I’ve had two posts in a row about the phenomenon of Life, so it is perhaps fitting to round things out with a post on death. Despite the fact that one cannot enjoy life without the accompaniment of death in its many forms, death is not a suitable subject for polite company in our culture.
Before discontinuing after a few episodes (due to excessive violence), my wife and I started watching the American Primeval show on Netflix. One scene contrasted most members of modernity who—when threatened by Native Americans—blubber and shriek at the prospect of death against one rare individual who showed no fear. While not explicit on this point, I could believe the Native Americans would perceive most members of modernity as being infantilized, pampered, useless, “full-grown children” who had not learned to accept the reality of life—including its requisite, ubiquitous mortality. Or, is that just me, projecting?
Fear of death pervades our culture: many among us cringe at its mention, and indeed structure whole lives around elaborate stories of denial: we can’t really ever be dead, surely!
It’s understandable: having never experienced death ourselves, our brains have no point of contact and cannot conceive what it is like. The vacuum begs to be filled by any fanciful notion that displaces fear of the great unknown.
But, I’ll make a point that many of us actually have experienced something close enough to death to be surprisingly informative. In another sense, all of us have “experienced” our own death state. I’ll explore these “experiences” and why I believe they tell us almost everything we need to know about the state of death. Indeed: if we’re open to observation, we actually already possess a highly probable sense of what happens after we die! As far as I can tell, it turns out to be a nothing-burger—which can be either disappointing or relieving (or just “whatever”) depending on perspective.
Basic Observations
Let’s start with non-controversial facts to which I hope we can all agree. Our bodies are made of atoms. These atoms arrange into compounds and molecules in solid, liquid, and gaseous forms within our bodies. The arrangements and interactions are far from random: viable humans are not blended scrambles of these atoms. All the exact same atoms sloshing in a garbage pail won’t pass first grade. Our incredible anatomy handles ingestion; metabolic processing; waste removal; oxygen intake; circulatory distribution of critical atoms/molecules; employs sensory organs; and includes a neural processor called the brain. Interconnections within the brain—especially to and from the prefrontal cortex, and across hemispheres—provide a means for parts of the brain to have access to what’s transpiring in other parts, in a coordinated way: the right hand can “know” what the left hand is doing.
The functioning of the human body—or of any organism, for that matter—is extraordinarily remarkable. While not everyone accepts the next bit, I expect most readers of this blog find no credible basis on which to challenge the statement that evolution is responsible for the emergence of biological sophistication and diversification over (an inconceivable) billions of years. Unsurprisingly, the complexity of even the simplest forms of life boggles our limited meat-brains, which is a source of great frustration for many. Such manifest limitations lead to an inevitable practice of creating facile mental shortcuts (what the brain is evolved to do, after all), basically amounting to our sweeping the incomprehensible tangle under the rug and pretending it requires no further bafflement. Failure to offer a full account of the long chain of complexity is taken by many as disqualification of the complexity conjecture altogether rather than more sensibly and obviously being attributed to our own limitations.
Cause of Death
Now we’ll list some conditions that end an individual life (sticking to human terms for the sake of familiarity). My apologies for some gruesome elements: I am simply trying to be blunt and simple—not driven by thirst for gore. But if one cuts a body in two, it fails to go on living due to rapid blood loss. The French of the 18th Century demonstrated repeatedly that just severing the head works every time (separating a vital part from the whole destroys the vitality of the whole). For that matter, removal of any (non-redundant) major organ usually is unsurvivable. A single bullet into the brain usually ends life, and quickly. Being suspended by a loop around the neck spells the end. A plastic bag or soft pillow held over the head (or really just mouth and nose) has a predictable result. Despite having water-based bodies, submersion in water for a minute or two is all it takes for termination. Exposure to 99.99999999999999999% of the universe (space) results in a quick death (add more nines to taste—I figure at least 25 more are justified). Various poisons—even a single drop—can finish us off. More slowly, if we fail to import water, we are gone in a few days. Failure to ingest food likewise brings us to a protracted end within a few weeks. Cutting off the supply of essential nutrients (atoms) will lead to deterioration and death. We can die of exposure to excessive heat or (more commonly) cold. Though not the same context, that last word conjures the phenomenon of disease. Tiny viruses or microbes can takes us down. Our own cells, when going off-script can become cancerous and kill us by interfering with normal function.
While the above paragraph is bursting with ways to die, it is far from being complete. The common element is interference with the body’s physical plant doing what it must to keep all its constituents supplied with necessary atoms (and molecules). In many cases, interruption of the delivery of oxygen to the brain is the last straw. Exposing something of a bias, one might be called “alive” in our culture as long as the brain is still provided with oxygen (and other maintenance services), even if otherwise the person is in a coma and on machines to perform the mechanical functions of breathing and circulation (and to be sure, some people in these circumstances do recover, so aren’t dead yet).
Have You Died Yet?
Our entire “conscious” experience requires functioning brains. This is why we pronounce someone to be “truly” dead when their brain is no longer active. So, I ask you: what is the experience like if neurons no longer fire? Is it anything at all?
A remarkable window is available to us in the form of general anesthesia. Have you ever “been under” for an extended period? What was that experience like? Everyone I have talked to reports the exact same sensation that I had both times (at 17 and 19 years old I had nasal septum reconstruction due to a badly-broken nose and an ineffective first procedure).
Here’s how it went both times for me. I was basically alert if not a little groggy/loopy from some pre-surgery medication. The anesthesiologist approached with a mask, placed it over my mouth and nose, and asked me to count backwards from 10. Piece of cake! What will I do after I quickly reach zero? Ten. Nine. Eight. Recovery room. That’s it. In a flash, I’ve time-traveled a few hours into the future and to a new location. From my perspective, it’s an abrupt discontinuity in spacetime—across which one’s body feels decidedly, instantly different and uncomfortable.
