A Quinternion of Thoughts about Death
1. So I want to talk in a rational and analytical style about death and to explore different approaches to thinking about it. One approach that people have, is to say that dying is essentially equivalent to going to sleep. When you go to sleep, time passes, you have no consciousness of it. When you die, time passes, you have no consciousness of it.
So one should take the same attitude to death, to your own personal death, as going to sleep, which sounds attractive superficially, but I would say that a counter argument to that easy equivalence is that you feel that you are enmeshed, most of us, in personal relationships with a partner, with children, with relatives, with friends, with communities.
When you go to sleep, you imagine that you'll wake up again and resume your duties of care and your relationships with all those significant people. When you die, it's like you suddenly walk away and you never come back. So that sense of loss, both on your part, your loss of other people forever, and also their presumed loss of you, surely makes you think that death is very non-equivalent to falling asleep.
2. Okay, let's progress then. So, if you're a religious believer, whether you're in the Jewish - well, perhaps not the Jewish, but certainly the Islamic or the Christian tradition, and you are essentially a down-the-line, fairly literal believer, then you will believe that when you die, if you're a good person, you will go to a better place. It might be purgatory, it might eventually be heaven. Various things might be in your personal future which are not of this world, but certainly it's not nothingness.
But as has often been observed, Christians are no less concerned about death than non-Christians. Nobody seems to look forward to it, except in the few cases of the martyrs who perhaps have specially fervent beliefs. But for most people, the general background belief that death is not the end of their personal experience doesn't seem to come as all that much of a consolation, although it's obviously some.
One might say, by analogy, that back in earlier centuries, if somebody in Europe, say an Irish person during the Great Famines, went to America, leaving their family and extended kin network behind, then they might have every expectation of being able to make a new life for themselves, but a life perhaps with no communications back home at all. They might never be heard of again, it would be like going to heaven, where the heaven, say, was America or Australia, and the rupture with that kin group might be total in the absence of mail services and so on.
Would people think that, on the point of departure on that ship to America or to Australia, that they would have the same feelings about the lack of future connections with all of their relationships to date, whether they would feel the same way about that rupture, as they would if they were about to die, do you think?
3. All of this sort of assumes the extreme individuality of one's sense of consciousness, the sense that you are a person with a personal history, personal memories, and personal relationships, and everybody else is really quite different. Even if they really exist at all, some might secretly believe.
But perhaps it's equally arguable that essentially we're all much the same, so humanity is really almost like a commonality of consciousnesses, which are extremely similar to each other, in the same way that we think all ants in an ant's nest are essentially almost interchangeable from a distance.
In which case, if my consciousness gets snuffed out by death, in the broader scheme of things, most consciousnesses do not get snuffed out by my death. They carry right on: the memories, the feelings, the emotions, the hopes, the relationships - they all carry on. And perhaps I should not feel so isolated. I should just feel that the continuation of that web of relationships and of consciousnesses, the flame of consciousness, spread over many, many, many individuals, is what really needs to carry on, and which should be welcomed as carrying on. And that my personal contribution and role as a node in that is really somewhat minimal, even disposable.
And I'm wondering whether certain, perhaps Eastern philosophies, Buddhism, or Confucianism, or some other similar thought systems might tend to emphasise that view?
4. Okay, so now we could move on to some other, frankly speculative ways of thinking. Let's consider panpsychism, which is seeing new popularity; the sense that consciousness is perhaps something that is more depersonalised than some pseudo-reality that lives inside your skull only, and has no existence apart from the functioning of one's neurons.
Although materialism obviously has its attractions, at the end of the day we don't understand how material reality gets to create qualia and emotions and feelings and all those experiential aspects of being a person for oneself - being ‘something like it is like something to be’ as the jargon has it. It might instead be argued that there's a kind of analogy here with the way radios work in the context of broadcast radio signals.
Okay, so here's the analogy. Suppose consciousness is an ontologically valid category. It's something that exists as part of the structure of reality, and by analogy it's like a modulated electromagnetic radiation field which permeates space and time. We generally can't - or matter in general doesn't - interact with, say, Radio 3 as a transmitted signal. You require a very specialized piece of equipment called a radio, which can interact with and engage with the electromagnetic source signal, which is a radio station.
And in the same way, it might be argued that you need very specialized things called nervous systems to interact with the universal category of consciousness as an ontological reality. We don't know how that interaction would work because we don't understand consciousness at all. Nobody knows anything about consciousness in reality, certainly not affectively, at the level of experiential qualia. One is therefore free to speculate about a variety of ways of thinking about it.
On that model, what religion is talking about is trying to make sense out of consciousness as an independent dimension of the reality of the universe, peopling it with personalised, immediate, familial-type notions like Personal Gods and all kinds of God-human interactions which reflect family dynamics, essentially to create some dramatic backcloth to the underlying common experience of consciousness and the belief that perhaps when we die, it's more like that the radio has broken or worn out; the signal somehow is still there and maybe it's two-way.
But of course there is zero evidence for such a view.
5. So let me just conclude by saying that everybody dies, and we understand from an evolutionary biology point of view why complex creatures die, and why the disparate lifespans that different species have are adaptive trade-offs between immediate reproductive success and the benefits of living in and mastering that complicated world within which organisms exist.
You know, there's a lot of discussion about repair mechanisms and their cost, r/K selection theory, and so forth. We know a lot about the mechanics of lifespan and the almost-inevitability of death. Apparently, there are some non-senescent organisms but most complex organisms are not immortal for very good reasons.
So it seems, on that basis, that since death is not only inevitable as a matter of fact, but it's also pre-programmed as a matter of genetic and evolutionary optimisation, and one understands that not only does it happen as a matter of fact, contingently, but it's kind of necessary for it to happen - by design - we should develop a philosophy which accepts that fact, and trying to fight it, and trying to say that it's somehow unfair or wrong or that it's something that we have an intellectual problem with seems to be confusing ourselves and rejecting something on emotional grounds, which actually we know we should not be rejecting.
So perhaps, in the end, we need to understand why quite naturally people are afraid of death and why people don't want it, understand it in the sense that organisms which are careless about their existence are not necessarily the ones that are going to leave the most descendants.
So there is a biological reason for caring about not dying, but at the same time, rejecting the idea of dying altogether also seems to be something which is delusional and not at all in tune with the way we correctly function as finite organisms.
So, as the stoics suggested, we should naturally seek to prevent avoidable death, but not obsess about its natural inevitability?
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