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Tag Archives: Afterlife

What John Updike Thought about the Afterlife

20 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

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Afterlife, Autobiography, Biography, Christianity, comedy, Faith, John Updike, Karl Barth, Life, memoir, On Being a Self Forever, Philosophy, reason, Self-Consciousness, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, tragedy, William Shakespeare

John Updike

“Karl Barth, another Reformed clergyman, responding in an interview late in his life to a question about the afterlife, said he imagined it as somehow this life in review, viewed in a new light. I had not been as comforted as I wanted to be. For is it not the singularity of life that terrifies us? Is not the decisive difference between comedy and tragedy that tragedy denies us another chance? Shakespeare over and over demonstrates life’s singularity — the irrevocability of our decisions, hasty and even mad though they be. How solemn and huge and deeply pathetic our life does loom in its once-and-doneness, how inexorably linear, even though our rotating, revolving planet offers us the cycles of the day and of the year to suggest that existence is intrinsically cyclical, a playful spin, and that there will always be, tomorrow morning or the next, another chance…

In church this morning, as I half-listened to the Christmas hymns and the reading of the very unlikely, much-illustrated passage from Luke telling how Gabriel came to Mary and told her that the Holy Ghost would come upon her and the power of the Highest would ‘overshadow’ her and make her pregnant with the Son of God, it appeared to me that when we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept — the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.

I have the persistent sensation, in my life and art, that I am just beginning.”

__________

Excerpted from the impeccable final chapter “On Being a Self Forever” in John Updike’s Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of this multifaceted, beautifully written book. Among modern American writers, Updike is perhaps the best known for his prolific output: in looking at his CV, it seems he published a book every month — and a poem every morning along with two essays and a review each afternoon. This unsurpassable fluency and energy come through in the superb writing and versatility of Self-Consciousness. It’s a memoir that covers a lot of ground, effortlessly.

Though I like the biographical narrative of Self-Consciousness, it’s these ruminative asides — profound and deeply personal — that make the book so special. You can read more below.

  • JU eloquently touches on how to make peace with your past self
  • My favorite of Updike’s many good poems: “Petty Lutz, Fred Muth”
  • In two paragraphs, Updike outlines his political and personal philosophy

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David Frum: What Does Secularism Offer in the Face of Mortality?

08 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy, Religion

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Tags

Afterlife, belief, Cholera, David Frum, fame, family, Genghis Khan, God, Immortality, interview, Life, meaning of life, MeaningofLife.tv, memory, Mortality, Philosophy, Phlogiston, Real Time with Bill Maher, Robert Wright, The Evolution of God, Why Romney Lost

David Frum

Robert Wright: Given the fact that you’re not looking forward to an afterlife, well… maybe the best approach is to just not think about death. But if you do think about it, is there a way you console yourself in the face of it?

David Frum: When you’re younger, it seems a much more terrifying prospect than it does when you’re older. I think we do see it coming and we accept it.

My consolation in my final hours, I hope, will be that I won’t have left anything unsaid. I won’t have left any of the people that I love in any doubt that I love them. That, to the extent of my ability, I’ve made provision for them. That they’ll be secure after I’m gone…

There’s something kind of megalomaniacal about wanting more, wanting our actions to have eternal consequence. I mean, I suppose that’s literally true — if you have a baby, and the baby has a baby, and so on, then yes, your action has an eternal consequence. But we ourselves are going to be forgotten so soon, and those of us who aren’t forgotten are going to be so misunderstood that they might be happier being forgotten.

There are a lot of things that are remembered for ill or even for derision. Whoever invented the Phlogiston theory, he’s remembered — and his work is held up to mockery in science classes from now and for a long time to come.

We look at history and remember the people who left behind misery. Genghis Khan remains a celebrity to this day. But how many people know the name of the man who proved how cholera was caused? How many remember the dozens of obscure civil engineers who put in safe and reliable water piping so we wouldn’t have it anymore?

Most of that desire for remembrance, it usually ends up pretty badly.

__________

An exchange from Frum and Wright’s interview last month in Wright’s MeaningofLife.tv series. You can pick up Frum’s newest Why Romney Lost or Wright’s expansive book The Evolution of God.

So, I think the answer is a resounding not much. Though not exactly wrong, the approach is in many ways an exercise in managing expectations.

