| ZEN PHYSICS (what is this?) The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation David Darling 
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What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.
– Aristotle
So here we are: brains in conversation, trying to understand and come to terms with death. We want to know what it will involve, what it will feel like, what will happen after the last shallow breath and feeble heartbeat, after the sheet is finally drawn over our still features. Of this much we can be certain: within a matter of minutes, at some future time, our brains will become terminally starved of oxygen and will cease to function. All of the memories they so recently held, together with the power to integrate two selves – you and I – will be lost. Put this way, it sounds catastrophic. It sounds hopeless, terrifying, terrible. But how will it really be for us when the time comes?
Our great difficulty in thinking about death is that we can see it only in others, never in ourselves. (I'm reminded of a quote from a dying student nurse in Allegra Taylor's book Acquainted with the Night: "Death may get to be a routine for you, but it is new to me. You may not see me as unique, but I've never died before.") And viewed objectively it does look depressing – lifeless corpses, despair, mourning, decay, loss. Since our only contact with death is as an outsider this is our natural basis for envisaging what our own death will be like. But our own death is special and unique, because we shall be part of it, inside it, the one who actually dies. And as experienced, rather than observed, death is a very different proposition.
Witnesses regularly report that in the last days or hours of life, a dying person will appear serenely calm and at peace with the world, and even, on occasions, extraordinarily joyful and elated. And there are the reassuring testimonies, too, of people who have been through near-death experiences in which reference is often made to almost indescribably blissful sensations. The final passage leading to death is evidently, in the great majority of cases, not at all unpleasant. Indeed, for those who have suffered from a long, painful, or debilitating illness, such as cancer, the immediate prelude to death can be anticipated as a time of welcome deliverance from suffering. As for the moment of death itself, if we take this to mean the total breakdown of cognitive function (brain death) at the end of a person’s life, then, as experienced, it will be over in a painless, trouble-free instant.
To those who knew and loved a person who has just died there is obviously great regret and sadness at his or her departure. But, if we are being honest (and it is especially hard to be objective about such matters following a bereavement), at least a part – and perhaps a very large part – of the sadness we feel is for ourselves because we have lost someone dear, like a cherished possession. We will no longer have the pleasure of their company, and so we are consumed, understandably, by self pity. Moreover, the death of another, especially a close family member like a parent or spouse, reminds us keenly of our own mortality.
The terrible thing about death, then, is not the actual experience that awaits us – we all know what it is like to lose consciousness – but the angst and feeling of insecurity it instills in us now. It preys on our mind that, despite all the assurances of religion and the many tales of people who claim, in all sincerity, to have glimpsed wonderful visions of the other side of life, there may, quite simply, be nothing to come. And however irrational, however futile it may be to fret about death, we are psychologically paralyzed by the thought of a timeless, mindless void.
We seek comfort. But what does science do? It rejects the soul as an implausible and unnecessary hypothesis and reduces what is left of us to the musings of a moist, cauliflower-like (though nonetheless remarkable) lump of tissue. Have general anesthesia, go comatose, or just fall into a deep, dreamless sleep, it asks, and where are you? You are nowhere, because in such situations the brain temporarily stops generating the feeling of being someone. The brain makes you, it dissolves you, it brings you back again. And, as psychology and neurology have emphatically shown, when the brain’s workings are altered or impaired, the sense of self they give rise to is correspondingly changed or diminished so that you become no longer the person you were. The scientific evidence for an intimate brain-self link is overwhelming. But the problem seems to be that if we are persuaded by such no-nonsense materialism, and if at the same time we abandon faith in a higher, spiritual domain, our hopes for the future will be dashed. Such is the brooding and pervasive concern of contemporary Western society. But it is a concern that is wholly unjustified.
What most of us instinctively hope for is to be able to continue, after we die, as the person we are now. We may be happy to accept a change of scenery and circumstances, but our overwhelming desire is to survive death with our current selves intact. There is a general assumption that, in denying the existence of the soul, science precludes such a possibility. But it does not. On the contrary, science can supply an astonishing variety of scenarios, any one of which amounts to nothing short of secular reincarnation.