I can assure you that the sensation is much different than sleeping. We are aware of time passage during sleep, even if imperfectly so. I have never experienced any other sensation like the sharp discontinuity of general anesthesia. Others describe the same thing: instant transport to recovery, as if not a single second elapsed. The instant discontinuity in sensory inputs makes it clear that something major just happened (the physical trauma of surgery), but all in an instant that eluded detection.
Not Surprising
It actually isn’t all that surprising that messing with neurochemistry in the brain in such a way as to impede communication between neurons would alter—or actually skip—experience. Your computer would fail to perform a single operation if all the connective copper were suddenly rendered non-conductive. Its clock would stop as well, resuming where it left off once the wiring was restored.
People object to being compared to a machine like a computer. But aside from nodding to an overwhelmingly different level of complexity, I say: get over yourselves. Remember the enormous list of ways life can be terminated? Notice that every one of them is mechanical (material; mechanistic; physics/chemistry-based). If the physical machine is broken, so, too, is one of its products: the experience we call consciousness.
If we had a soul or consciousness unmoored from physiology, it would presumably skip off to other delightful, distracting occupations during the surgery while the brain was incapacitated. The direction of flow seems obvious: the state of matter matters foremost: it has complete veto power over experience.
Death Preview
I therefore consider the experience of general anesthesia to be a remarkably apt preview of what it must be like to be dead, when the brain is no longer able to function. And what it is like is: absolutely nothing. No time, no thought, no “soul” bored out of its “mind.” Just nothing. It’s not unpleasant, not scary, not confusing. It seemingly can’t be any of those things, without a functioning brain to process (generate) such thoughts and feelings—suggesting that we really are our bodies (atoms)—together with all the other matter that makes our bodies possible (sun, rocks, biomass, etc.) and most importantly the even-greater-number of interactions connecting all the particles. Stories and promises and hopes aside, not a single one of us has ever lived, laughed, loved, or thought without a functioning body made of atoms, right?
A related line of inquiry is mind-altering substances. We are “not ourselves” under the influence of sometimes-minuscule amounts of chemicals. We may not even be aware of our actions. Blackout drunks have zero memory or accountability of their actions in such a state. Sleep-walking might be similar in some regard. Is the soul on vacation? Can it possibly be so fragile as to be influenced or even disabled by trace chemicals in the material domain? (Yes!) More sensibly, our sense of soul is generated by “chemicals in the material domain.”
Scorecard: billions of examples (daily!) of the “soul” being influenced or incapacitated by mechanical/material means; zero examples of unaltered souls trucking on absent a functioning physical basis. Hmmmm.
Objections?
I am well aware that many or most in our culture will reject this notion out of hand, on the basis of…evidence? Don’t want to believe it? Against religious teachings (soothing fabrications)?
I try, in good faith, to imagine what objections might be raised to deny this “anesthesia window” into death. They tend to boil down to “the two phenomena are not the same.” Okay, granted, death is not the same as anesthesia. That particular chemical cocktail is not present in most deaths.
How does the “not the same” argument aid understanding? Let’s build the case on the observation that under general anesthesia, the “experience” is of complete non-experience: no sense of time, self, existence, or thought. If one wishes to believe in a soul/consciousness that is somehow separate from the physical body, then why would a mere chemical in the meat-brain have the power to wrestle the soul into oblivion for the duration of the surgery, without the merest peep? And if the patient dies on the operating table while “under,” does the soul then wake up for eternity, or remain “off” forever? Since the brain is inactive before and after, what signals the point of wake-up?
If one tries to claim that anesthesia is a special exception that disables the brain in some particular, odd way that is not similar to how the brain is disabled by a bullet or a guillotine, then how would this help? Is the claim that the soul can survive other forms of brain-disabling really anything other than empty, wishful assertion? Why, then, should the soul be in the least bit susceptible to this particular form of physical (chemical, mechanical) disabling? Did we accidentally stumble onto the one “kryptonite” cocktail for the soul? What argument would possibly be persuasive enough to sell this suggestion?
We’ve All Been Dead
Changing gears: try describing yourself before you were born. What memories do you have? When did your immortal soul start? Was it, by chance, connected to the physical wiring of your brain? Do your first memories happen to be contemporaneous with neurons well-enough arranged to form physically-based memories? How bizarrely coincidental!
In a sense, we were all dead before we were alive. What was the experience like? Was it lonely, agonizing, seemingly eternal? No: it was nothing. Billions of years passed without notice: no pain, thought, sense of time, or awareness of human activity on Earth. It was nothing to “you,” because “you” were not yet a physical reality: no atoms were yet arranged in a complex manner so-as to register events in “your” experience. Mark Twain captured the sentiment perfectly:
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Now, some subscribe to the idea of reincarnation, and I went through a phase of this myself in high school—in rejection of a God so vengeful and impatient that eternal damnation could be handed out: surely he’d give everyone more chances until getting it right and earning an eternal stay in heaven? The rules are also unclear, as the number of living people (or of all animals) is not a constant. Who gets “old” souls vs. newly manufactured units? In any case, some people report foggy “memories” from a prior life (possibly much like the way we sometimes can’t make out whether something actually happened or was part of a dream we had). All I can offer is: brains are tricky people.
Light at the End of the Tunnel
Presumably most of us have heard accounts of sensations accompanying near-death (or temporary death) experiences, often involving common elements like a perceived bright light at the end of a tunnel. Dollars to donuts says that during these periods of sensation/experience, neurons are still active to some degree (unlike during general anesthesia) to generate these sensations. If this is the case, then so what? Just as a hard bang on the head can produce the perception of a flash of light or “seeing stars,” it’s not much of a stretch to imagine commonalities in responses of neural systems to the self-similar traumas of going offline for a bit and coming back.
