Death

Life is a sexually transmitted terminal disease.[69]

***

Death is generally taken to mean the irreversible loss of capacity for consciousness combined with the irreversible loss of capacity to breathe. [104]

We can be quiet certain that all life on this planet will eventually die out and that the physical Earth will be destroyed some day.

When it runs out of light gasses to fuse into heavier elements, the Sun is expected to supernova (explode in a huge flash of energy). Even though life will die out long before this we can be reasonably sure this will not be for about five thousand million years, so you need not worry about that. Of more concern, objects in space often hit the Earth's atmosphere. You can see them on a clear night in the country; shooting stars. Sometimes these collisions are big enough to hit the ground and leave craters.

On five separate occasions almost all plants and animals on earth been have wiped out. These big collisions are rare and have been hundreds of millions of years apart. The last big one probably wiped out the dinosaurs. In my mind these extinctions, and the constantly changing cycle of life despite them, calls into question why we would want to protect the environment for its own sake. Preserving it only makes sense in the context of protecting humanity.

As I have already said modern humans have been around for a short blink in this time and will no doubt be followed by other species. The animals that follow us may be more or less intelligent. If they are intelligent they will certainly see our ideas and culture as an interesting curiosity or grounds for academic study, but of no day-to-day relevance, just as we observe other animal behaviour and social interactions.

When humans change or die out, not only will our bodies be gone but so will be our ideas, memories and our works.

Individually death is inevitable; we are born to die. When our body stops working we are dead. We cease to think or to have new experiences (in so far as the words 'think' and 'experiences' have any meaning). There is absolutely no evidence or possibility that our brain continues to function after we die. Indeed, if we accept the British Medical Association definition of death (quoted above) if it did continue to support consciousness we would not yet be dead.

Individually, death comes two ways: by accident (or a combination of accidents accumulating to the ultimate certainty; including disease, injuries, being murdered etc) or by our own choosing: suicide. Suicide is now the greatest single cause of death for people under 30. Before you are very much older someone you know will probably suicide. So you need to think about it.

... To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause:
... But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;[70]

When people get old and their quality of life degrades to the point where they can no longer do the things that give them enjoyment they may want to die. I think my father willed himself to die; and I am glad for his sake that he did.

Suicide is a very common theme throughout our literature, including Shakespeare[71], and our culture in general. For some existentialists it is the ultimate existential act; the ultimate break with bad faith.

It is always consoling to think of suicide: in that way one gets through many a bad night[72].

As discussed elsewhere the widely held idea that one can go on living, in any meaningful way, after death, fails even the most modest sceptical analysis. It clearly springs from a primitive context in which lives were (most) often short and brutish and when personal relationships were very close and fundamental to survival; when the heart, not the brain, was thought to be the source of the soul; and it was believed that the Universe was created for humanity, not humanity by the Universe.

Today we know that mankind has no special place or time. This universe is around 13.7 thousand million years old, there are billions of billions of planets and life in many forms is very likely commonplace throughout.

We know that the heart is just an organ. We can replace a heart and most other organs with no substantial impact on the personality. But a personality will change dramatically if certain areas of a brain are damaged or even temporally stimulated. We often see these effects after a stroke or traffic accident and we know the effects of drugs or oxygen deprivation on the brain.

Addendum:

In 2016, nineteen years after I wrote this chapter, I had a personal experience of death, when I underwent heart surgery. This is part of what I wrote:

The idea that a personality survives death requires that the brain continues to function, in such a way as to sustain the present personality after a person is dead (or even to regress to a previous personality if there was a stroke or brain degeneration late in life). But every brain is massively damaged by death, so what sort of degraded personality passes on (disregarding the question of where it goes to; and by what means it is supported there)?

If there is no 'Other' place then the universe begins and ends for each of us with our perceptions of it, just as a peasant may live and die oblivious to anything beyond their village. For the ancient Romans (and Hebrews) what happened in China may just as well have never happened; it was outside their field of perception.

You are the only one who perceives your universe and yours is the only 'real' universe there is. Thus when you either die or suffer serious brain damage, the universe will end or contract, just as it did not exist until you arrived and then it expanded, with your perceptions of it. We each live in our own unique field of perceptions. And each of us can potentially end the universe by killing ourselves or sustaining sufficient brain damage.

A personal philosophy that nothing can matter once your universe ends is perfectly rational. The past, discussed at length elsewhere in this essay, is done and can't be changed. The future, beyond your death, is only important in so far as it impacts those you leave and care for; or your desire to be remembered. In this reality, personal values become focussed on your own lifetime. For example: your wellbeing, friends, family, place in society, or perhaps physical or mental stimulation.