Though I disagree with a good bit of Frum’s outlook, I thoroughly enjoyed this interview, as I do almost all of Robert Wright’s conversations, especially those on his new series MeaningofLife.tv. It’s a program devoted to the big questions, with guests who, like Frum, are leaders in their fields though not professionally or at least chiefly concerned with issues of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny.

This combination makes for an informal, direct exchange, where intelligent people can make dinner table points instead of polishing well-worn soundbites. As you’ll see in the Frum interview, this is a man who’s thought a lot about these things, though I’m not sure he’s ever been asked a question like “Are you religious?” on camera.

His answer, by the way, is an interesting one. “I’m religious, but I’m not spiritual,” Frum replies, echoing a common though unacknowledged thread in modern reform Judaism. It’s the reversal of that well-worn yawn “I’m spiritual, but I’m…” Well, I can’t even bring myself to type it.

If you want to hear more of Frum, I recommend watching his appearance on Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, which features a very worthwhile back and forth about why middle class America is falling to pieces.

You can also continue here:

  • Clive James thinks about mortality and the next generation
  • Existence for Existence’s Sake?: Dostoevsky, Sam Harris, and others on the surprising reason we want to stay alive
  • Physicist Alan Lightman writes about the cost of immortality

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John Updike: Is It Selfish to Want an Afterlife?

26 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography

≈ Comments Off on John Updike: Is It Selfish to Want an Afterlife?

Tags

Afterlife, Christianity, consciousness, eternity, heaven, John Updike, Life, Miguel de Unamuno, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, Selfishness, Tragic Sense of Life, Unselfishness

John Updike 2

“Do I really want it, this self, these scattered fingerprints on the air, to persist forever, to outlast the atomic universe?

Those who scoff at the Christian hope of an afterlife have on their side not only a mass of biological evidence knitting the self-conscious mind tight to the perishing body but a certain moral superiority as well: isn’t it terribly, well, selfish, and grotesquely egocentric, to hope for more than our animal walk in the sun, from eager blind infancy through the productive and procreative years into a senescence that, by the laws of biological instinct as well as by the premeditated precepts of stoic virtue, will submit to eternal sleep gratefully? Where, indeed, in the vast spaces disclosed by modern astronomy, would our disembodied spirit go, and, once there, what would it do?

In fact we do not try to picture the afterlife, nor is it our selves in our nervous tics and optical flecks that we wish to perpetuate; it is the self as window on the world that we can’t bear to think of shutting. My mind when I was a boy of ten or eleven sent up its silent screams at the thought of future aeons – at the thought of the cosmic party going on without me.

The yearning for an afterlife is the opposite of selfish: it is love and praise for the world that we are privileged, in this complex interval of light, to witness and experience. Though some believers may think of the afterlife as a place of retribution, where lives of poverty, distress, and illness will be compensated for, and where renunciations will be rewarded – where the last shall be first, in other words, and those that hunger and thirst shall be filled – the basic desire, as Unamuno says in his Tragic Sense of Life, is not for some otherworld but for this world, for life more or less as we know it to go on forever: ‘The immortality that we crave is a phenomenal immortality – it is the continuation of this present life.'”

__________

John Updike, writing in the best book I’ve read this year, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs.

To truly get the entire heft of his argument, it’s essential that you read all of this chapter, which closes Self-Consciousness on a note of such extra perception, depth, and clarity that you wish John Updike had lived a dozen lives to write memoirs about. These paragraphs, which deserve an attentive reread, tie into the remarks from King below. At bottom, both men emphasize a shift in perspective; the truly unselfish desire to live on is like the desire to help another – each requires that fundamental shift in perspective, from thinking first about “I” to thinking about “thou”.

Publicity photo of author John Updike

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Shostakovich and Music as a Protest against Death

12 Wednesday Nov 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Comments Off on Shostakovich and Music as a Protest against Death

Tags

Afterlife, Alan Lightman, Beethoven Quartet, Classical Music, Composer, Dies Irae, Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich, Dmitri Shostakovich, Einstein's Dreams, Fear, Immortality, Julian Barnes, Life, Mark Wigglesworth, Mortality, Music, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, Saul Bellow, Symphony

Dmitri Shostakovich

“Shostakovich knew that death — unless it came in the form of heroic martyrdom — was not an appropriate subject for Soviet art, that it was ‘tantamount to wiping your nose on your sleeve in company.’ He could not have the Dies Irae blaze from his scores; he had to be musically covert. But increasingly, the cautious composer found the courage to draw his sleeve across his nostrils, especially in his chamber music. His last works often contain long, slow, meditative invocations of mortality. The violist of the Beethoven Quartet was once given the following advice about the first movement of the fifteenth quartet by its composer: ‘Play it so that the flies drop dead in mid-air.'”

