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Adam and Eve, cognition, Ecclesiastes, Edward Young, evolution, Genesis, Goethe, Immortaility: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization, Immortality, Jorge Luis Borges, Martin Heidegger, Michel de Montaigne, Mortality, Mortality Paradox, Sigmund Freud, Stephen Cave, W. B. Yeats
“What sets us apart is, of course, our massive, highly connected brains. These too have evolved to help us perpetuate ourselves indefinitely, and they are enormously useful in the struggle to survive. Our awareness of ourselves, of the future and of alternative possibilities enables us to adapt and make sophisticated plans. But it also gives us a perspective on ourselves that is at the same time terrifying and baffling. On the one hand, our powerful intellects come inexorably to the conclusion that we, like all other living things around us, must one day die. Yet on the other, the one thing that these minds cannot imagine is that very state of nonexistence; it is literally inconceivable. Death therefore presents itself as both inevitable and impossible. This I will call the Mortality Paradox, and its resolution is what gives shape to the immortality narratives, and therefore to civilization…
We are therefore blessed with powerful minds yet at the same time cursed, not only to die, but to know that we must. ‘Man has created death,’ wrote the poet W. B. Yeats. Other creatures blindly struggle on, knowing only life until their moment comes. ‘Except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death,’ wrote the Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges. But we bring death into life: we see it coming for us in every storm or forest fire, snake or spider, illness or ill omen.
This is a central theme of philosophy, poetry and myth; it is what defines us as mortals. It is represented in that most ancient and influential of stories, the book of Genesis: if they eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve are told, they will die— mortality is the price of knowledge. Since we attained self-awareness, as Michel de Montaigne wrote, ‘death has us by the scruff of the neck at every moment.’ No matter what we do, no matter how hard we strive, we know that the Reaper will one day take us. Life is a constant war we are doomed to lose.
But the second idea— and the other half of the Mortality Paradox— tells us quite the opposite: that our own obliteration is impossible. The fact is, whenever we try to imagine the reality of our own deaths we stumble. We simply cannot envision actually not existing. Try it: you might get as far as an image of your own funeral, or perhaps a dark and empty void, but you are still there— the observer, the envisioning eye. The very act of imagining summons you, like a genie, into virtual being.
We therefore cannot make death real to ourselves as thinking subjects. Our powerful imaginative faculties malfunction: it is not possible for the one doing the imagining to actively imagine the absence of the one doing the imagining. ‘It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death; and whenever we attempt to do so we can perceive that we are in fact still present as spectators,’ wrote Sigmund Freud in 1915. He concluded from this that ‘at bottom no one believes in his own death . . . [for] in the unconscious every one of us is convinced of his own immortality.’ Or as the English Romantic poet Edward Young put it: ‘All men think all men mortal, but themselves.’
This applies no matter how far into the future we attempt to look: whether one or one thousand years from now, we cannot help but be present in what we see. There is no limit to just how far into the future we can project; it is not as if our imagination stops at a million years, or a billion. And so, to quote the Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes, God— or nature—‘has set eternity in the hearts of men.’ In our own minds, we are part of the very fabric of the universe, ineradicable, here forever. The great German writer Goethe is reported to have concluded that ‘in this sense everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.’ We cannot conceive of our own nonexistence, he reasoned, and therefore our nonexistence is impossible.”
__________
From Stephen Cave’s book Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization.
I started reading this book late last night and got through about a third of it before falling asleep and into dreams about it. I’m convinced there is something very significant about this sort of software glitch in the human mind — this firewall that stands between us and the full picture of our own individual extinctions. (I’ve heard some people defiantly claim exception to Freud’s rule, but I’ve never found a convincing explanation as to what it looks like or how it’s conceptually possible.)
A fact that Cave doesn’t mention is that the second part of the Mortality Paradox applies even in our sleep. Strangely, even when our conscious minds are shut off and shut out from external sensory stimuli, we still cannot picture our own demise (you wake up at the moment you die in dreams). François de La Rochefoucauld coined a memorable epigram: “no man can look at the sun or his own death with a steady eye.” And it seems that’s true also when we’re asleep — when the sun is set.
Many poets have nodded to this strange feature of human cognition — that even when our conscious mind is shut off (like in REM sleep), we cannot die.
Ernest Dowson imagined our lives unfolding out of “a misty dream… within a dream” (isn’t that the plot of a Chris Nolan movie?)
Oscar Wilde complained, “reality is a dream that keeps me from sleeping”; a sentiment that sends a smirk to my face while on the bus most Monday mornings.
James Joyce — through his protagonist Stephen Dedalus — reflected soberly, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Jessica said:
This is a fascinating subject. There is a presupposition inherent in the argument however, that consciousness is only possible–is a product of, controlled by, and dependent on–the material brain. This is what causes the dilemma.
But what if it isn’t? A neurosurgeon originally committed to the materialistic view, Dr. Eben Alexander had an experience during a coma which profoundly changed his understanding of consciousness. He contracted gram-negative bacterial meningitis which shut down all brain functioning but that required for the lowest levels of existence.
Yet during the extended period his brain was non-functional, he found himself very much alive, mobile, and conscious, functioning intellectually to a degree which surpassed by orders of magnitude the limited abilities of his material brain.
He quotes from his medical records and his physicians confirming the state of his brain with his personal account of what he was experiencing concurrently–an enhanced ability to learn, think, reason, sense and understand–in his book Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey into the Afterlife.
I hope to posts some quotes about the relationship of the brain and consciousness on hiddeninjesus.wordpress.com within the week.
Oh, and in Genesis mortality was not the price of knowledge. Mortality was the price of disobedience. Knowledge (of evil and its consequences, experiencing the exquisite pain of knowing we will die, described above) was a byproduct, a part of that package.
jrbenjamin said:
Good points. I haven’t read Alexander’s book — and I know his credentials are solid — but there have also been some critiques made of his methodology (see Sam Harris’s article “The Must Be Heaven”).
Also: in terms of Genesis, couldn’t mortality be the price of knowledge and disobedience?
Interesting objection, I’m just not sure if you’re right.
Thanks for commenting, as always.
Jessica said:
I may be totally missing his point. Is this an argument for consciousness beyond death? Is this quote at the end his own conclusion: “We cannot conceive of our own nonexistence, he reasoned, and therefore our nonexistence is impossible.’”
I sent this link to my brother Ted Reynolds, who is a materialist, with the note “Ted, It seems to me you have indicated you can imagine a world without your existence or consciousness. But maybe not imagining in the sense described here. Just acknowledging?”
He wrote back, “I hate to diss all these distinguished personages, but I think they’re a bit confused about how imagination works. If one couldn’t imagine something without including oneself in the imagination, that would be a clear contradiction. But in fact we are constantly doing the opposite.
“So yes, I can easily ‘imagine a world without [my] existence or consciousness.’ I find it neither impossible nor inconceivable. In fact, I do it all the time.
“When I imagine a valley in China, I don’t imagine myself in it, any more than when I see a photograph of that valley, I imagine the camera. When I watch or remember a historical movie, I have no idea at all of myself being an observer in that time and place. When I contemplate my corpse after my death, I do not project a future disembodied self as contemplating it. In each of these cases, it is quite clear that I am in one time and place, while what I imagine is in another; there is no difficulty at all in thinking thus and no contradiction. That’s how imagination works, from where you are to where you aren’t.
“But if one tries to imagine a time and place where one is not, and also simultaneously insists on trying to imagine oneself as being in that same time and place, then of course one can’t manage it.
“Reasonable rebuttals are always welcome.”
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