Where Do We Go?
In my interpretation, “we” are made of atoms, and our atoms do not disappear upon death. Indeed, we’re more aptly described as a pattern of atoms, as individual atoms come and go, so that very few atoms make a lifetime journey with our bodies. We’re more like a standing-wave pattern, with material flushing through. Nonetheless, where do we go after death?
Ideally, rather than being sequestered in hermetic boxes, our hydrogen atoms are found in the ocean, clouds, rain, and living tissue of all sorts. Some may even escape Earth’s gravity to become interplanetary and even interstellar travelers. Our oxygen permeates the atmosphere, fills lungs, joins water, oxidizes minerals. Carbon enhances soil, feeds flowers, is gulped out of the air by plants, and composes living tissues across the Community of Life. Nitrogen joins the air, fertilizes plants, and builds proteins. That’s 99% of our atoms. Our calcium might be found in others’ bones, eggshells, and limestone someday. So it goes with the rest—contributing to the Community of Life and the environment in which it thrives. In fact, many of our previous-occupant atoms are already enjoying such adventures.
There’s our reincarnation!—but not confined to the animate world, as the atoms comprising us do not make the same mistake our mental models do by drawing an artificial boundary between animate and inanimate. They’re not at all “racist” that way. If you get a chance, listen to the haunting, spaghetti-western-sounding song Long Lost by Lord Huron. It captures elements of the ideal fate of our bodies, running free in the wilderness forever: let it have me!
Whether you find this inspiring—as I do—or depressing, one other domain in which we leave a trace is in the living memory of others (another form of atomic arrangement, but now those in other bodies). Some left handprints and drawings on cave walls that persisted for millennia. Some contributed cultural knowledge that hasn’t gone away (fire, atlatl, flint knapping). Everyone makes ripples that change the universe forever, in ways often too subtle to discern.
Relevance?
You might be asking why I’m on about this—again. Why do my posts return to topics of free will, materialism, consciousness, and soul? The answer is not glaringly obvious, even to myself. But, here’s is why I think I am continually drawn back to this topic (and continually offer such justifications; apologies for being a broken record).
Just as Daniel Quinn stressed in Ishmael, a fundamental driver in the sickness of modernity is our flawed, mythological view of who we are as humans. We, in the culture of modernity, believe ourselves to be separate from and above the rest of the Community of Life: transcendent.
This aggrandizing detachment was on full display thousands of years ago in the rise of monotheistic religions, and sharpened to a point by Descartes and his complete—misguided—detachment of soul from body. We’ve been stuck in a dualist nightmare ever since, and in fact witness a strong pull in the direction of consciousness being “primary” in the strains of philosophical idealism (i.e., panpsychism)—against all observation and evidence. Actually, the use of “primary” automatically invites a stubborn dualism, as opposed to “only” (as in: only matter and its complex interactions). Our thinking and language and culture subscribe to divides such as subject/object, inner/outer, and animate/inanimate that fan the flames of dualism and keep us mired in separateness. I cringe at constantly being forced by convention to use “I” and “me” and “my” body (etc.), propagating our language’s dualistic basis, artificially separating body from soul—detaching “myself” from body, Life, ecology, rock, sun, universe.
Because “I” (see how annoying?) am strongly persuaded that living in right relationship to this planet and the Community of Life involves a foundation in humility, I am deeply uncomfortable with any tendency to represent ourselves as anything more grand than the already-fantastically-grand arrangement of atoms shaped by an astounding evolutionary heritage and in constant, full contact with the rest of the universe. Why is that not enough? It’s still far more than our puny brains can ever grasp: lots of mystery will always envelop even a purely materialist worldview.
The tendency to believe that we are more than incredibly sophisticated material assemblies gives us unjustifiable mental license to ignore biophysical realities and even destroy other species—in some cases based on the premise that the “hereafter” is infinite and far more important.
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Lovely post, Tom! Are you familiar with Religious Naturalism? I recently discovered it and find it a helpful way of understanding my religious orientation. The work of Ursula Goodenough and Loyal Rue are good introductions.
I did "read" (audio form) Goodenough's book: The Sacred Depths of Nature a couple years back. I found plenty of resonance in terms of universal kinship and scientific underpinning. I was less resonant with the latter part of the book, but can't remember precisely why (maybe insisted on a spiritual layer, when just the basics are—ahem—goodenough for me to marvel at).
This is exactly what Sapolsky means when he says that murderers cannot be condemned. Their matter (body), which creates the illusion, does not work adequately. They cannot change it. It is not "they", as souls, who commit crimes, but "they", as bodies.
I have talked to such people, some of whom are quite adequate, regret what they have done, but at the same time indicate that they could not have done it without doing it. The commission of the horrors was done for "relief", not for pleasure. Some called this state "animal", I interpret it as "instinctive"/"unconscious".
An interesting point about the soul is the following: regulation of digestion (why don't we consciously produce trypsin when we eat more steaks?), theomoregulation (why don't we regulate body temperature like an air conditioner, is it too much for the soul?), why can't we turn off hearing, skin sensitivity, vision? Hmmmm, but why doesn't the soul remember that it forgot the pasta on the gas stove? What about life's mistakes? Deception of experience? Do you remember how a dog bit you when you were 5 years old, but you don't know if you were wearing sneakers or shoes? Was the T-shirt green or blue? Who was there? What day of the week? It's strange that the soul made such a clumsiness and forgot.
Regarding death: it doesn't actually exist. This is another mental construct (yes, a bony woman with a scythe), a fiction. We called the end of life – death. Marking this short moment with huge "superstructures". The moment of phase transition between "stable entropy" and its accelerated increase. Decay, that's what best characterizes what we think of death.
Love the post. You and Alex Rosenberg are the only 2 academics that I am aware of who get it, even though I am sure there are many others. It's great to see this laid out so clearly and logically.