To take just one example: we know from experience that we carry on thinking we are the same person throughout life despite the ceaseless turnover of our constituent particles. And this is just what theory would predict. Because all atoms of a given type are identical, it doesn’t matter which particular ones happen to temporarily form part of our bodies and brains. Therefore, it follows that if your brain were to be reconstituted, at some point in the future, down to the last atom (and perhaps the replication wouldn’t need to be anywhere near this precise), you would live again. The chance of such atomic level re-creation taking place might seem incredibly remote. But set against this improbability is the fact that the universe is extremely large and long lived. It may also be cyclic, alternating repeatedly between epochs of growth and collapse. Some cosmologists have recently gone further and proposed that our cosmos may be just one of countless universes that exist like bubbles in an inconceivably vast ocean of foaming space-time. In any event, since no one has yet come near to circumscribing the bounds of physical reality, we cannot rule out the possibility that any specific collection of matter, however complex, will recur – and recur many times over – in the distant future. Our uncertainty as to the full extent of the universe leaves open the prospect of a given brain being recreated and therefore the possibility of its associated conscious mind coming back into operation. The same argument applies, with equal strength, to the past of an indefinitely old universe, or collection of universes. If your brain has existed before, then in some sense it must be that “you” have existed before — perhaps an infinite number of times.
Were this mind-boggling scenario of recurring yous to be enacted in reality, the jump from one “phase” of your existence to the next, as experienced by you, would be instantaneous. Since you would not be conscious of anything in the intervening periods (you would after all be dead during these times!), you would not be aware in the slightest of any passage of time between when you last existed, even if tens or hundreds of billions of years had gone by. Any periods during which your brain was not (reasonably) accurately configured would be timeless instants from your subjective point of view.
This may seem like a stratospheric flight of speculation. Nevertheless, it is true that given the limitations of our current knowledge of cosmology, there is as much reason to suppose that materialism leads to a prediction of eternal life as it does to a prediction of nonexistence. And neither need give us any cause for concern. The Epicureans and the Stoics realized more than two thousand years ago that there was nothing to be afraid of in permanent extinction. Now, without assuming anything more than an indefinitely long-lived and varied cosmos, we have arrived at an alternative scenario of eternal life.
Yet it may be premature to start uncorking the champagne. We need to consider carefully what “eternal life” on these terms might mean. Nowhere in the picture of recurring yous just outlined is there a mechanism, an escape pod (like a soul), for transferring memories between successive phases of your existence. So, apparently, there is no way you could know or build upon the fact that you had lived before. Any previous yous might as well have been different people with differently patterned brains. As far as you were concerned, at any moment in time, it would be as if you had only one life, bounded by a single birth and death, not a series of more or less identical lives scattered across different epochs in cosmic history. Frustratingly, you would not be able to carry on where you had left off in your last life, or enjoy interphase continuity of any kind, because you could not inherit or benefit from what your previous incarnation had achieved. At the same time this wouldn’t matter to you since you wouldn’t know about it.
Eternal life punctuated by bouts of total amnesia seems to offer no advantage over an ordinary mortal life followed by permanent extinction. What most of us hope for after death is something quite different – a chance to live forever under circumstances not unlike those of the popular Christian notion of heaven. We fantasize about spending the rest of eternity in a gardenlike Eden, fraternizing with other kindly souls, without the inconvenience of having to die again at some point. Genuine eternal life on this basis sounds idyllic. But, again, looked at more closely, it rapidly loses its appeal. Imagine spending endless eons – trillions upon trillions of years – with the same people in the same place doing the same things (but not, rumor has it, involving such diversions as sex or alcohol). If this is paradise, one can scarcely conceive what hell might have in store.
In Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, the hero discovers what a curse everlasting life can be during his stay in the land of Luggnagg. Every so often in this country, a child is born with a distinctive mark on its forehead indicating that it is a Struldbrugg – an individual who can never die. Gulliver supposes, naturally enough, that the Struldbruggs must become steadily wiser and wealthier than anyone else since they have all the time in the world to accumulate knowledge and riches. But, in fact, it turns out that the Struldbruggs, though normal until about the age of thirty, thereafter become increasingly dejected, opinionated, peevish, vain, unsociable, and envious – especially of the dead. Eventually, they lose their teeth, hair, appetite, memory, and ability to communicate. They become, in other words, permanently and unpleasantly senile, and are universally despised. Gulliver learns that only in those countries not having Struldbruggs is death considered to be an evil to be delayed as long as possible.
Not having journeyed with Gulliver, we tend to have a superficial and, therefore, exceptionally rosy view of what eternal life would be like. And there is no doubt we have a powerful urge, at least while we are healthy and active, to go on living as long as possible. How many of us would spurn the offer of a safe drug that guaranteed, barring accident, an additional fifty years of top-quality life? That extra half century might allow us to survive to a time when still more powerful drugs, or other techniques, become available for extending life for much greater periods. Gerontologists are already suggesting such breakthroughs may happen in the early part of the twenty-first century. And so we might continue, indefinitely, leapfrogging down the generations. The trouble is that, under such circumstances, we might well become obsessed with clinging on to life, dissatisfied with whatever time was left to us, frightened even to go outdoors in case death came by accident, concerned only with the quantity of life and not its quality.
Voltaire was another who understood well that a longer life is not necessarily a better one. In his comic, cosmic satire, Micromegas, an inhabitant of Saturn complains that the people on his planet live only to the age of fifteen thousand years.
So you see, we in a manner begin to die at the very moment we are born: our existence is no more than a point, our duration an instant, and our globe an atom. Scarce do we begin to learn a little, when death intervenes before we can profit by experience: for my own part, I am deterred from laying any schemes. I consider myself a single drop in an immense ocean.In reply, a creature from Sirius points out that the folk of his world live seven hundred times longer than on Saturn. Moreover, he adds, there are some places where people live a thousand times longer than Sirians, and still complain about the shortness of life.
A long or endless life grounded in perpetual routine and repetition could become a weary treadmill – an existence from which we would be only too glad to escape, even if it meant death. In just such a frame of mind must the aging Jefferson have been when he wrote to a friend: “I am tired of putting my clothes on every morning and taking them off every evening.”
And there is another potential problem with life everlasting. We are all familiar with the worrying sensation that time seems to pass by more and more swiftly as we age. Could it be that the human brain keeps track of the passage of time by the frequency of novel additions to its memory? In our youth, most of the experiences we encounter during the course of a day are new or have some element of newness. This makes them memorable, in the sense that there is potential survival value in the brain adding them to its store for future reference. It seems reasonable to assume that our subjective experience of the passage of time is linked to the availability of fixed objective reference points. And this is evidenced by the absence or gross distortion of time sense which people report when they spend extended periods in total isolation. When we are young, all sorts of events in the outside world catch our attention and are subsequently ferreted away in our brain. With so many novel entries being made in our daily memory diary, the experience of time is stretched out. But as we grow older, more and more of the things we do and see are mere repetitions of what has happened before. Habituated actions, sights, and sounds fail to register in our consciousness: the loudly clicking clock that its owner no longer hears, the daily drive to work that is done on mental autopilot, there are many such examples. As our lives revolve increasingly around set routines so there is less need for the brain to lay down fresh memory traces – our “novel event density” falls dramatically while, at the same time, the passage of our lives alarmingly speeds up.
We seem to be faced with a dilemma. We have a strong urge to remain the same, either by staying alive or by surviving death as the person we are now. Yet the enjoyment of life, and indeed the very experience of life in a fully conscious way, seems to hinge upon novelty and change. We don’t want to die, to stop being who we are now. But continued existence of any meaningful kind seems to demand that we eventually become someone else. How can we make sense of this apparent contradiction?
