Zen Physics The Science of Death the Logic of Reincarnation Read online

  By contrast with burial, today's most common mode of disposal, cremation, annihilates a corpse at tremendous speed. In less than an hour, in a gas fire at temperatures of between 1100 and 1750 degrees Fahrenheit, the body reduces to just a few pounds of white ash, which can then be stored or dispersed according to whim – scattered over a favorite hillside perhaps, or, in the most exotic way imaginable, jettisoned into space from a rocket to boldly go where Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, has gone before.

  Alternatively, organs of the body may be bequeathed so that they go on serving a useful function, other than as fertilizer, inside someone still alive. Yet another option was that chosen, in pretransplant days, by the British geneticist and writer J. B. S. Haldane:

  When I am dead I propose to be dissected; in fact, a distinguished anatomist has already been promised my head should he survive me. I hope that I have been of some use to my fellows while alive, and I see no reason why I should not continue to be so when dead. I admit, however, that if funerals gave as much pleasure to the living in England as they do in Scotland I might change my mind.

  Tragedy and dark comedy often seem to be companions in death. We take ourselves so seriously, invest such effort in our public image, work so hard at building a secure and comfortable niche for ourselves – and then what? All the pretense of modern life is stripped away and we end up desiccated, dissected, or decomposed.

  Or do we? Our organic forms are obviously doomed. But are we more than just our living bodies and brains? Does some part of us – an inner essence, a soul or spirit – escape the dissolution of flesh?

  Haldane put the case for the prosecution:

  [S]hall I be there to attend my dissection or to haunt my next-of-kin if he or she forbids it? Indeed will anything of me but my body, other men's memory of me, and the results of my life, survive my death? Certainly I cannot deny the possibility; but at no period in my life has my personal survival seemed at all a likely contingency.

  If I die as most people die, I shall gradually lose my intellectual faculties, my senses will fail, and I shall become unconscious. And then I am asked to believe that I shall suddenly wake up to a vivid consciousness in hell, heaven, purgatory, or some other state of existence.

  Now, I have lost consciousness both from blows on the head, from fever, anesthetics, want of oxygen, and other causes; and therefore I know that my consciousness depends on the physical and chemical conditions of my brain, and that very small changes in the organ will modify or destroy it.

  But I am asked to believe that my mind will continue without a brain, or will be miraculously provided with a new one.

  The basic materialist view of death, now widely held by scientists and layfolk alike, seems, on the face of it, bleak beyond despair. "We" – our minds – appear to be nothing more than outgrowths of our living brains, so that inevitably we must expire at the moment our neural support structures collapse. Death, from this perspective, amounts to a total, permanent cessation of consciousness and feeling – the end of the individual. Considering how anxious most of us are at the thought of losing merely our jobs or possessions, it is hardly surprising that, in an increasingly secular society, the fear of death – of losing everything, including ourselves – has become so deep and widespread. Yet exactly what are we afraid of?

  Epicurus pointed out the irrationality of fearing the end of consciousness in his Letter to Menoeceus:

  Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation. And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it takes away the craving for immortality. For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.

  Others have echoed this view, including Ludwig Wittgenstein: "We do not experience death," he insisted; "Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limit." To use a mathematical analogy, just as an asymptotic curve comes closer and closer to a line but never actually touches it, so we move closer toward death throughout life but never actually reach death in experience (if by death we mean the end of an individual's consciousness).

  Ironically, one of the possibilities we tend to dread the most – that death represents a one-way trip to oblivion – turns out to be something we need have no fear of at all. Socrates even enjoined us to look forward to it. In his Apology he explained:

  Death is one of two things. Either it is an annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything, or ... it is really a change – a migration of the soul from this place to another. Now if there is no consciousness but only a dreamless sleep, death must be a marvelous gain ... because the whole of time ... can be regarded as no more than a single night.

  We can put it even more dramatically than this. If death marks a permanent end of your consciousness, then from your point of view when you die, the entire future of the universe (running into tens of billions of years or more) must telescope down not just into a night, as Socrates described, but into a fleeting instant. Even if the universe were to go through other cycles of expansion and contraction, then all of these cycles as far as you are concerned would happen in zero time. What conceivable basis for fear could there be in such an absence of experience? We may as well be afraid of the gap between one thought and the next.

  Marcus Aurelius was among those who offered another way to come to grips with the prospect of nonbeing: the period after death, he pointed out, is like the period before birth. You didn't spend the billions of years before you were born in a state of anxiety and apprehension, because there was no "you" to be aware of anything. Looking back now, it doesn't seem frightening that there was once a time when you were not conscious. Why then should you be concerned about returning to that nonexistent, nonconscious state when you die?

