| ZEN PHYSICS (what is this?) The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation David Darling 
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There was a young man who said “Damn!
It is borne upon me that I am
An engine which moves
In predestinate grooves
I'm not even a bus, I'm a tram!"
– anonymous
We would rightly regard someone who habitually spoke of himself as being a robot or a machine as being crazy. Yet this is precisely what science seems to be telling us about ourselves. The brain? An organic computer. Love? A process in those neurological systems that underpin mood. Anger? An activation of neural impulses in the amygdalahypothalamus structures. And self-consciousness as a whole? A fairly recent, emergent phenomenon of matter.
All of this may be true. We may, in one sense, be awesomely complex machines. But such a description fails to do proper justice to the human condition, because we are not only objects in the world but also objectifiers – and both aspects of our nature, the outer and the inner, need to be encompassed by any credible worldview.
Other people see you objectively, from a spectator’s standpoint, as a living human being with certain unique characteristics. They observe a body and, most importantly, on that body, a head. On that head they see a face – a face that in the subtleties of its ever-changing expressions projects a certain persona to the world. The eyes, in particular, have been called “the windows of the soul.” But this pretty description does not allow for the fact that the face may be, and generally is, a kind of mask (the Latin persona refers to the mask worn by actors in ancient theater: per = “through,” sonus = “sound”; hence, literally, the sound that comes through the mask) hiding our genuine feelings. The outward face we present for the benefit of others (and so, indirectly, of ourselves) more often than not is a pretense, a concealment or misrepresentation, of the true state of the mind.
There is, then, this exterior view of you as a dramatis persona – an actor playing his or her part on the world’s stage with the help of a convincing disguise. But there is also an interior view, to which you alone are privy. In mechanistic terms, as well as the appearance of the brain-body machine, there is the feeling of what it is like to be that machine – the subjective experience of being a certain someone. Consciousness, we might say, is the symmetry-breaking factor between the objective and the subjective.
To make this more clear, imagine that you are having your brain monitored by a superscanner. This scanner creates a detailed three-dimensional image highlighting the regions of the brain that are most active at any given time. Suddenly, a large screen in front of you, which had been dark, glows bright red. At the same instant, the scanner reveals a new region of activity in your brain – the physical correlate (presumably) of your perception of redness. Next, several other people have their brains scanned under exactly the same conditions. The result is a series of scans, including the one of your own brain, all of which are very similar. As far as you are concerned, the brain scans of the other people encapsulate all you can know of their reaction to the color red. In the language of physics, they represent complete “state descriptions” of your companions’ brains. But when it comes to the scan of your own brain, it is patently obvious that it falls well short of capturing everything about your experience of redness. For what it leaves out is nothing less than the conscious experience itself! A more precise definition of consciousness follows, then, as that property which makes a detailed state description of the observer’s own brain seem incomplete when compared with equally detailed state descriptions of the brains of other people. Another way of saying this is that no form of symbolic communication, verbal, graphical, or mathematical, can convey the essence of what it is like to be someone. Fortunately, each of us, being human, is already intimately familiar with what it is like to be one person. And since there is no reason to suppose that there are any great differences between the subjective experiences of one person and those of any other, language is in fact a useful way of telling each other what we are feeling.
Still, you are you, and I am me. Alike we may be in many ways, but undeniably we have our differences. Indeed, to a large extent, we are defined by our differences. To be a self is to be different from anyone else and to know it. And to be different and to know it involves having a clear conception of where “you” end and the rest of reality begins – an awareness of one’s boundaries.
At first sight, it may seem obvious that a person’s boundary – their interface with the external world – is just the surface of their skin. As Sigmund Freud put it: “The I is first and foremost a bodily I.” And it is certainly the simplest criterion of “I-ness” to apply. When we look at another human being, we have no trouble in deciding what is part of him or her and what is not. But the bodily I, by itself, is too simplistic a notion to capture all the possibilities of what we might consider ourselves to be. There is the question, for instance, of whether we are our bodies or whether we simply own them. The reductionist, the materialist, would claim the former, the Cartesian the latter.