Science has revealed that we are the products of an evolutionary process that goes back billions of years. Everything that is part of us – our cells, tissues, organs, and organ systems – has come about because it proved successful in the great survival stakes. And the brain is no exception. The brain evolved, at least in part, as a means to allow a creature to learn from what happens in its life, to retain key elements of experience so that they are available for favorably influencing future action. A physicist might liken the brain to an instrument that automatically records the most relevant parts of its own “world line,” its unique private meanderings through the four-dimensional realm of space and time. We don’t find this difficult to believe in the case of brains in general. But when it comes to our own brain we are reluctant to accept that it is “just” an information processor – and one, moreover, with a depressingly short mean time to failure. We want to equip it with a soul that offers it a way of escape when the brain dies. We will do anything to avoid facing the possibility that who we are now cannot continue. And it is not difficult to see why this should be so. As Rick Blaine, Humphry Bogart’s character in Casablanca, put it: “I’m the only cause I’m interested in.” Everything about us – our bodies, our brains, our selves – is geared for self-preservation. If this were not so, if the self were not wholly preoccupied with the business of staying alive (ultimately to propagate its genes) then we humans would not be here today. In fact, it is no overstatement to say that the prime biological function of the self is to be afraid of death. Only by being so contrived can the self play its critical survival role.
This seems to put us in a difficult position. Awareness of self and awareness of mortality effectively go hand in hand. Self and the death-fear almost certainly came into existence together, both during the evolution of the human race and during the evolution of each human being from birth to adulthood. They are inextricable. And, as a consequence, only together can they disappear. Nothing that “we” – our selves – can say or do or think will quell our terror of dying. The self can never come to terms with its own extinction. And yet, having said this, the situation is far from hopeless. In fact, we now hold the key to the solution of our problem: to understand what lies beyond death we need only understand what lies beyond self.
And what are selves other than the sum of our differences? At the beginning of our lives, we are all, from a subjective standpoint, equal and undifferentiated. A newborn does not and cannot distinguish itself from the world around it – there is no self, no person, no firm sense of boundary. Only we, as mature selves looking on, make a distinction between the latent individual and his surroundings. Even during childhood, perhaps until late adolescence, the feeling of selfhood is not completely well defined. One indication of this is that young people can be remarkably stoic and even sanguine in the face of impending death, a fact that shines through from the deeply moving, uplifting statements that many children make when faced with terminal illness. It is only as we age that we start to think more and more of the particular brain and self we “own” as having a special, privileged status – of being a unique, treasured possession that we are desperate not to lose. Increasingly we become, in the most basic sense of the word, selfish. And once the self is fully installed, as “you” and “I” are now, feeling secure, confident of its own inner story, then it becomes impossible for it to conceive of its own demise. The psychological barrier preventing us from coming to terms with death, from our self’s point of view, is utterly impenetrable. In fact, it becomes impossible for the self to contemplate any kind of change in itself, because to change is to become someone else, and to become someone else is to cease to exist as the person you are now. Logically and practically, change to the self is the exact equivalent of death. Even to go back and become the child you once were would seem frightening, unless you could take your present cargo of memories with you – in other words, transfer who you are now into your former body. To obliterate the memories of the intervening years would be to destroy an essential part of your current self. And the self, here and now, is satisfied by nothing less than the prospect of having continued access to all the memories that define it.
Yet the scientific evidence is clear that the brain never stops changing throughout life. Its neural configuration is in a continuous state of flux, the pattern of synapses shifting, individual connections forming and breaking, the dendrites (nerve cell endings) and axons (nerve cell bodies) extending and retracting like the pseudopodia of amoebae in response to every new thought and sensation. And since we arise, at any given time, from the particular configuration and state of our brains, we also, viewed objectively, are subject to continual change. We are forever gaining new memories, losing old ones, having different feelings – or, rather, being different feelings – so that the permanent creature we take ourselves to be is in reality a marvelous artifice of the brain.