  On a purely academic level, we can follow these arguments and appreciate the logic in them. And yet, for most of us, they ring hollow. They fail utterly to dispel the visceral dread we have of plunging into the terminal darkness, alone. The fear of death, timor mortis, the horror of the ultimate abyss that waits to claim us all, is far too deeply ingrained in our nature to be alleviated by mere rhetoric. Indeed, it is a fear whose origins go back to the very dawn of our planet.

  On Earth, at least, life began as molecules of increasing complexity came together purely by chance in the primitive terrestrial ocean. In one scenario, a rich chemical broth activated by unshielded high-energy radiation from the sun and powerful lightning strikes gave rise to the first molecules that could make copies of themselves – the precursors of today's DNA. There is no mystery about this. Any assortment of objects, especially "sticky" objects like molecules, randomly stirred for long enough will give rise to every conceivable possible combination. Over millions and millions of years, the simple atomic and molecular units bumping into one another, under energetically favorable conditions, must have come together in all sorts of different ways. Most of these complicated associations would have been unstable. And even if they had been stable under normal conditions, a hard enough collision with some other particle or a well-aimed ultraviolet ray would have broken them apart. Eventually, however, a certain formation of molecular units combined to give a supermolecule that, by chance, could act as the template and docking station for making precise copies of itself. No sooner did this happen then the supermolecule spread rapidly throughout the waters of the young Earth. Possibly there were several variants of such self-replicating substances which competed for resources. Not that there was any thought of competition at the time; there was as yet no substrate for thought at all. But in the chance emergence of self-copying molecules we can discern, from our future vantage point, the first stirrings of life, the beginnings of the struggle to survive in a potentially hostile world – and the origins of self.

  Nature lays down no boundaries between life and nonlife. What we choose to call li
ving is our own affair. Is an intricate self-replicating molecule alive? What if the molecule, through natural selection, acquires a kind of protective skin? The point at which we want to say that life has developed from nonlife is open to interpretation and debate since it is purely a human issue – a question of labels.

  In reality, self-copying materials just became progressively more effective at surviving, more elaborate, and more capable through a process of blind, natural competition. Having internalized, as it were, their own blueprint, they became subject to random mutation. Struck by a penetrating photon from the sun or possibly a cosmic ray, a self-replicator risked its internal code being minutely altered. And, if this happened, then in the next generation an individual built according to a slightly different design would be created (providing the change had not altogether impaired the assembly mechanism). Most commonly such a mutant would prove less effective than its parent at staying in one piece long enough to have offspring of its own. But very occasionally a mutant would be born with an advantage over its parent and peers – the ability, for instance, to make copies of itself more rapidly, or to better resist attack from competitors.

  In general terms, then, there is no problem in understanding how a variety of competing life-forms – primitive but steadily evolving toward greater sophistication – appeared on Earth long ago. None of these early creatures was anything more than a bundle of biochemicals wrapped up in a membrane bag. Even so, in their makeup and activity, we can recognize the inception of a new quality in the universe. These ancient gelatinous specks of matter showed the beginnings of self-interest and purpose. They had established barriers, definite, sustainable boundaries between themselves and the outside world. And although the heady heights of human intellect and introspection lay almost four billion years away, even the most elementary of life-forms harbored information at some level about what was part of their own constitution and what was not. They were, at least chemically, self-aware. Thus, the foundations for dualism – the belief in the separation of self and the rest of the world – were laid.

  What we see from our biased viewpoint to be the most significant advance in evolution is the movement toward increased cerebration – the development of bigger, more elaborate brains and nervous systems. The ability of a creature to retain within itself a sophisticated representation of the world outside is held by us in high regard. But the greatest accolade of all we reserve for ourselves and the capacity we alone seem to have to be conscious of ourselves as free agents in a world amenable to our control.

  Natural selection gives no vector of progress. There was never any master plan to build bigger, better brains. But with hindsight, it seems almost inevitable that once life had become established it would develop in the direction of increased self-awareness. To be aware of yourself is to have an effective knowledge of where you end and the rest of the universe begins, so you know precisely on which battle line to fight. And being an individual in the wild is a battle, a continual, desperate struggle to stay alive. Any number of events can destroy you. A terrifying array of predators are out there trying to make you their next meal. Or, if you are not sufficiently aware of what is going on around you, you may fall victim to some other unfortunate accident. Or you may simply not find enough to eat. And no one is going to help you. On the contrary, your equally determined adversaries will take full advantage of any sign of weakness that you display. Given such perilous circumstances, the stronger your sense and skills of self-preservation, the better it is for you. Indeed, being and remaining an individual necessitates that you be uncompromisingly selfish.