“At the premiere, Shostakovich overcame his usual shyness to explain to the audience that, ‘Life is man’s dearest possession. It is given to him only once and he should live so as not to experience acute pain at the thought of the years wasted aimlessly or feel searing shame for his petty and inglorious past, but be able to say, at the moment of death, that he has given all his life and energies to the noblest cause in the world – to fight for the liberation of humanity. I want listeners to this symphony to realize that ‘life’ is truly beautiful. My symphony is an impassioned protest against death, a reminder to the living that they should live honestly, conscientiously, nobly, never committing a base act. This is very important for much time will pass before scientists have succeeded in ensuring immortality. Death is in store for all of us and I for one do not see any good in the end of our lives. Death is terrifying. There is nothing beyond it.’ … [Shostakovich] disagreed with all the composers who had portrayed death with music that was beautiful, radiant and ecstatic. For him, death really was the end and he took that as an inspiration to make sure that he lived his life to its full.”

__________

Paragraphs excerpted from Julian Barnes’s Nothing to Be Frightened Of and the meticulous notes of composer Mark Wigglesworth. A fly-stunning version of Shostakovich’s fifteenth quartet is here.

Both writers cite a further, clarifying reflection from Shostakovich, which MW describes, “In the disputed memoirs… [Shostakovich] talks revealingly about death:

Fear of death may be the most intense emotion of all. I sometimes think that there is no deeper feeling. The irony lies in the fact that under the influence of that fear people create poetry, prose and music; that is they try to strengthen their ties with the living and increase their influence on them. How can you not fear death? […] We should think more about it and accustom ourselves to it. We can’t allow the fear of death to creep up on us unexpectedly. I think that if people began thinking about death sooner, they would make fewer mistakes.

Shostakovich makes the common though deeply misguided assumption that death serves no purpose — that there is not “any good in the end of our lives.” Of course there are individual tragedies which aren’t, in any sense, “good.” But death does the essential business of lending life a clarity and urgency it otherwise would not have. Saul Bellow’s brilliant metaphor, that death is “the dark backing a mirror needs before we can see ourselves,” sets the idea in place: without an ending, albeit an opague one, there is no way to focus on ourselves.

In case that metaphor hasn’t fully absorbed, Alan Lightman’s short story collection Einstein’s Dreams features a fictional world in which people live forever. He characterizes the tragedy of these immortal inhabitants:

[T]hey can do all they can imagine. They will have an infinite number of careers, they will marry an infinite number of times, they will change their politics infinitely. Each person will be a lawyer, a bricklayer, a writer, an accountant, a painter, a physician, a farmer…

With infinite life comes an infinite list of relatives. Grandparents never die, nor do great-grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles, great-great-aunts, and so on, back through the generations, all alive and offering advice. Sons never escape from the shadows of their father. Nor do daughters of their mothers. No one ever comes into his own.

Such is the cost of immortality. No person is whole. No person is free.

More:

  • Barnes looks at how his understanding of mortality changed as he entered adulthood
  • Sam Harris puts a fine point on the tragedy of wasted time
  • Neurologist David Eagleman explains how consciousness may transcend the physical brain

Dmitri Shostakovich

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The School of Affliction

12 Monday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Abigail Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Afterlife, American History, Bixby Letter, founding fathers, friendship, John Adams, Kazuo Ishiguro, loss, Mortality, mourning, Noam Chomsky, personal letter, Ravelstein, Saul Bellow, Thomas Jefferson

Thomas JeffersonMonticello, November 13, 1818.

The public papers, my dear friend, announce the fatal event of which your letter of October the 20th had given me ominous foreboding.

Tried myself in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medi­cine. I will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain, but that it is of some comfort to us both, that the term is not very distant, at which we are to deposit in the same cerement, our sorrows and suffering bodies, and to ascend in essence to an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved and lost, and whom we shall still love and never lose again. God bless you and support you under your heavy affliction.

Th. Jefferson

__________

Thomas Jefferson’s letter to his friend and political rival John Adams, upon hearing that Adams’s wife Abigail had died. You can find it along with more the best letters in American history in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence.