In fact, the physical boundaries of self are nowhere near as fixed or well defined as we sometimes imagine them to be. If I lose an arm and have it replaced by a sophisticated prosthesis, does the artificial substitute become part of me or merely a new possession?
Today, implants, transplants, and prostheses can act as highly effective surrogates for so many bits of our original bodies that we are being forced to confront the issue of how much of a person can be replaced before a new individual is created. This dilemma will reach new proportions as partial transplants and prostheses for the brain become available. And in other ways, too, our physical bounds can appear to shift accordingly to circumstances. Normally mild-mannered and soft-spoken individuals, for instance, can at times seem to mutate alarmingly into aggressive, raving monsters when behind the wheel of a car, while skilled drivers and pilots often feel their vehicles to be seamless extensions of themselves. Has the link between man and machine become so close that we can sometimes regard the combination as being effectively like a new individual? And if so, what will be the consequences of even more intimate relationships between ourselves and our technology in the future as developments such as virtual reality take hold?
If you are nothing more than your body (or extended body), then is your corpse still you – or yours – after you die? Semantic problems obscure an easy answer. But more to the point, we are not really interested in our corpse, or the issue of its ownership, any more than we care about the fate of our hair once it has been cut off. What really matters to us is not what happens to our bodies when we die, but what happens to us. The implication is clear: we instinctively consider ourselves to be something more, or at least something very different, than just the material contents of our bodies and brains. We are the “what it is like to be” experience that our bodies and brains give rise to. And it is the long-term future of this “what-it-is-like-to-be-ness” that concerns us above everything else.
William James wrote: “Each of us spontaneously considers that by ‘I’ he means something always the same.” We know that our moods and attitudes alter from one day to the next. And we recognize, too, that great changes are associated with going through the various stages of life. Adolescence, in particular, is a time of dangerously rapid physical and psychological transformation – a time of enormous upheaval and insecurity. Yet, through it all, we believe that at root we remain one and the same person.
Two aspects of ourselves stand out as appearing to be of crucial importance. First, personal identity. You may not look or even think much like you did when you were five years old, yet in spite of this you believe that, in a deep, underlying sense, something about you – your identity – has remained uncompromised. This belief of yours is shared unquestioningly by the rest of society and has to some extent been cultivated in you by society’s influence. How very different the world might be if this belief were not widely held. If people did not generally maintain that personal identity were an inviolable fact then it would bring into question, for instance, whether an individual could be held responsible for a crime that he or she was supposed to have committed some time ago. If a person could not be uniquely or conclusively identified with any past self, then that person could not be said to have existed at the time of a particular crime. By the same token, we would not be able to take credit for anything worthwhile we thought we had done, since the achievements would be considered by others to belong to someone else who was no longer alive. Conventions such as marriage, parental rights, nationality, and ownership or membership of any kind would lose their meaning.
The second aspect of ourselves we consider to be fundamentally important is continuity. Identity and continuity may be spoken of as different qualities, but clearly they are related. The former implies the latter. Your identity is rooted in the continuous existence of your body. You look more or less the same as you did last year. And last year you looked more or less the same as you did the year before that. The chronologically arranged photos in your family album testify to the smooth and steady development of your body and appearance from infancy to the present day. No one would seriously argue with this. And just as obviously there seems to be a continuity in your mental life because of the relationship between your awareness and your brain.