Also helps keep me sane when I sometimes get overwhelmed with the news of the day.
Thanks and keep up the good work.
Western society does not fear death, it fears the pain that it anticipates that comes from impending death. The irony is that there are some forms of pain that are categorically worse than death, in the sense that multiple independent raters would all agree to short lives to avoid those types of pains.
One loses their fear of death once one truly surrenders to the fact that death is the final release from pain, suffering, torture, torment, and cruelty.
I suggest reading "The Denial of Death," by Ernest Becker, for an in depth look at the subject.
Well I can't speak for the rest of you, but death and I are squared away. I have been through enough personal tragedies that have been worse than death that when my old friend arrives I will welcome the peace he brings. Much like Ignotus Peverell of the Deathly Hallows in Harry Potter.
Nice post, I tend to agree.
One thing about the soothing fabrication of religion that I have pondered is that given there are some ~2.6 billion Christians and ~1.8 Muslims, more than half of global population between these two religions, does this lend credence to the idea that humans are more irrational than rational writ-large?
I think because of its ubiquity, humanity cannot really escape religion. Indigenous peoples have unique religious views, it seems to be a mode of self-expression that our species craves, reality or not. When the Zo’é tribe of the Amazon puts monkey bones through their chins because "the Gods taught them how", it's sort of a no harm no foul situation at the small-scale tribal level as they are not disturbing populations of monkeys beyond what can be replenished. If the tribe scaled up its presence significantly however, the disturbance to the monkey populations would become more severe and perhaps even lead to local extinctions, so scale matters.
Similarly, if there were a couple hundred Christians out in the forests somewhere practicing Christianity, we'd all be just fine. But, with 2.6 billion of them purporting everything from human supremacy narratives, wishing to bring about the end times, even the take that environmental destruction doesn't matter because God will remake the Earth into a perfect Eden, this kind of crazy thinking at scale becomes invariably deleterious.
We could express ourselves with whatever spiritual nonsense we wanted when we were living in the tribal context because our scale was never enough to cause serious harm. In the modern context, with the human enterprise making massive changes to whole planetary systems, our wackadoodle human construct ideas, including religion, have become highly damaging.
Great topic and essay Tom.
Regarding your "Light at the End of the Tunnel" section, I think you're correct that neurons are still active to some degree. And I think I know exactly why the famous bright light is so commonly associated with our death stories. (check out this story about me tearing apart my own NDE, but I'll give you a hint… good drugs)
https://un-denial.com/2025/06/06/what-should-can-could-will-we-do/#comment-112519
I do like such discussions and good for bringing it up.
I have a science degree which involved a lot of sub-atomic particle physics, I like to tell people I have seen atoms and measured them. Which is kinda true, in a fuzzy electron microscope photograph kind of way, and have certainly done maths on the energy levels and sizes of atoms.
I have long realised that death is just a phase change – all the atoms and molecules and free electrons that make up me are leftovers from the big bang (or from whatever was before that) and at some point those particles will go back into the environment in some form or other. Any one near me at my time of passing will receive a random influx of atoms, and a few may even make their way into space and travel the universe (If someone says rather dramatically they'll carry a piece of you in their heart forever, it might literally be true.)
I find this very comforting. So yes, reincarnation of sorts, the one thing religion got kinda right but had to give it a human-centred narrative.
If you look at a really smooth surface, a sheet of polished metal, a pane of glass, the skin, but under an electron microscope, it looks more like the Himalayas. The interface between two mediums is very fuzzy indeed at atomic level, and atoms and electrons migrate between the two regularly. It is said the atoms you are born with are not the ones you have now. I'm not sure if thats totally true, but it gives a person an idea of the magnitude of the whats within.
When I look at a solid object, a brick wall or piece of armour plate, I see all the gaps between the particles in my mind, and know that even the toughest of objects is mostly space. If you could travel faster than the speed of light you could in theory navigate through the wall, a sophisticated computer programme knowing where each particle is and planning trajectories to avoid them. it would take more processing power than currently exists on the planet of course. If other species have got past the Fermi Paradox somewhere in the universe, maybe they have conquered this.
And this, understanding nature at the atomic level or even lower, it is magnificent, it has an elegant symmetry all of its own, such that I don't need the concept of gods to explain its existence. The structure of the universe is awesome; the patterns repeat – you have sub-atomic particles going round a nucleus and you have planets going round a sun, and galaxies of suns going round universes. Even the sub-atomic particles appear to be made of other even smaller stuff. We used to muse as students that our universe might just be a bubble in someone else's coke bottle, fizzing along until it bursts at the surface. Their time of seconds might be our time of billions of years. We'll never know, but that's fine.
Nature is awesome because it just is.
I too have been under the anesthetic for a nose op, and yes, my experience was the same, a whole gap of nothingness. I can't measure the time of that nothingness, the concept of applying time to it doesn't really make sense. It does feel like something has been stolen from me, bizzarely, and wouldn't want to go back there again.
We are all stardust, and go back to stardust. Nature recycles everything eventually. Elegant or what?
Very good. I suspect the strongly religious would suggest that the soul only comes into its own once the host body dies. So the anesthesia experience is irrelevant to them. However, that does take away one possibility for the felt experience of free will. So maybe they would have no rejoinder to the anesthesia experience (I had the same experience). God moves in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform!
Free will, or the lack of it, is a critical understanding, at the centre of our predicament. But it also means that we are already living in the right relationship with the rest of nature. We couldn't have lived any other way, so it must be right. At least in an objective sense. Subjectively, some people might feel it isn't right and should be forced into a different relationship. Which is impossible.
Successful species only persist if imbued with appropriate "wiring" to react to stimuli in a net-favorable manner. Even if purely physics (no free will override), living beings react and "do things." It is quite possible that some humans react to a crumbling (or even disagreeable) modernity by intentionally abandoning it. Meanwhile, some humans never bought in (and continue to "live another way.")