I finished graduate school at Georgetown a week and a half ago, and have now found myself, for the second time in a year, living in my childhood home, as a graduate, idling away a brief but ambiguous stretch of days before moving on to the “next stage” of life. Twelve months ago, I had just finished four undergraduate years at the University of Virginia, and had lugged home a bag of dirty clothes to wash and suitcase of books to read.

One of those books is Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein, which I inhaled last July and have since picked up off the shelf and re-read in the past week. The novel (Bellow’s final book, published when he was eighty-five) is a roman à clef and thinly disguised paean to his friend and colleague Allan Bloom. Bellow speaks through the narrator, Chick, as he recounts his long friendship and final months with the renowned academic Abe Ravelstein (re: Bloom) as well as the erotic and intellectual conversations they rehearse as the undercurrent of impending mortality slowly submerges their long-developing friendship. Bellow gives voice to these anxieties with a quivering, careful solemnity that I haven’t encountered elsewhere. His text simultaneously affirms Martin Amis’s claim that Ravelstein is a masterpiece without analogue, while flouting Kazuo Ishiguro’s suggestion that no great novels are written by writers who have matured beyond the class of quinquagenarian.

Bellow’s voice is inflected with the ambiguities and uncertainties of one who is aware of his limited earthly future yet wary of traditional immortality narratives. Chick defers to Ravelstein’s afterlife-agnosticism for much of the book, until its final scenes, wherein the two old pals are overwhelmed by a sensation that Ravelstein’s deathbed is not — and perhaps cannot — be their final meeting place. This impulse is rendered and pondered beautifully by Bellow:

“I wonder if anyone believes the grave is all there is… This is the involuntary and normal, the secret, esoteric, confidence of the man of flesh and blood. The flesh would shrink and go, the blood would dry, but no one believes in his mind of minds or heart of hearts that the pictures do stop.”

By the tone of his letter to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, who was an absolutely determined skeptic for his entire adult life, seems to have embraced some loose version of Bellowian death-survival. The body decays, Jefferson certainly knew that, but as it is eventually cast off, does the spark of consciousness continue to flicker elsewhere? Jefferson may not have really thought that — he may have merely been bowing to the grief of his good friend — or perhaps, like Bellow, he didn’t just want to believe it, he had to.

John Adams

As a side note: Last summer, in the throes of obsession with Ravelstein, I sent the above quotation to Noam Chomsky, to which I attached the question, “So Bellow intuited that life may go on after death — can you sympathize with, or make sense of, such a view?”

Chomsky’s response was typical in its sobering candor: “Bellow is clearly wrong in saying we all believe it.  I can sympathize with a young mother who hopes fervently to see her dying child in heaven, but not with someone like Bellow who chooses the same illusions.”

I didn’t push Chomsky to amend his answer in light of Bellow’s crucial use of the word “involuntary,” though I perhaps should have (or may even in the future). The whole point of the quote — and the related speculation about Jefferson’s view of the afterlife — is to suggest that there is something reflexive, something automatic about the human belief in immortality.

Finally, returning to Jefferson’s letter: does anyone know if his apposition of “loved and lost” in this context inspired Abraham Lincoln’s use of those same two words in his famous Bixby Letter?

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It All Adds Up to Happiness… Doesn’t It?

22 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Psychology, Religion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Afterlife, Faith, happiness, heaven, Julian Barnes, materialism, Nothing to Be Frightened Of

Ireland“Bumper stickers and fridge magnets remind us that Life Is Not a Rehearsal. We encourage one another toward the secular modern heaven of self-fulfillment: the development of the personality, the relationships which help define us, the status-giving job, the material goods, the ownership of property, the foreign holidays, the acquisition of savings, the accumulation of sexual exploits, the visits to the gym, the consumption of culture. It all adds up to happiness, doesn’t it — doesn’t it? This is our chosen myth.

But if life is viewed as a rehearsal, or a preparation, or an anteroom, or whichever metaphor we choose, but at any rate as something contingent, something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious. Those parts of the world where religion has drained away and there is a general acknowledgement that this short stretch of time is all we have, are not, on the whole, more serious places than those where heads are still jerked by the cathedral’s bell or the minaret’s muezzin. On the whole, they yield to a frenetic materialism; although the ingenious human animal is well capable of constructing civilizations where religion coexists with frenetic materialism (where the former might even be an emetic consequence of the latter): witness America.”

