I am immortal

Last nights talk was on immortality in the context of Plato and Aristotle. Considering that 40% of the worlds population testify to believing in life after death in one form or another it should still be considered a live issue. I for one became interested in philosophy through a morbid fascination with my own death and saw a possible way out in Plato’s republic. Here is what it is: good things perish, but goodness itself is eternal. “Eternal” can be seen not to signify a very long period of time, but timeless, unchanging, outside time. In the same way people can use the term “priceless” to mean very expensive. In particular contexts “priceless” can mean £150 000. But really priceless means not being measurable in money at all. Eternal then can be thought of as not being measured in time. Could our souls be eternal in this sense?
It seems that our souls participate in goodness in an essential way. Goodness is the light by which we understand things. This is not a contemporary thought. English speaking philosophers tend to think we understand things in terms of their truth conditions. But if we don’t know the value of something, then there is a very real sense in which we do not know that thing at all.
So my version of Plato’s version of Socrates version of the immortality of the soul is that when we understand things, we participate in the good, so in understanding we are eternal.
This is good enough for me, it certainly feels that way when one thinks a certain type of thought. “I think therefore I am”. This is always a valid argument, whoever thinks it. Either “I” is an indexical, or we are all immortal whenever we think this thought.
However, I suspect that the two billion people who believe in life after death want the afterlife to be a bit more personal than this.