For the vast majority of the time, the brain assimilates change so adroitly, its primal urge to maintain coherence and internal consistency is so strong, that the change appears to take place exclusively in the outside world. It seems not to affect “us” at all. As far as the self is concerned, it feels like a rock against which the waves of external change relentlessly and harmlessly break. But there is a limit to how much flux the brain can handle and still maintain the illusion of a constant inner “I.” Once this critical threshold has been passed, the self senses the threat to its continued existence and reacts by becoming afraid. For this reason, although we are not apprehensive about ordinary day-to-day experiences, we become very nervous indeed about situations that represent a sudden shift from our normal way of life. Leaving home, embarking on a new career, getting married or divorced, having children, losing a loved one, all generate internal stress because they confront the brain with a degree and rapidity of change from which it cannot shield the self. These, then, are transformative experiences, sudden twists and jumps in the inner narrative, that alter the self to such an extent that it goes through a period of uncertainty, instability, and doubt before settling down into a new equilibrium state. During such disturbances to the self, a person is launched along a new trajectory in life, surrounded by very different circumstances, and suddenly inundated with fresh memories and ideas. We acknowledge marked outward changes in character that may ensue in phrases such as “Marriage has made a new man of him” or “She has never been the same since her husband’s death.” However, because the individual who has been through the change still looks the same and appears to us to have access to all of his or her old memories, we don’t conventionally go so far as to say that an entirely new person has been created. But this is where we make our mistake. A new person has been created, and it is only by challenging preconceived notions, by bringing our view of self into line with contemporary scientific evidence, that we can hope to properly understand the implications of death.
In physics, the classical mechanics of Newton provides a perfectly workable model for most everyday applications. Only in exceptional situations, for example at very high relative speeds or in very strong gravitational fields, does the Newtonian approximation break down and need to be replaced by the more precise formulations of Einstein. A parallel exists with our conception of the self. In most ordinary circumstances the self approximates well to the Cartesian ideal of a fixed ego, both from an objective and a subjective point of view. But as conditions deviate increasingly from the norm, it becomes necessary to switch to a new, more realistic conception of the self as a dynamic process subject to continuous and unpredictable change.
The problem we face is that unlike in physics, where Einstein’s notions of space and time have superseded those of Newton, our conventional ideas about the self remain strictly “classical” and very outmoded. Despite the startling progress made by neurology in uncovering the mechanisms of the brain, as a society we have not yet moved on from the body-soul dualism of René Descartes. This leaves us as nonplused as the classical physicists were at the end of the nineteenth century when they were confronted with observations – such as the constancy of the speed of light – that their theories were unable to explain. The old generation of physicists invented the ether. We cling to the idea of the rock-solid self, the indestructible ego, and the possibility of a spirit that will carry away our true essence at the moment of death. But just as the ether failed in the end, so too our antiquated notions about the self have proved inadequate to account for cases in which the inner world of an individual is damaged, fragmented, divided, rejoined, destroyed, or remade.
The crucial point to realize is that the death, or changing, of the self from one moment to the next and death as we normally understand it differ only in degree. In nature, in essence, they are identical. Like radio waves and gamma rays, they simply lie at opposite ends of the same continuous spectrum. Thanks to numerous psychological and neurological case studies we now have the ability to mark off points virtually all the way along this spectrum, so that physical death need no longer be seen as a unique, isolated, inexplicable, phenomenon. At the “little death” end of the spectrum, for example, are cases of minor memory loss that chip away, by varying amounts, at the supposedly immutable thing we think of as personal identity. Further along come more profound cases of amnesia or other manifestations of brain damage – especially to the prefrontal lobes – that can affect the brain’s power to integrate a clear and secure sense of self. Somewhere in the middle of the “death spectrum” are conditions such as MPS in which a person may fragment or flicker in and out of subjective existence or even (as in the case of “Sally”) effectively die by merging with other personalities. Finally, near the “big death” end of the spectrum are found instances of total, permanent amnesia that completely obliterate one person and are followed by the emergence of a different person as new memories are laid down.