__________

From Julian Barnes’s book Nothing to Be Frightened Of.

It’s interesting: all of those areas purporting to lead to self-fulfillment, when considered either individually or collectively, are so alluring. Yet — and I say this without having attained anything like fruition in any one of them — I know they can’t lead to sublime, substantial happiness. I somehow am positive of that; in fact, I’m almost equally as sure they only frustrate one even more in the rabid quest to feel fulfilled.

Consider this passage from A Canticle for Leibowitzas a sort of macro-level frame for a human life that seeks ceaselessly to check all of the above boxes:

The closer men came to perfecting for themselves a paradise, the more impatient they became with it, and with themselves as well. They made a garden of pleasure, and became progressively more miserable with it as it grew in richness and power and beauty; for then, perhaps, it was easier to see something was missing in the garden, some tree or shrub that would not grow. When the world was in darkness and wretchedness, it could believe in perfection and yearn for it. But when the world became bright with reason and riches, it began to sense the narrowness of the needle’s eye, and that rankled for a world no longer willing to believe or yearn.

The picture was taken on one of those temporarily fulfilling foreign holidays to Ireland.

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The Company of Saints

30 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Afterlife, Arthur Koestler, Dom Perignon, Edmund Wilson, heaven, Ian McEwan, Isaac Bashevis Singer, saints

Saint Patrick“Arthur Koestler expressed ‘some timid hopes for a depersonalized afterlife.’ Such a wish is unsurprising — Koestler had devoted many of his last years to parapsychology — but to me distinctly unalluring. Just as there seems little point in a religion which is merely a weekly social event (apart, of course, from the normal pleasures of a weekly social event), as opposed to one which tells you how to live, which colors and stains everything, which is serious, so I would want my afterlife, if one’s on offer, to be an improvement — preferably a substantial one — on its terrestrial predecessor. I can just about imagine slopping around half-unawares in some gooey molecular remix, but I can’t see that this has any advantage over complete extinction. Why have hopes, even timid ones, for such a state? Ah, my boy, but it’s not about what you’d prefer, it’s about what turns out to be true. The key exchange on this subject happened between Isaac Bashevis Singer and Edmund Wilson. Singer told Wilson that he believed in survival after death. Wilson said that as far as he was concerned, he didn’t want to survive, thank you very much. Singer replied, ‘If survival has been arranged, you will have no choice in the matter.’

The fury of the resurrected atheist: that would be something worth seeing. And while we’re on the subject, I think the company of saints might be distinctly interesting. Many of them led exciting lives — dodging assassins, confronting tyrants, preaching at medieval street corners, being tortured — and even the quieter ones could tell you about beekeeping, lavender-growing, Umbrian ornithology, and so on. Dom Perignon was a monk, after all. You might have been hoping for a broader social mix, but if it ‘has been arranged,’ then the saints would keep you going for longer than you might expect.”

__________

From Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes.

I stayed up most of last night reading Barnes’s highly anticipated new work Levels of Life. It’s one of the most refined, and probably the most heartbreaking book I’ve ever read. The last third is an extended essay on loss and bereavement — a meditation so heavy that the only thing keeping you from collapsing under its emotional weight is the lucidity and beauty with which it’s crafted. Barnes is an absolutely masterful writer. For my money, Ian McEwan is the only living author who can write such intricate prose.

Pick up a copy of Levels of Life.

Read other parts of Nothing:

Julian Barnes

Identity is Memory

Julian Barnes

Because the Universe is Happening to You

Julian Barnes

Mere Human Love

Julian Barnes

Nothing to Be Frightened Of

Saint JeromeBarnes on Belief and Doubt in Religious Art

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What Is Happening When We See Somebody Die?

20 Saturday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Philosophy, Religion, Science

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Afterlife, David Eagleman, Life, Will Self

David Eagleman

“It may be that people have different flavors, or levels, of anxiety about death. I’m actually quite optimistic about death. I feel like everything about our existence is so mysterious. For example, you don’t remember getting here, you’ve just sort of always been here as far as you recall. You’re told you’re going to die; nobody knows what that means.

We don’t understand the fabric of reality yet. We know that space is somewhere between nine and thirteen dimensional — not just the three dimensions that we see. So I sort of feel optimistic about it. And I feel like, I’m curious about what happens next.