“A person,” says philosopher Jonathan Glover, “is someone who can have I-thoughts.” To be capable of I-thoughts seems to imply the existence of self-consciousness. And yet both are elusive concepts. You know that you have I-thoughts. You know you are self-conscious. But in others it is not obvious how to decide when self-consciousness shades into a less focused form of awareness and when this, in turn, merges into an almost unconscious state. With regard to nonhuman species, for instance, how can we judge if any other animals might qualify, in a limited or modified sense, as persons? Does the brain of a bonobo (a pygmy chimp, the creature most genetically similar to ourselves) or a dolphin integrate its experiences in a manner that enables something resembling I-thoughts to emerge? Or, are I-thoughts the exclusive privilege of life-forms that have evolved a language sophisticated enough to subtend a symbolic image of self? In considering such matters we need constantly to bear in mind that just because we have words such as “I,” “self,” and “person” in our vocabulary gives us no guarantee that they correspond to anything real outside of our cultural context. How we choose to define and interpret the terms we have invented is entirely up to us, and nature is not compelled to follow suit.
Most people would be happy to agree that a jellyfish is not a person in that it almost certainly can’t think of itself as an “I.” To say that it can’t think at all would be going too far – a jellyfish can process some kinds of information in ways that today’s artificial intelligence researchers would be only too glad to be able to emulate in their machines. But a jellyfish cannot (as far as we know) generate thoughts such as “I’m happy,” “I am being touched,” or “I am stinging my lunch to death.”
Children sometimes ask: “If you had to be a different kind of animal, what would it be?” Few people in their right minds (or rather, in their left minds – see chapter 6) would choose to be a jellyfish, or an ant, a worm, or a grasshopper. To be any of these, most of us might imagine, would probably be not much better or worse than being nonexistent. On a wish list of alternative life-forms, creatures with small brains or no brains at all would tend to come near the bottom, for the simple reason that we use mental prowess (gauged roughly by brain-to-body-size ratio) when differentiating between lower and primitive animals and those considered to be further up the evolutionary ladder. If you couldn’t be human, the chances are you’d choose to be an ape, a cetacean, or a relatively smart domesticated animal such as a dog or a horse. You would naturally opt for a species that seemed to have a relatively secure, pleasant life, and that also had the wits to appreciate it – a species, in other words, that was as nearly human as could be arranged.
We sometimes wonder what it would be like to be a different kind of creature. Yet, in a sense, we already know, because we have effectively been different kinds of creatures during our own development. The growth of an individual human parallels, or recapitulates at a vastly accelerated rate, the general evolution of life on earth. We start out as a single-celled organism, like a bacterium or an amoeba. Then we progress through a simple, undifferentiated multicellular stage (a blastula) to become an embryo that, early on, is barely distinguishable from the embryos of many other animals, including reptiles and amphibians. For the first few weeks after conception we are truly a lower form of life ourselves, bathed in a warm amniotic sea. So, how did it feel to you? Can you recall? The problem seems to be that you were not really around at the time. And, consequently, it is difficult to imagine in what form any memories of this primal, pre-you phase of existence could be meaningful to or capable of being experienced by you now. By the same token, our brief spell as primitive creatures in the womb strongly suggests that lower life-forms have no well-developed conscious sense of self.
It seems that what we really mean by ourselves – the feeling of being an “I” – is not an all-or-nothing affair. In other species it may exist in a guise unfamiliar to us. In humans, it develops and changes over time. What we call self-awareness surely emerges as our minds construct an increasingly sophisticated symbolic representation of the outside world – an internalized portrayal of reality that, at some point during early childhood, comes to include our own bodies. Almost certainly, the same process took place during the evolution of mankind as a whole.
Much of what we believe about ourselves derives from how others relate and react to us. And, for this reason, total isolation from society can prove devastating. In 1988, a French woman, Veronique Le Guen, spent a record-breaking 111 days alone underground, 250 feet below the surface at Valat-Negre in southern France. Deprived of a clock, natural light, and any form of contact with others, Le Guen had only her diary for company. In one of the entries she described herself as being “psychologically completely out of phase, where I no longer know what my values are or what is my purpose in life.” It was an experience from which she never properly recovered, and in January 1990, at the age of thirty-three, she committed suicide. Her husband said, “She had an emptiness inside her which she was unable to communicate.”
