was dead] matter-of-factly about his adventures on Tralfamadore, assured the fatherless boy that his father was very much alive still in moments the boy would see again and again.

“Isn’t that comforting?” Billy asked. (172)

Billy is speaking before a capacity audience in a baseball park…Billy predicts his own death within an hour. He laughs about it, invites the crowd to laugh with him…There are protests from the crowd…“If you protest, if you think that death is a terrible thing, then you have not understood a word I’ve said.” (181)

Analysis

In the background of all these passages is eternalism, which says that the past, present, and future all exist. But what exactly about death is supposed to follow from eternalism?

Death doesn’t exist?

Billy’s statement that “when a person dies he only appears to die” suggests that he thinks death doesn’t exist if eternalism is true. The idea might be something like this:

1. If eternalism is true, then you never cease to exist.
2. If you never cease to exist, then you never die.
3. Therefore, if eternalism is true, then you never die.

But this is equivocating on “never cease to exist”. If eternalism is true, you never cease to exist only in the sense that there’s always some time, possibly in the past, at which you exist. But for you to never die, you need to never cease to exist in the sense that you exist at every future time.

To save the argument, you could try giving some non-standard analysis of “die” according to which you have died only if there’s no time, not even in the past, at which you exist. But I’m not going to be comforted by learning merely that I never die in this sense. There is still a time after which I never exist. Isn’t that bad, even if you decide not to call it “death”?

Death exists but isn’t bad?

It’s more productive to take for granted that death exists and ask how bad it is if eternalism is true. Billy himself does this at times, like when he predicts his own death but denies that it is terrible.

One standard view says that death is bad because it deprives us of good things. But Billy’s death will indeed deprive him of good things, whether or not eternalism is true, such as the happy days he would have gone on to live if he hadn’t died when he did.

Also, if death isn’t bad, then a life that lasts for a hundred happy years is no better than a life that lasts for only a single happy day. Billy presumably doesn’t believe this.

Death exists and is bad, but isn’t as bad as it would otherwise be?

The previous section notes that there is something that death deprives you of, whether or not eternalism is true. But maybe Billy’s idea is that there is also something that death doesn’t deprive you of if eternalism is true. If so, then although death might still be bad, it’s not as bad as it would be if eternalism were false.

It’s tempting to say that death doesn’t deprive you of your existence if eternalism is true. But it still does, just as I deprive you of $20 if I steal it from you, whether or not eternalism is true: there’s a time after which you don’t have it.

Maybe the idea is instead that death doesn’t deprive you of your past existence if eternalism is true. All those days you lived are still there, and no less real, even after you die.

OK, but how much better is this than the alternative? For example, compare the following two possibilities:

(E)

Eternalism is true and you live 80 happy years before dying.

(P)

Presentism is true and you live 80 * x happy years before dying.

The idea seems to be that if x = 1, then (E) is better than (P), but there’s some value of x which makes (E) and (P) equally good. The bigger this value is, the more eternalism blunts the badness of death.

The problem is that it’s not obvious how to defend the claim that if x = 1 then (E) is better than (P). I have a paper that tries to do this, but I think it mostly doesn’t work.

Death exists and is as bad as it otherwise would be, but we should still view it differently?

Billy’s focus seems to be more on comforting people than on assessing the objective badness of death. So how might eternalism comfort us, even if it has no implications for how bad death is?

Our concerns about death often are indexed to the time, such as being distressed, at 79, that you will die next year. This isn’t the same as being distressed that you will live for only 80 years. You might know all along that you will live for only 80 years, but it’s probably only as you get closer to 80 that you start to feel distressed. And even if your lifespan was 1,000,000 years, you’d feel the same sort of distress at year 999,999 if you knew you were going to die next year.¹

Eternalism alone can’t help with this feeling. We need to add to it the view that there is no objective passage of time. On this view, just as the universe has no privileged location, it also has no privileged time: “past” and “future” are like “up” and “down”.

What, then, does it mean for you to say, “I will die next year”? Merely that the timeslice of yours which makes that utterance is in a particular location in the 4D worm that constitutes you—that it is one year away from the edge of the worm. And there is nothing distressing about this, either from the perspective of the worm as a whole (which is static) or from the perspective of the timeslice (which lasts as long as any other timeslice, regardless of its location in the worm).

It’s tempting to imagine that a unique time is objectively present, and that eventually the objective present will tick forward to a future year, 20xx, in which you will die. But if there is no objective passage of time, this is mistaken. 2024 is no more objectively present than 2025, 3025, or 399 BC. If you’re worried about 20xx becoming objectively present, you are worried about something that, on this view of time, simply cannot happen. I think Billy is right to find this idea comforting.

Similar quotes from real people

Parfit’s note to a friend after the death of her husband:

I am very sorry to learn that Ray died a couple of weeks ago. When someone I loved died I found it helpful to remind myself that this person was not less real because she was not real now, just as people in New Zealand aren’t less real because they aren’t real here.²

Penrose, as characterized by a biographer, after his mother’s death:

Every moment in a relativistic life exists with equal reality, though we only experience them in sequence. The dead are never really gone, and the yet-to-be-born are already a part of the continuum. Roger’s loss was mitigated by the knowledge that the passage of time was a human illusion.³

Einstein after the death of a friend:

Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. For us believing physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future only has the meaning of an illusion, though a persistent one.⁴

Academic work5

1. Le Poidevin (1995), ‘Time, Death and the Atheist’
2. Le Poidevin (1996), Arguing for Atheism, chapter 10
3. Burley (2008), ‘Should a B-Theoretic Atheist Fear Death?'
4. Deng (2015), ‘On Whether B-Theoretic Atheists Should Fear Death’
5. Story (2021), ‘Life and Death Without the Present’