So let me make up a couple of things that could be happening – I’m not saying I believe these, but they’re perfectly possible. So let’s say what happens when you die is that you slip out of these three dimensions and into some other dimensions. Okay, well there’s no evidence to support that, it’s a lovely idea, and when a loved one dies, you can certainly think about that happening.

When it comes to questions of consciousness… most neuroscientists will say something like, ‘Oh well, when you die, you just shut off. That’s the end of it, because the brain stops functioning.’ What’s clear from a century of good neuroscience is that you are totally dependent on the integrity of your biology, and when this starts going downhill, you change. You lose the ability to see colors or name fuzzy animals or understand music. You are your brain. So it seems the logical conclusion to that must be that when your brain stops, you stop.

But there actually are other ways of viewing it that are equally as plausible. And again, please don’t cite me on this, because I’m not saying it is true, but let me give an example of something that could be true.

Imagine you’re a bushman in the Kalahari desert and you find a radio. You don’t understand what it is or how it works, but it’s making voices.

You discover through experimentation that if you pull out the different wires, the voices stop or change. So you would conclude, correctly, that the voices are dependent on the integrity of the physical system. But you’d be missing something very large there, which is that it’s not really about just the integrity of the physical system: there’s electromagnetic radiation, which you don’t have the capacity to detect yet.

So the reason I mention these sort of wacky, far out ideas is that they’re equally as plausible as anything else we have in neuroscience. They’re consistent with all the data. And those different options – there are lots of them – make me feel, when I see somebody die, as though there are many things that could be happening.

Including that they’re slipping off into some different place and the broadcast may still be going on.”

__________

A transcribed portion from neuroscientist David Eagleman in conversation with novelist Will Self. This is a fantastically illuminating interview (the second best for my money, behind the greatest interview ever given, Martin Amis with Charlie Rose).

Eagleman, who I’m proud to say lives and operates a lab in my home city of Houston, Texas, is one of the great living communicators of science. I try to listen to or read everything of his.

Watch a portion of the conversation here:

Listen to the entire Eagleman-Self conversation here.

Read a story from his acclaimed collection of fiction, Sum: “In the Afterlife You Relive All Your Experiences”

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The Only Conversation Worth Having

10 Sunday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Religion

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Afterlife, Christopher Hitchens, Faith, God, reason, Shakespeare, Socrates, William Dembski

Christopher Hitchens

“I’ll close on the implied question that Bill asked me earlier.

Why don’t you accept this wonderful offer? Why wouldn’t you like to meet Shakespeare, for example?

I don’t know if you really think that when you die you can be corporeally reassembled, and have conversations with authors from previous epochs. It’s not necessary that you believe that in Christian theology, and I have to say that it sounds like a complete fairy tale to me. The only reason I’d want to meet Shakespeare, or might even want to, is because I can meet him, any time, because he is immortal in the works he’s left behind. If you’ve read those, meeting the author would almost certainly be a disappointment.

But when Socrates was sentenced to death for his philosophical investigations, and for blasphemy for challenging the gods of the city — and he accepted his death — he did say, well, if we are lucky, perhaps I’ll be able to hold conversation with other great thinkers and philosophers and doubters too. In other words, the discussion about what is good, what is beautiful, what is noble, what is pure, and what is true could always go on.

Why is that important, why would I like to do that? Because that’s the only conversation worth having. And whether it goes on or not after I die, I don’t know. But I do know that that’s the conversation I want to have while I’m still alive. Which means that to me, the offer of certainty, the offer of complete security, the offer of an impermeable faith that can’t give way, is an offer of something not worth having. I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet; that I haven’t understood enough; that I can’t know enough; that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And I’d urge you to look at those people who tell you, at your age, that you’re dead ’til you believe as they do — what a terrible thing to be telling to children. And that you can only live by accepting an absolute authority. Don’t think of that as a gift. Think of it as a poisoned chalice. Push it aside however tempting it is. Take the risk of thinking for yourself. Much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way. Thank you.”

__________

Christopher Hitchens’s improvised closing remarks at one of his final debates on faith and reason. This debate was against the very erudite and convincing William Dembski of Baylor University, and the entire contest is worth watching (and is on Youtube), but this particular segment is below.

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Ephemeral Creatures

08 Friday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Afterlife, Alphonse Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt, Journal Entry, Jules de Goncourt, Poem, poetry

Edmond de Goncourt

“Out walking this morning, [Alphose] Daudet asked me whether my brother had been tormented by the thought of an after-life. I replied that he had not and that not once during the whole of his illness had he mentioned an after-life in his conversations with me.