Regular, close social interaction is vital to our self-definition, to bringing the fuzzy edges of our psychological bounds back into focus. (This is strangely analogous – and I wonder if it may be more than that – to the situation in quantum mechanics [see chapter 10] where repeated observations of an atomic nucleus serve to prevent it from decaying.) We assimilate the responses of our fellow humans both to our appearance and our behavior. And this results in a feedback loop. Our appearance and behavior are subject to change according to the internal image we hold of ourselves. And any modifications in how we appear outwardly affect people’s responses to us, which may result, again, in further alterations to our inner beliefs about ourselves. If people approve of how we look and act – if we conform to some positive, preconceived stereotype – then we will be praised and generally treated well, a response that will strengthen the already good self image we hold. On the other hand, if we deviate much from the norm and act disreputably, the feedback we receive will serve to confirm our worst fears that we are among society’s outcasts.
Experiments have been carried out in which people’s usual personas and roles are temporarily and drastically altered. In one of these studies, a group of college students was arbitrarily divided into two groups – prison warders and prisoners. The students were cut off from the outside world and encouraged to act their respective parts as realistically as possible. The warders pretended to treat their charges as potentially dangerous and untrustworthy criminals, while the latter feigned to look upon the uniformed officers as hated oppressors. After a short time, however, the students found themselves completely taken over by their roles; they were no longer acting. The warders genuinely regarded the inmates as being inferior and often behaved toward them in a brutal and domineering way. The prisoners, on the other hand, became cowed and actually afraid.
It is remarkable how much and how easily our self-image can be changed by outside influences. Dress one day in torn jeans and unironed shirt, your hair unkempt, your attitude careless; then the next day go out to the same places in your best attire, immaculately groomed, acting confidently and assured. The difference in how others will treat you is staggering (I speak from experience!). Moreover, this dramatic shift in the attitude of others will have a powerful influence on how you feel about yourself. You will feel, literally, like a different person.
Of course, most of the time we don’t go out of our way to fabricate a new image of ourselves every day. We wear a uniform, in the broadest sense – a stable overall persona – because in this way we ensure that the reactions of others to us are reasonably predictable. And so the world is rendered less threatening and stressful. Our efforts at conforming to some particular role, whether it be as a rebel or as a stalwart of society, and the subsequent stabilizing of others’ reactions to us, results in the creation of what seems to us, on the inside, a fairly well-defined, consistent self. We recognize “ourselves” more and more easily as we age; our life patterns become more and more predictable. But this is not to say that the self is ever really solid or secure. The self, the inner “I,” remains no more than whatever feeling we are having at the present moment – a feeling shaped by the memories our brains have laid down of past experiences.
You and I are different not because different things are happening to us right now, but because, throughout our lives, our brains have acquired different narratives and ways of responding to the world. We are the products of our life stories. Your story is different than mine. But what is crucial in defining and distinguishing between us is not so much the differences between the actual events and surroundings that you and I have encountered, as it is the different way in which our brains have interpreted and remembered what has happened to us. An essential part of being human involves trying to make sense of the world, seeking and finding meaning (whether it is there or not). We have to do this from one moment to the next, every second of our lives. So, inevitably, a lot of what we remember is not what actually happened – whatever this may mean – but rather a kind of myth or confabulation that helps us sustain the impression that we know what is going on. We tell ourselves white lies all the time to bridge the gaps in our understanding of an impossibly complex world. And not only do we fail to realize they are untruths (indeed this would undermine all our efforts) but we lay down these countless little fictions in our memories and subsequently treat them as if they were factual. We maintain a sense of continuity and so provide a basis for our feeling of personal identity at the cost of never knowing what is true. We are as much a myth as the stories we tell ourselves.
How then can we discover what is real – assuming there is such a thing? Stories we may be. The self, the “I,” the ego, whatever we choose to name what we thought was our true essence, may be as insubstantial as a unicorn’s fear of a dragon. But we cannot just leave it there. We do feel like someone, a being with inner depth. And we do want to know what it will feel like to die, and whether what follows death feels like anything at all.