It might be objected that total amnesia differs fundamentally from actual death because in the former case a physical body and brain survive. This survival is recognized objectively by others and can subsequently be pointed out to the new person who arises, even though all memories of the previous occupant of the body have been internally erased and replaced. By contrast, when a person dies in the conventional way there is no functional body or brain left to provide any outward sign of continuity. But this physical continuity is irrelevant, for two reasons. First, although the brain survives overall (and, if we could see it, would look superficially the same) it is almost certainly altered beyond recognition at the level of synaptic connections. In its microscopic details, the post total amnesia brain, following recovery, can be expected to be as different from the preamnesia brain as it is from any other brain. In computational terms, it is an entirely different neural network – and it is the specific wiring pattern of a brain that is pivotal in determining the characteristics of the self. This, then, represents a definite prediction based on the ideas being advocated here that is, in principle, testable.
The second reason that bodily continuity is irrelevant is that it makes no difference at all to the new postamnesia “person” that there was once some other mind, some other self, occupying the head in which it now resides. And for confirmation of this, one need only reflect back to the comments, recorded earlier, of Linda Macdonald and Patsy Cannon.
Objectively, the extinction of a person following complete memory loss and the physical death of an individual appear very different. But what matters to each of us, in the final analysis, is the inner experience. And from this perspective there is absolutely no difference whatever between, on the one hand, losing all your memories and gaining a new set during life and, on the other hand, the death of one human being followed by the birth of another. (In fact, in some ways, actual physical death is to be preferred, since it does not require the new person to assume a particular, and perhaps unwanted, role or set of responsibilities that, in the case of a victim of total amnesia, is expected by society, family, and friends.)
If this argument is valid, and I firmly believe that it is, then from the reported experiences of people who have had unusual and extreme subjective experiences during life we can begin to build a picture of what the experience of physical death is like. And, in broad outline, what emerges is remarkably simple, straightforward, and familiar. In brief: the act of dying is like falling asleep, the effect of dying is to forget all about being one particular person, and the sequel to dying is the gradual laying down of new memories in a new brain, which will define another particular person. What is crucial is that, from the subjective point of view, although one set of memories (and life circumstances) is completely replaced by another, and one brain by another, there is no cessation of experience, of consciousness, of being. One story ends and, in the wink of an eye as felt from within, another story begins.
You might reply: “But this is no consolation because I happen to be this story, here and now. It does me no good at all that other stories, other people, will follow after my death.” The philosopher Leibniz put it like this:
Of what use would it be to you, sir, to become the king of China, on condition that you forgot what you had been? Would it not be the same as if God, at the same time, destroyed you and created a king in China?This objection, however, comes from – who else? – the self. The only vantage point we have from which to think about death is the current self, and this is the very entity whose principal biological function is to avoid death at all cost. The fact is, if we die and someone else is born who has no memory of us, then it is perfectly true that it does us – meaning the person who once existed – no “good” at all. But the person you think is going to die is not the person you are now. Who you are now is impossible to lose – and this will be true at all future moments at which you exist. You fear death because you imagine your self to be a static thing which will continue unchanged (amid an ever-changing world) until the dreaded moment at which your brain stops working. But it is logically impossible for you – the feeling of being one brain in the present – to die. And what else can you ever be except the feeling of being one brain in the present? Death only marks a limit to what new experiences can arise based on the memory chain that a brain has access to.
We assume that if death terminates a particular “you,” then it must mean the end of all subjective experience. But, on the contrary, what death actually involves is a new start. And here it is essential to keep in mind the parallel between physical death and actual clinical cases of total amnesia and related syndromes. A certain concatenation of memories disappears. And after this very minor loss, the world continues as before, life carries on, a new neural network comes into existence, and as this new support system for the mind develops, a new self begins to emerge – a new narrative, a new “you.”
Still, you may argue: “I accept all this. There’s nothing revolutionary in the idea that as some people die, others are born. But if, as you claim, we – our inner selves – die when our brains die, then surely that’s it. We can’t somehow become one of these new yous because there’s nothing to transfer over to the next person in line.”