Then Daudet asked me what my own opinions on the subject were, and I answered that in spite of my longing to see my brother again I believed that the individual was totally annihilated at death, that we were utterly insignificant beings, ephemeral creatures lasting a few days longer than those which lived for a single day, and that if God existed it was expecting too much of Him in the way of accounting to imagine that each one of us would have a second life in another world. Daudet told me that he shared my opinions; somewhere in his notes, he said, he had a record of a dream in which he was crossing a field of broom to the sound of the crackling of the bursting pods, and he compared our lives to those little explosions.”

__________

Edmond de Goncourt’s journal entry on Friday, July 17th, 1891.

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Wittgenstein on God and Belief

25 Friday Jan 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Philosophy, Religion

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

Afterlife, belief, C.S. Lewis, Culture and Value, De Carne Christi, God, Is Theology Poetry?, language, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophische Untersuchungen, St. Augustine, Tertullian

Ludwig Wittgenstein

“A proof of God’s existence ought really to be something by means of which one could convince oneself that God exists. But I think that what believers who have furnished such proofs have wanted to do is give their ‘belief’ an intellectual analysis and foundation, although they themselves would never have come to believe as a result of such proofs. Perhaps one could ‘convince someone that God exists’ by means of a certain kind of upbringing, by shaping his life in such a way.

Life can educate one to a belief in God. And experiences too are what bring this about; but I don’t mean visions and other forms of sense experience which show us the ‘existence of this being’, but, e.g., sufferings of various sorts. These neither show us God in the way a sense impression shows us an object, nor do they give rise to conjectures about him. Experiences, thoughts, — life can force this concept on us.

It strikes me that a religious belief could only be something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference. Hence, although it’s belief, it’s really a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It’s passionately seizing hold of this interpretation. Instruction in religious faith, therefore, would have to take the form of a portrayal, a description, of that system of reference, while at the same time being an appeal to conscience. And this combination would have to result in the pupil himself, of his own accord, passionately taking hold of the system of reference. It would be as though someone were first to let me see the hopelessness of my situation and then show me the means of my rescue until, of my own accord, or not at any rate led to it by my instructor, I ran to it and grasped it.

Suppose someone said: ‘What do you believe, Wittgenstein? Are you a sceptic? Do you know whether you will survive death?’ I would really, this is a fact, say ‘I can’t say. I don’t know’, because I haven’t any clear idea what I am saying when I am saying, ‘I don’t cease to exist.'”

__________

Excerpts from Culture and Value and Philosophical Investigations (3rd Edition). Two quotes to supplement Wittgenstein’s interpretation of religious conversion and the religious worldview:

“Credo quia absurdum.” (“I believe because it is absurd”)
Tertullian, De Carne Christi 

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
C.S. Lewis, Is Theology Poetry?

In terms of the final paragraph, Wittgenstein’s answer is my favorite reply I’ve yet read to the question, “What do you think happens after death?”

I can’t say. I don’t know, because I haven’t any clear idea of what I am saying when I am saying, ‘I don’t cease to exist.’

Acute and essential. I can’t believe I’ve never thought of (or ever heard of) that line of reasoning.

Also, for a very condensed introduction to Wittgenstein’s fixation with objects and qualities, read the illustration below (from his dissection of Augustine’s theory of language in Philosophical Investigations).

“When they (my elders) named some object, and accordingly moved towards something, I saw this and I grasped that that the thing was called by the sound they uttered when they meant to point it out. Their intention was shown by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples; the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of the voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. Thus, as I heard words repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences, I gradually learnt to understand what objects they signified; and after I had trained my mouth to form these signs, I used them to express my own desires…

Think of the following use of language: I send someone shopping. I give him a slip marked ‘five red apples’. He takes the slip to the shopkeeper, who opens the drawer marked ‘apples’, then he looks up the word ‘red’ in a table and finds a color sample opposite it; then he says the series of cardinal numbers—I assume that he knows them by heart—up to the word ‘five’ and for each number he takes an apple of the same color as the sample out of the drawer.—It is in this and similar ways that one operates with words—’But how does he know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word “five”?’ Well, I assume that he acts as I have described. Explanations come to an end somewhere.—But what is the meaning of the word ‘five’? No such thing was in question here, only how the word ‘five’ is used.”

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