I would not call modernity in "right relationship" in that it initiates a sixth mass extinction. Was it deterministically inevitable? I don't have any basis to say otherwise. That's not the same as having zero values, though, as a social species is bound to develop. According to our values, then, modernity is not "right" and it is possible that a corrective winds up putting humans back into an ecologically long-lived state.
I get your point: could not have been any other way, so it is by default the only (thus "right" way), but I'm adding a layer of how the result comports (or fails to) with our evolved social value system—the usual context of using a word like "right." A mismatch can trigger a new direction (all based on stimulus/response in neural wiring) that tries to align the actual/only path with what we would deem to be more "right" according to values.
If someone had a genetic precursor that indicated a strong likelihood of cancer, I don't know if one would call it their 'right state' when this same person is actually in the throes of the predicted cancer. Deterministic but still not pretty.
If we have 'metastatic modernity', then that makes us self-aware cancer cells to some extent. Yet, I feel inclined, because I understand this, to try to be less of a cancer cell and ponder whether it's possible to flip over, like a pluripotent cell, to becoming a T-cell or immune system response. I don't know, maybe that's too fanciful for a westerner, but I'd still rather work on my regenerative vegetable garden instead of doing industrial agriculture, and that's a value judgment.
I just added a pointer to the song Long Lost, by Lord Huron, in the section titled Where Do We Go? My ideal situation would be to walk deep into the mountains when it's time to die and "let it have me."
I also added a parenthetical about the sense of past life perhaps being similar to confusion over whether an event happened in real life or in a dream: sometimes very hard to tell.
It occurs to wonder at the human habit of conflating the "soul" with consciousness. Then there is the question of what you may leave behind in the memories of your fellows, which (according to Becker) is supposed to be a form of immortality…"soul"? The experience of being "me" is an entirely conscious experience. I was not entirely unconscious during my colonoscopy, but there was definitely less of "me" there during the procedure.
For clarity, the cocktail used during colonoscopy is milder than the type I experienced in surgery (I've had the colonoscopy flavor twice as well, and didn't have the same experience of a complete time void: just an extremely fuzzy experience). Definitely severely impaired, but not "gone."
It *does* seem like these eternal souls that transcends space and time should have the power to, say, keep someone from behaving like a total jackass after a few too many beers, right? To challenge further – considering our exponentially-growing human population, where'd all these souls come from? There's too many humans now for them to be 'recycled'. Is there an invisible warehouse at the ends of the earth with a massive stockpile of eager souls, where the lesser saints pack them up Amazon-style in the ephemeral equivalent of bubble wrap (fluffy clouds?) any time there's a human fresh off the presses?
I could go on, as this is likely one of the few places I could do so without having to face terror management theory in action.The challenges drugs present to the idea of separate soulhood is a great point and worth exploring further. I asked a friend who'd experienced many alcoholic blackouts and also major anaesthesia if they felt similar and he confirmed as much, basically what's described here. That we may frequently seek out that sense of impairment or blotting out or whatever would seem to say a lot about the reality of modernity, too – or maybe we're just testing the death waters?
I still struggle in dealing with people out there, though, around this topic. "Infantilized, pampered, useless full-grown children", while perhaps projecting, seems accurate to me, and such find the mention of death worse than depressing, as you noted. The most full-blown narcissistic human supremacists are going to have the hardest time finding delight in the prospect of nothingness, I'd think. The thing that would be most liberating from the fear is the thing they refuse to touch with a six-foot-long (six-feet-under?) pole. Like it doesn't even matter how flawlessly the argument is laid out – they'll just smugly chuck "I have FAITH" out there, and that's the end of it. It's super frustrating, and hard, at least for me, to build camaderie or community with other humans when there's such a huge gulf in between. But I do appreciate having it laid out so eloquently. I find it all relieving and inspiring and it further reinforces my commitment to giving back to the community of life before I die.
Nice comment. The "nothingness" is as illusory as consciousness to begin with (two sides of the exact same coin), and depends on what we identify as giving meaning. Nihilism points to a lack of imagination, as a whole universe continues to exist—along with millions of species on Earth each doing incredible things—no matter what we think (or don't think, after death). That's very far from "nothing." I guess if a person's sensation of consciousness far outweighs the value of the rest of the universe, then such a narcissist is probably doomed to find nihilism/nothingness in the sort of death I describe here. Their loss. It's also possible to bask in the glory of a complex universe that continues to use "your" atoms in untold innovative ways—not that there's anything particularly special about the atoms any one of us borrows, or in the fact that we borrowed them at all. It's not about us.
Great post! I find myself in agreement. But I want to circle back on a couple of things:
I'm not sure how to interpret that " 'nothingness' is as illusory as consciousness (two sides of the exact same coin)" –and– "Nihilism points to a lack of imagination, as a whole universe continues to exist"
According to Google, same coin "… [H]ighlights that seemingly distinct things are actually part of a larger whole. They are not separate entities but rather different facets of a single concept or situation" –or alternatively– "The phrase can also imply that different viewpoints on a situation are just different ways of looking at the same underlying reality."
I fail to appreciate how your equation of consciousness = nihilism (nothingness?) illustrates the 'two sides of the same coin' idea.
I continue to be mystified by Wigner's comment about mathematics in his 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences'.
I just don't see any equivalence between "nothingness" and "consciousness". You seem to claim that consciousness is simply an "emergence" resulting from the (unique?) arrangement of matter in living things, and are content to accept that we just don't know how that happens. (Is each quark, electron, photon "identical"? [in the sense of Leibniz' monads?].
I want to something more. Some people (Kastrup) claim consciousness is "fundamental". Others (Faggin) call it "irreducible". The first claims matter arises from consciousness (idealism). The second claims a non-living entity cannot be conscious (try building a computer that is conscious).
