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.
The Grim Reaper on a cottage in Netton Street,UK, by Trish Steel via Wikimedia Commons. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Grim_Reaper_-_geograph.org.uk_-_522625.jpg