A consequence is that the prospect that all humans on the planet may be wiped out, painlessly in an instant, say by a solar flare, or over an extended period, by evolution, is non-threatening.

Religion may rank very low in such a value system, unless as a means to secure an individual's 'lifetime' values (eg strengthen friendships). Some fear that such a philosophy may lead to anti-social beliefs or behaviour for them the separation of body and soul continues to be an essential theme in our culture.

Another explanation for the widespread success of the idea of an afterlife could be its cultural power to discourage suicide, as an action likely to result in distress to our everlasting soul.

For me the realisation that there is no afterlife is an argument for not committing suicide. I believe that this life is all there is. There is no second chance or reincarnation. You have the fortune to be here and to be able to appreciate that fact. You have one chance to play a part in world. How pointless it would be to step out earlier than you have to; something interesting might happen tomorrow!

Although there is no evidence that our mind (or soul) can exist without our body, and there are now a lot of scientific reasons for thinking that it cannot, we can believe in a 'soul' if it is another name for the ideas or information I leave (pass on to others).

We know that messages (ideas or instructions) can pass from one medium to another without changing meaning. I can write the first bars of Beethoven's 5th symphony on paper, play it on the piano, record it on tape, transfer it to a record, then to a CD, play it on a car radio, a sound system or computer or store it away dozens of different ways without changing the idea.

Many now believe that the entire universe can be reduced to information or messages (eg beliefs, ideas, genetic code, quantum theory and information theory in which the qualities of fundamental particles are constrained by the information they are able to carry). But if I were sending a message describing you it would be very inadequate if it failed to describe your body. You are your body; your brain is made of cells, even your memories and ideas are physical structures and events within your brain. It is no longer possible to believe that 'we' exist in isolation from our bodies. There can be no afterlife without them.

The realisation that we are alone in the vast Universe with an uncaring, distant or non-existent God and that when we die there may just be nothing is supposed to be frightening. But I think the opposite could be true.

In the movie the Truman Show[73], Truman discovers that his life is just an entertainment for others; that since his birth his whole life has been created and manipulated. He is given the choice of continuing to live in this protected 'heaven' or to leave to an uncertain, dangerous, 'godless' existence. Weir shows us that freedom is the only true 'life choice' and we applaud as Truman escapes.

I can't even begin to comprehend the idea of living without my body into the infinite future. If there was such a 'heaven' imagine how God would feel with many tens of billions of detached souls clamouring for His attention; forever.

Culturally we have a very ambiguous relationship with death. We can fear death but enjoy taking risks. You already enjoy dangerous recreations (skiing, rock climbing etc) and will likely add more. Most humans enjoy some danger, probably because success requires a degree of risk taking. Testing risk is probably a successful survival strategy favoured by our genes. Although we might be prepared to take personal risks we take great care to avoid risk to loved ones.

Society is much the same; we spend millions to avoid a single death in some areas while accepting death in large numbers in other areas. We even glorify some kinds of death. A soldier, sailor or pilot will be expected to risk their life 'for your country' or, more realistically, just to succeed in the action at hand. At other times you may choose to risk your life to save others (eg fire fighting or in a rescue). You have good genes and traditions for doing this, if called on, as many of your ancestors have done.

At the beginning of this essay I said that we are all defined by our ideas. I then argued that ideas are messages that we receive from others or our environment and I pointed out that genes are messages passed from generation to generation.

Each of us is a unique collection of messages. If you write in the sand and your message is washed away, where does it go? Its message may survive (as an arrangement of neurons) in the mind of anyone else who reads it. It might also survive as a photograph (a passing satellite perhaps or in any other medium) but the sand is rearranged.

When I die my genes and my ideas may go on in others, things I have said may be remembered, things that I made or wrote might survive me and changes I made to the way things are done or in the lives of others may leave my mark; but I will be gone. You might believe your purpose is to leave something you made, children or ideas for posterity but this is your choice not a principle of life.

At my father's cremation I concluded by saying:

'...it would be his fondest hope that we remember him as a good and honourable man; one who will go on in our hearts; through those he taught and helped and employed; through those improvements that he made to the world through his inventiveness, management and consulting work; and through his children and grandchildren.'

If you believe in improving 'the world' that's the best that anyone can hope for. When Woody Allen was asked if he wanted to achieve immortality through his films, he replied that immortality was of no interest to him since he would not be around to enjoy it. Don't sacrifice now for the hereafter.