And this also is perfectly true. There is indeed nothing about “us” – our selves – that can pass into the future for the simple reason, as we have seen, that there is nothing substantial about us during life. The self will do anything to find a way out, to stay alive in some form. So, as soon as it starts to contemplate the period after death, it wonders, “What will happen to me?” and “Who will I be next?” But such questions represent an effort by the self to seek reassurance about its future. The self will not and cannot admit that it is going to perish, that its story is bound to reach an end. It has to believe that, after death, its essence will live on in some new guise, that perhaps it will appropriate some new brain in which to live again. However, this is not going to happen. There is no direct connection between person A who dies and person B who follows. Whether we are talking about total amnesia or physical death, nothing of the old person transfers to the new. (As Patsy Cannon remarked, “That person is dead; I am a new person.”) And yet, such a transfer is not important or problematic, once it happens, either to person A (who never stops existing as far as she is concerned) or to person B (who has always existed as far as she is concerned). All that is relevant is that subjectively, after death, the feeling of being continues – a feeling that, as a new individual condenses, becomes once again the feeling of being a person.
The difficulty we face is in appreciating why this is a conclusion we should be happy about. And again the answer is that we – our present selves – can never be happy about it because the one all-consuming goal of a self is not to end. It is pointless – literally self-defeating – to attempt to understand death while in our typical “selfish” frame of mind. The “I” cannot abnegate itself because it cannot operate outside its own particular field of memories and projections. The “I” may go from level to level seeking release, but its efforts will always take place within the sphere of its own making. This leaves as our only viable alternative to try to adopt a less self-centered mode of thinking – a nondualistic mode – in which it is possible, I believe, to grasp the idea that the continuity of consciousness in general is more important, more fundamental, and ultimately more desirable than the continued existence or identity of the person we imagine ourselves to be right now.
A determined effort, involving the intuition as much as the intellect, is called for if we are to adjust to this seemingly offbeat way of seeing death. And since our thoughts unavoidably take place within the context of our self-awareness, it is not possible for us to logic away entirely our deep-seated thanatophobia. Even so, I can attest from personal (or, rather, impersonal) experience that the effort is worthwhile and can at least lead to a more philosophical and sanguine attitude to our own mortality.
To be a person is just to have the feeling of being part of an ongoing story, to experience being within a narrative. But what needs to be appreciated is that any narrative will do. While we are in the midst of one particular story we naturally don’t want that story to end; we dread the approach of the final chapter, the final paragraph, the final line. And yet it is important to realize that the very obvious discontinuity and impression of finality associated with the objective view of death (seeing someone die) are not what is felt from within. Subjectively, there is never, and never could be, a break in awareness. As experienced, rather than observed, death is not the end of life, but rather the point of entry into a new phase of existence, the coming back into being of someone else. Inevitably, this implies the loss of your current identity. But to have a sense of identity means just to have a continuity of memory – a life history to date. It makes no difference in the long run whether this life history is the one we happen to have now, or whether it is a completely different autobiography that may exist in the future. Whatever happens, whenever it happens, it will happen in the present. And in the present moment there will be a you with a narrative and a secure feeling of self.
What will it be like, though, to be someone else after we die? Our language makes it impossible for us to frame questions that do not seem to imply the direct continuity of who we are now. But as long as we are aware of this limitation, we can never attempt an answer.
As neurological studies of living brains using PET and MRI scanners have shown, we are not as different from each other as was once supposed. The individual experiences and perceptions we have, as the nearly identical measured reactions of different brains to identical stimuli attest, are almost certainly very similar indeed. Therefore, in terms of the kinds of distinct sensations, emotions, and feelings that humans can and do have, being one person is much like being any other. The differences between us lie in contexts, in the particular situations and in the particular combination and order of circumstances that accompany our lives. We tend to emphasize our differences precisely because “we” are the result of our differences. The process that begins in infancy with distinguishing “my hand” and “my foot,” the bodily-I, extends by degrees to identifying a whole complex of feelings, experiences, thoughts, ideas, impulses, desires, hopes, and fears as “mine” – a complex that constitutes the self. However, when we look closely at these components, it becomes clear that they are derived from our environment and culture; they are the common building blocks from which we are all made. Yet in ordinary life we don’t see this. And the more actions we perform imagining that the self originates and executes whatever is felt, the more substance seems to be endowed to this wholly insubstantial entity. This ongoing process of self-discrimination makes us overlook, or neglect, how remarkably alike our inner worlds really are. Society and the way the self has evolved lead us to place undue stress on the importance of the individual, on the differentiation and separation of selves, when in truth the basic “feeling of being me” is much the same for us all. Our different-looking faces, our varied personas, conceal the fact that under it all we are pretty much alike, and therefore need no great leap of the imagination to put ourselves in someone else’s place.