Robert Sapolsky [Determined] claims there is no free will, and yet we all experience it as a phenomenon every day.
I cling to the possibility that it's mathematics "all the way down"; that matter might be the illusion and consciousness the fundamental. Which one is the "substrate"? And what about Leibniz and his monads?
I'll try to clarify—we'll see how it goes.
My view is that both nihilism and consciousness are imagined "realities" created in brains. Moreover, firm belief in consciousness as reality leads to the prospect of its disappearance or illusory nature feeling like nihilism. It's like light and shadow: one creates the other. If one does not take consciousness as other than emergent from interactions, then its disappearance is less mysterious and threatening: no nihilism. They are co-dependent: one creating the other.
The illusory nature is probably more convincing in the case of nihilism, as nothing we think will change the fact that the universe is real, ancient, vast, complex, etc. It's a whole lot more than "nothing," and always will be, no matter our mood. Well, I suppose the true idealist says hogwash: the universe is a figment of our minds. Brushing them aside, I'll stand by the notion that the universe is real: bigger than us; older than us; more amazing than us—we're a tiny subset of the whole. So, nihilism is illusory: the actual real universe won't be nothing just because of our existential flailings.
It is harder to accept an illusory nature to consciousness, because we're so inextricably tied to the illusion (emergent sensation might be a less triggering term) as an enormous part of our personal experience. As we really can't imagine being without it, its removal leaves us with nothing. That's very true in a sense: curtains for us as individually-aware beings. It's just very insular, self-focused, and has little to do with 99.999999999% (and 50 more nines) of the universe. Plus, you won't experience the nothingness, so it doesn't really exist for us (as an experience).
I hope this is clearer: very difficult (for me) to get language around some ideas…
True! This is where regarding the material world and other-than-human as meaningful and valuable is key. Perhaps our collective poor treatment of other atomic configurations inclines people toward denial, but could also lead to embracing the opposite behavior once you accept you were, are, and will be the same stuff as that stream or raccoon or passionflower.
And regarding the aforementioned narcissists, if anyone doubts that it is *their loss* – actually witnessing the histrionics of an undignified approach to death can be a turning point, at least it was for me. The in-it-to-win-it Taker attitude completely collapses when death is banging at the door. Seeing a relative behave so gracelessly that even the medical staff couldn’t hide their disdain was the beginning of asking myself tough questions. And here we are.
Also: cool song! At least we can count on the artists. This discussion reminds me of the lines from Fiona Apple’s track “I Want You to Love Me”: ‘I move with the trees/in the breeze/I know that time is elastic/And I know when I go/All my particles disband and disperse/And I’ll be back in the pulse’
It's possible my treatment is a little too dense, but I have addressed the same issues in my essay here, if you are interested! https://jakehpark.substack.com/p/panpsychosis-the-finitude-of-all
Specifically, in the "Immortality" section, I write:
> In general, there is no reason to suspect any consciousness is left once our bodies are destroyed. Once we die, the *only* patterns we have been able to detect that reliably correlate with consciousness *disappear for good*. Evidently, we cannot imagine a world in which we don't exist, so many of us often tend to imagine some kind of primordial "blackness" or "stuckness"—but nonexistence is *by definition* the absence of experience. Even the experience of "stuckness" is a *process* that requires metabolic *progression*: if consciousness can be reduced to discrete, hermetic slices of time, there is no mechanism by which the continuity of awareness is generated. A single "slice" of consciousness has no duration, and can only be experienced once. Theories of reincarnation or posthumous continuous identity are also equally absurd. They require some complex, transcendent mechanism by which our bounded consciousness is magically linked to another disjoint metabolic structure. We may survive anaesthesia, coma and concussion, but we have never survived brain death.
I should add: Sapolsky elicited the nihilist in me; McGilchrist elicited the amazement you allude to.
Interesting: almost the reverse is true for me. That our experiences arise out of processes involving "ordinary" matter—well beyond our ability to track—cannot fail to elicit amazement. Relegating matter to a consciousness-conjured illusion is a cheap shot by comparison, practically wiping out the entire amazing universe (close to nihilism). To each their own, I suppose.
It's almost a matter of where one situates aggrandizement. I tend to aggrandize the (whole) universe, while others are more attracted to aggrandizing mind/consciousness. The latter feels a bit supremacist/selfish to my taste.
This is well done, and very interesting, because I have diagnosed the exact same issue in my own essay here! https://jakehpark.substack.com/p/panpsychosis-the-finitude-of-all
Great piece, thanks.
People have been revived from death after prolonged submersion in icy water, which would be a more complete death than the unconsciousness used in your GA example. Given that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that seems to be distributed across the entire nervous system rather than just the frontal lobes I think it is over simplistic to consider to consist solely of baryonic matter. My happiness my be instantiated through the medium of protons, neutrons and electrons but it's functioning cannot be directly explained by the physical laws governing it's constituent parts.
Have you read Greg Egan's sci-fi book "Permutation City"? Egan's premise was that sufficiently complex patterns can become self-sustaining and free themselves of the computational substrate.
Another recommendation would be an Alastair Reynolds short story but I can't remember the name so I'll just mention that Reynolds proposed that consciousness is able to actively choose a path through the Everett interpretation of the universe so if there is any possible way to avoid death the mind will switch to that reality. Almost like quantum tunnelling through near-death experiences 🙂
"…but it's functioning cannot be directly explained by the physical laws governing it's constituent parts" Whoa there! An enormous gulf sits between "cannot be explained" and "we lack the wit to explain." No one can credibly proclaim it to be impossible, and every time we peer into a phenomenon we find physical interactions of baffling complexity involved.
