E.G.

Consider:

The forever view: Each moment of your life is, was, and always will be happening locally, at its particular time and place.

This view has long been a comfort to me. I feel it is a somewhat satisfying substitute for afterlife, though far less satisfying than hope of heavenly life after death would be, were I able to sustain such hope.

Recently, I noticed a paper on this idea, written from a Christian perspective, by Mikel Burley entitled "Eternal Life as an Exclusively Present Possession: Perspectives from Theology and the Philosophy of Time." Burley's paper is very helpful, and I want to add a few points to what Burley says. But before I say what I think, I'll say a bit about my understanding of (what I'm calling) the forever view.

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I take it that the forever view is neutral with regard to a certain dispute about the nature of ordinary things, which Katherine Hawley explains as follows:

The two most popular accounts of persistence are perdurance theory (perdurantism) and endurance theory (endurantism). Perdurantists believe that ordinary things like animals, boats and planets have temporal parts (things persist by ‘perduring’). Endurantists believe that ordinary things do not have temporal parts; instead, things are wholly present whenever they exist (things persist by ‘enduring’).

It seems to me that, whether you are wholly present at each moment of your life (as endurantists say) or smeared out across time (as perdurantists say), it can be the case that each moment of your life hangs permanently in the aether of the world (which is what the forever view needs to be true).

The forever view requires us to reject presentism (the view that only the present moment is real) and seems to require some kind of temporal/spatial equality thesis (a B-theory) according to which the past and future are as real as the present.

Moreover, rejection of presentism and adoption of a temporal/spatial equality thesis aren't enough to get us all the way to the forever view. For example it is possible to have a so-called "moving spotlight" view according to which (a) there is a kind of cosmic timeline in which all times are real, but (b) we are moving along this timeline, such that (c) the only moment in the cosmic timeline that is ever happening is whichever moment is now present. This sort of view says, for example, that if you're turning 47 years old today, then your 47th birthday is happening, but your 48th birthday isn't happening, though it will happen (knock on wood). Nor is your 46th birthday happening; it's already happened.

The forever view, by contrast, says that your 47th birthday is happening today; your 48th birthday is happening one year from today; your 46th birthday is happening one year ago; etc. All of these birthdays are happening locally in their particular times and places, though of course only one of those birthdays is happening today. Likewise, if somebody in China is having a birthday party today, their party isn't happening here, but it's still well and truly happening.

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My purpose here isn't to argue for the forever view. My purpose is to ask: If the forever view turns out to be right, should we be glad about that?

Think about the people you've loved who have died, the friendships you've had, the times when you felt a great connection with someone, your biggest victories, your Spalding Grey perfect moments. All of that good stuff isn't gone. It's still right where you left it. It's all elsewhen. That's what the forever view promises.

The view isn't all roses. All of the horrible things that have ever happened to you are eternally happening, too, like the "always on, always suffering" scenario from Black Mirror Season 4, Episode 6. And as Burley says:

Worst of all would be to imagine the most wretched of lives, the lives of abused children, for instance, who have no opportunity to flourish, permanently etched into the structure of the cosmos.

I think it is the case that many people have ample reason to hope the forever view is false. Still, if you (like me) feel that the good outweighs the bad in your life, then I think you might find significant comfort in getting yourself into a forever view mindset.

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I think the forever view is at least more comforting than the Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence. The forever view implies that all of my life's joyful moments are permanent and eternal. The thesis of eternal recurrence might seem to have the same implication. But the thesis of eternal recurrence is not as comforting to me because, even if (as the thesis says) the story of the universe is eternally cyclical, I am not at all sure that future recurrences of my story will involve me. It seems arguable that if, as the eternal recurrence view says, there is a person in the distant future who will live a life just like mine, this person will be a copy of me but will not be me. These sorts of worries do not arise for the forever view.

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Burley discusses the ideas of a Christian theologian named Karl Rahner who seems to have tried to turn something like the forever view into a Christian vision of eternal life. Here is what Burley writes about Rahner's thinking:

This unity, says Rahner, may be thought of as the ‘resurrection of the dead’, not because it is a further life that takes place after the earthly one, but because it is this very earthly life contemplated in its concrete bodiliness (Rahner 1986a, p. 240). The original life and the resurrected life are not two stages along a single trajectory, as though we merely switched horses and journeyed on (Rahner 1966, p. 347; cf. Feuerbach 1980, p. 19); they are the life as lived in time and the life—the same life—as a determinate stretch of the eternal history of the universe.

I have no idea if the views of Rahner summarized by Burley are sound Christian theology. But it's puzzling to me that any believing Christian would have such interest in the kind of cheap substitute for an afterlife that may be given by views like the forever view. Christianity comes pretty close to straightforwardly entailing that we go to heaven after we die; and having heaven to look forward to seems way better than just securing permanence for the moments of one's mundane earthly life; so I do not understand why a Christian would feel the need to find solace in the very modest kind of eternality that we can squeeze out of the forever view.