  We sometimes wonder how humans can be so cruel and ruthless, how they can lay waste to the planet with impunity, how they can exterminate other species and kill one another in alarming numbers. But such acts are not difficult after four billion years' practice. To stay alive at any cost, at anyone else's expense, is in our nature. It is the prime directive of our genes.

  We are driven relentlessly to survive. And to aid us in this quest we have become equipped with the most remarkable survival organ in the known universe – the human brain. Such is the brain's power that it can construct and maintain a vivid sense of its own identity, its own unique selfhood. And yet it can also, with equal ease, cast its thoughts into the future and see its own inevitable demise.

  Here, then, is the source of our greatest fear. We know full well that the brain and body will eventually break down. Yet such is our urge to carry on living that we cannot come to grips with the notion that the self presently associated with this doomed receptacle may similarly come to an abrupt end. The world and other selves will survive our personal death, we know. But this seems like small consolation if the particular selves that are you and I cannot, at least in some recognizable form, continue indefinitely.

  Perhaps it was bound to happen that our race would go through this stage of uncertainty in its development. Maybe all creatures in the universe who become self-aware pass through a lengthy phase when they wrestle with the potentially devastating contradiction of a self-conscious survival machine that knows beyond all doubt that it cannot survive. But our combined intellect is formidable, capable of revealing deep, unexpected truths about the origin and nature of the cosmos. And there are no grounds a priori to suppose that it cannot also penetrate the more personal mysteries of the human self and mortality. Considering the importance of these issues to us, the time is surely ripe to embark upon such an investigation. And, providing we are prepared to take a broad-minded scientific approach, we can expect after millennia of doubt to shed real light on the problems of who we are and what happens to us when we die.

  Chapter 2 – The Soul is Dead, Long Live the Self

  And we, who are we anyway?

  – Plotinus

  Throughout history, people have countered the threat of death by believing in the existence of an immortal human spirit or soul. This soul, which is supposed to encapsulate all that is important about a person, is generally thought of as being like a pilot who, during life, works the controls of the body and brain. At death, as the physical body plunges to its doom, the ghostly pilot ejects in the nick of time (or is rescued by divine intervention) and hence survives to live on in some hereafter. Or so the hope goes. It is an attractive and comforting idea. And there is no doubt that most of us do need some notion of this sort to hold on to, if only to imbue our lives and the lives of our loved ones with more meaning.

  It would be immensely reassuring, for instance, if a theory like that of the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes were to be scientifically vindicated. Descartes believed strongly in the separate existence of the body and the soul. And he went so far as to identify the seat of the soul as the pineal gland, a neurological structure he chose because it was both centrally located and the only bit of the brain he could find that was not duplicated in the two cerebral hemispheres. The tiny pineal gland, in Descartes' view, served as the meeting place, or interface, between the material brain and the immaterial soul, which he equated with the mind or ego.

  At first sight, it seems a reasonable enough conjecture (even though we might dispute the choice of the pineal). But the problems for any seat-of-the-soul hypothesis start as soon as we focus on the exact means by which the brain and the soul might interact. The brain is demonstrably built of ordinary matter, whereas the soul is presumed to consist of something else entirely – "mind stuff," or res cogitans, as Descartes called it. Crucially, the soul is held to be not merely tenuous, with an elusive nature similar to that of photons (light quanta) or neutrinos (capable of passing straight through the Earth without being absorbed), but actually nonphysical. In its very conception the soul stands outside the normal scheme of physics. And so, from the outset, we are at a loss to understand how it could possibly influence or be influenced by material objects, including the brain.

  By the same token, the soul could not be expected to leave any trace on a detector or measuring device – a point, however, that has fai
led to deter some researchers. Sporadic efforts have been made over the past century or so to disclose the departure of the soul by weighing people shortly before and after death, but with negative results. The intriguing electric fields that surround living things and that can be visualized through the technique of Kirlian photography have also been posited, unconvincingly, as evidence for a spiritual life force. And, most recently, advanced scanning methods have been employed, notably by the American neurologist Richard Restak, to search the inner recesses of the brain for a soul in hiding, but to no avail. The fact is, the soul as it is normally presented is not a phenomenon open to scientific investigation. Nor is there any logic in claiming, on the one hand, that the soul is nonphysical or supernatural and, on the other, that it can have physical effects. Science will never be able to disprove the existence of the soul, any more than it can disprove the existence of fairies or fire-breathing dragons. The gaps between what we know can always be filled with whatever people choose to dream up. But any rational inquiry into death must start from the evidence at hand.