To posit that "People have been revived from death…" requires that we have a true and accurate understanding of what constitutes death. It may be equally accurate to posit that people have survived prolonged submersion in icy water without dying.
Well for my example the poor unfortunates were "dead" in both the legal and medical senses and it is difficult to understand how they could be any more dead. Would you be satisfied if they rotted slightly before revival? 😛
When you say they were "medically dead," is that the "heart stopped beating" version of dead, or the "brain activity ceased" version. And, can you say for certain that some future medical breakthrough will not come along that will detect more subtle brain activity, from which a re-start will become the usual practice? Maybe "slightly rotted" will become the new standard.
Adding to Gordon's question for clarification, it seems an unlikely scenario that a seemingly dead body pulled from icy water would be in a setting in which sensitive equipment could ascertain ongoing brain activity. The priority would be on revival by any means available, rather than careful study of brain state. I could be wrong, but it's a hard sort of knowledge to acquire in a desperate situation.
Some good comments here.
Indeed death is not to be feared (at least not obssessively). It's the other side of the coin from life – you can't have one without the other.
Many futurists (and other human supremecists) sincerely believe they'll one day be able to 'upload' their minds to a computer – words fail. It's easy to be repulsed by such people, but the emotion they elicit most in me is pity.
On this, we are in full agreement. It's rank hubris to imagine ourselves capable of such a feat. These boys need to grow up. They'll just die instead (in short order).
We could probably install a USB port in their skull with wires reaching deeper within, but I'm guessing the upload would fail, possibly delivering unpleasant shocks. I'm reminded of the "time machine" in the cult classic movie Napoleon Dynamite. It's a similar level of desperation.
In the example of anesthesia as an analogy for death – because the patient does not die but reawakens, is it possible that anesthesia just simply does not pass some tipping point into real death? Therefore any event occurring during death is not triggered – regardless of what it may be – heaven, reincarnation, or some kind of existence in a different plane, conscious or not, etc.
Explanations are essentially useless, but the speculations are fascinating. Thanks for yours.
I feel like this space has become a little defeatist.
There seems to be a trend for posters being emboldened by the lack of freewill / determinism type of argument to then claim that there is nothing we can do about our world's problems.
What a depressing position.
Did people not end slavery by fighting against it? And didn't women achieve suffrage by fighting for it? Didn't we cure polio by inventing vaccines? Was all this inevitable, or did people actually go out there and use their agency to achieve these things.
Likewise, the way things are doesn't have to be the way things remain.
Daniel Quinn wrote some great books which changed a few minds with his message, mine included. I personally think he would find some of the discourse here a little defeatist.
Determinism and lack of free will is only defeatist in the sense that riding a bicycle without training wheels is scary for a 5-year-old, even though the training wheels don't even touch the ground when they ride (they believe them to be crucial, all the same). In other words, it is absolutely possible to embrace determinism, jettison notions of free will (and soul and "real" conscious) and *still* remain fairly opposite of defeatist. It is possible to reconcile. Take me as an example (and it's not because I'm confused or haven't worked it out to my satisfaction).
Every living being (and inanimate lump, for that matter) has agency, in that they interact with the universe and alter it. In the case of living beings, evolution has shaped responses to stimuli that are (on average) adaptive toward species survival. All the items on your list involved responses to situations deemed undesirable, and we're being over-stimulated today with a meta-crisis/predicament. So you betcha we're going to see some mobilization in response. We're wired that way. It's a slim imagination that does not allow change without the training wheels of some override (free will) agency. Our actual agency works within the available material interactions in a brilliant way, beyond our control (no override).
Obviously I'm a huge fan of Daniel Quinn, and thump for awareness of our predicament, calling for a turn away from modernity. I am compelled to do so, and glad of it. Gaining power over death (nothing, to us) and self-aggrandizement (we're *part* of a material universe, not its masters) can be a vital part of the process.
Understanding our predicament may alter the neuron network in our brains in a way that causes us (our brain) to make different decisions. However, it's true (or at least it seems to be true) that modernity can't be made sustainable, no matter what we do. In that sense there is nothing to be done about it, apart from delaying the collapse or slowing its unfolding. Obviously, information about our world can cause our brains to alter our decisions about how we run our societies (like stop treating mental illnesses as demon possessions), so those predisposed to alerting the world about reality may have some impact.
Sapolsky points out…repeatedly and at length…the difference between "determinism" and "determined." "Determinism" is the theory that, if you can accurately describe the initial conditions of a purely mechanical system, you can then accurately predict the state of that system at any time in the future. "Determined" is the notion that who a person is, at any moment, is entirely dependent on everything that happened to that person (genetics, environment, experience) up to that point in time.
The problem for "determinists" is that it is absolutely impossible to "accurately" describe the initial conditions of anything. Get it accurate to one million places, and the one-million-and-oneth place will bugger you. The benefit for the "determined" is that there is no way to predict how future experiences will affect "who you are."
In a way, the failure of determinism is the saving grace for the determined.
DQ would've most definitely found some of the discourse here a little defeatist. That's because he preferred his reality served up with a side of fairytales. Like this:
“Man was born millions of years ago, and he was no more a scourge than hawks or lions or squids. He lived at peace with the world for millions of years. This doesn’t mean he was a saint. This doesn’t mean he walked the earth like a Buddha. It means he lived as harmlessly as a hyena or a shark or a rattlesnake. It’s not man who is the scourge of the world, it’s a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. Our culture.”
No Mr Quinn. You got it wrong. And because you got it so wrong, and because you were such a talented storyteller… you ended up confusing many people.
Our culture is not the scourge of the world… life is. Every lifeform on this planet would be following our current path if capable. But because none of them were lucky enough to have that winning biological combo that unlocks pandora’s box, life never had to worry about an early termination because of a self-induced mass extinction (GOE fans always correct me here, so fine, a species self-induced mass extinction).
