Descartes pioneered a mechanistic, repair-based approach to immortality

Evidence

Perhaps not surprisingly, René Descartes was an early pioneer in taking a scientific approach to life extension. Descartes foresaw the possibilities of modern medical technology, much of which is now routinely used. Confident that the human body could be understood as “an earthen machine,” he reasoned that if the “machine” broke, it should be possible, and one day easy, to locate the dysfunctional part and repair or replace it. Circulatory problems, he insisted, could be eliminated with new blood; respiratory difficulties could be resolved with a new lung. The fact that blood transfusions and organ transplants were not possible at the time did not trouble Descartes. He shared with his Enlightenment-era contemporaries the view that progress was inevitable, and that in the future all at present known…is almost nothing in comparison of what remains to be discovered… [W]e could free ourselves from an infinity of maladies of body as well as of mind, and perhaps also even from the debility of age, if we had sufficiently ample knowledge of their causes, and of all the remedies provided for us by nature. — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 374

Categorization

• CANDY: Descartes the body-as-machine immortalist who died at 54 is a perfect dinner-party anecdote.

Related

• Descartes’ cogito was partly motivated to prove the soul immortal (similarity 0.80)