The only event that will start the doomsday clock is the conquering of pandora’s box. Life on earth finally busted through around two million years ago. And no, just because we’ve been using fire for 1.99 million years without creating chaos and extinctions, that doesn’t mean fire might be sustainable… c’mon, I hate that I even have to say that. It’s all part of a process.
A two-million-year slow motion reverse werewolf transformation process… eventually culminating with the game changing uniqueness around 100-200kya. The real threat locked up in pandora’s box isn’t fire. It’s critical moment theory (CMT). Full consciousness. Mortality salience. MORT theory. Or whatever else you wanna call it.
Forget about the mystery of why nothing interesting happens until basically the last 10k years. Does anyone actually believe that if the Holocene had happened a million or even a few hundred kya, that these werewolves would’ve been capable of agriculture?
It would be pointless (especially from a deterministic perspective) to argue the counterfactual point that the current situation wasn't inevitable, or that humans weren't primed to hop on a climate anomaly as the key to Pandora's box (useful way to frame it). What if the Holocene never happened? Who cares? … It did!
It would be similarly pointless to claim knowledge of how the future unfolds. The fact that an inner layer of Pandora's box contains an explosive that destroys the box itself means that all bets are off. Does the explosion seal a sixth mass extinction, or halt/reverse its progress? None of us can say.
This is the sense in which Daniel Quinn's simplistic framing can facilitate the better of the possible outcomes. By differentiating cultures (Leavers and Takers), however simplified, we learn that actions and attitudes do matter, and translate to vastly different timescales for existing. People may differ on their perceived likelihood (based on little evidence) of avoiding the worst fate (mass extinction). But in the absence of certainty it is at least worth recognizing that many millennia from now people (if around) will describe what happens next as inevitable—even if that involves a reversal of modernity's cultural ills based on awareness of rotten mythology. It's rewarding to advocate for this awareness/reversal, however likely (which we can't know).
I'd definitely advocate for awareness. I'm not sure about reversal being possible but awareness is needed in order to react to that awareness. Without awareness, no reaction is possible.
I'm not convinced of Daniel Quinn's claim of two cultures, leavers and takers. I used to be, but subsequent realisation of things like the lack of free will, MPP, and such like, make me highly doubtful that there are leavers of any species. Climax states evolved in most ecosystems but not because any species had a culture of leaving stuff for others or for the future, but because a balance was eventually reached between predator and prey in the, then, current environmental conditions. That there appear to be some current communities which do consciously live a "leaver" existence doesn't mean either that it is a conscious decision (by brains that have developed in a particular way) or that it is anything more than a fleeting moment (geologically speaking) of aberration.
Still, it's nice to think that some future humans might take a different course.
Really enjoy your thoughtful essays. I strongly agree that language seems to both enable and limit our thought processes and wonder about concepts like moral agency. If our thoughts are determined by our atomic patterns, it seems to follow that the evolution that brought us to this point in history is inevitable and neither right nor wrong.
I feel economics (and law and religion…) have similar vibes – guiding our thought processes so we can in all seriousness spend significant resources producing a sterile "cost/benefit analysis" to soothe our discomfort in justifying which portion of life to wipe for our short-term plans.
Of course – life and evolution demands that we make choices. Perhaps the minor changes to the patterns in our meat-brains triggered by this website and others will tweak the course of humanity onto a more sustainable path results in less discomfort to our fellow travelers – non-human and human (and other? – are boundaries themselves patterns that have evolved with our senses and thoughts). Here's hoping we evolve to take a broader view and increase our humility in the process.
Well put, and you capture the stimulus/aspirations driving these posts as well.
We can't blame cyanobacteria for emerging out of evolution and creating a mass extinction. We are likewise products of evolution, doing what we do. However, even if the future is deterministic, it hasn't yet been written (we have no idea how it develops)—so that our reaction to the situation we find ourselves in is highly relevant in shaping the emerging future. Step 1: admit that we're far from perfect, so would do well to try something very different in terms of how we see ourselves, how we relate to the broader universe, and how much faith we put in our unprecedented, untested constructs.
The most comprehensive and compelling explanation I've found of humans' consciousness, our near-universal religiosity, and our refusal to accept our insignificance is in "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes. I won't try to distill Jaynes's arguments here because I couldn't possibly do them justice. Although his book is lengthy, it is beautifully written, and well worth the reading.
I can relate to the anesthesia experience. When I was 16, I was in a coma, or at least unconscious, for a full week. Afterward, it was clear that there had been no 'me' for all that time, and that it had mattered not a whit that the world had gone its merry way regardless. I found it comforting to know, like Mark Twain, that death would not be an inconvenience.
About eight years ago my wife and I were watching TV and I "fell asleep" and woke up three days later in the ICU. I had a cardiac arrest and my wife noticed and did perfect CPR, the EMTs did perfect CPR, my heart restarted after 10 shocks and I survived. I wasn't dead because my brain would have been functioning at a very low level just enough to be recoverable.
All I remember is "nothing", pretty much exactly like general anaesthetic.
Death seems very easy.
My grandmother used to say that it is getting harder to live.
You may like reading ancient Epicurean texts Tom, if you have not already.
I was glad to find such a practical materialist philosophy in the Western tradition, and have worked to adopt Epicurean ideas and practices over the past few years. It's gradual rediscovery clearly had a positive effect on many Enlightenment thinkers, however most were unfortunately still shackled to dualistic theology, or placed rationalism on much too high a pedestal from my perspective. As such, I consider Nietzsche perhaps the first modern philosopher to build upon Epicurus.
Knowing death is nothing to us however, where do we go from here? I'm still struggling with my own worldly direction–waxing between escape and accelerate–though it is clear I cannot out-swim the techno-cultural current. I think many materialists seeking apprenticeship to nature similarly find themselves here.