Consider the actor who studies his part so well that he feels himself to have taken on a new personality. Play Othello well enough, and in some sense for a while you are Othello (or, rather, Shakespeare thinking about Othello!). And consider identical twins who, although they may not have seen each other in many years, turn out to have led incredibly similar lives. They may have almost identical jobs and hobbies; they may even have children and spouses with the same names. And there are many well-documented instances of twins apparently having sensed when their co-twin was unwell or in danger. On such occasions, it is as if the walls separating one self from another have, for a short while, been breached, allowing the awareness of the individuals involved to become shared, overlapped, or merged. More disturbing cases are on record, involving schizophrenics, who seemed to experience directly what another person was thinking. One patient complained to the Canadian psychiatrist Clive Mellor that the thoughts of a television presenter kept coming into his head: “There are no other thoughts there, only his. He treats my mind like a screen and flashes his thoughts onto it.” Another patient said, “They project upon me laughter, for no reason, and you have no idea how terrible it is to laugh and look happy and know that it is not you, but their emotions.” In such cases it is almost as if the resident self has been displaced or become merely a mirror for reflecting the consciousness of an outsider. Finally, there are numerous examples of the differences between people disappearing almost completely, both subjectively and objectively, when mobs, gangs, or mass movements form. How easily, for instance, the individual’s sense of personal identity was submerged and melded with terrifying effect in the all-pervading, tribal identity of the Volk (Nation) of Nazi Germany.
Everyone’s life story includes numerous lacunae when we are not our normal selves. We may play at being someone else – empathizing with, imitating, or adopting a specific role (such as that of a parent or child) for another. We may join groups of individuals with a common interest or cause and so, to a certain extent, allow our identity to be subsumed in the cooperative effort. In the most intimate of dialogues and associations with others, we may well feel we are less a distinct self and more a part of a larger consciousness, a communal awareness, that is not localized within any one brain. Such experiences make it much easier to conceive of what becoming someone else is like. But as soon as we slip back into our normal I-mode again, we lose this ability to see beyond our present selves.
Most of the time, with the apparent solidity and uniqueness of the self at the forefront of our minds, we suppose there can be only two possibilities for the future. These are that we carry on as we are, albeit possibly in some less material form, or that after death there is nothing. However, as we have seen, science and logic point compellingly to a third option — that while particular personal identities come and go, subjective continuity, the feeling of being someone, does not end with our death. A useful analogy is to think of a chain of volcanic islands in the middle of the ocean. At surface level, the islands are completely separate and distinct. But at a deeper level, under the ocean, it becomes clear that the islands are part of a single mass and have a common origin – their individuality is an illusion.
Do these ideas amount to a theory of reincarnation? The answer depends very much on what we mean by this term. The picture of death being presented here is not one in which “we” survive or carry through any memories whatever of our present existence. Death is total amnesia plus total dissolution of our bodies and brains. As a result, when we die, not only will there be an internal break with who we once were, as there was for Patsy Cannon and Linda Macdonald, but there will also be no physical link between the old self and any new one that follows by which an objective observer might trace a lineage of “yous.” The experience of physical death could be closely simulated, for example, by a total amnesia victim who, after her accident, recovered in a place surrounded by people who had not known her previous self and who, therefore, could not “re-mind” her of who had previously occupied her body. In fact, situations like this do sometimes arise when people have “fugues” – passages in their lives when they suddenly forget who they are (or were) and find themselves (if the pun can be excused) in an unfamiliar place among people they have never seen before. To the victim of a fugue it is as if they had been suddenly born as an adult with a general understanding of language and the world but without any inkling of their own identity.
So, reincarnation? Yes and no. Death defines the ultimate limits of selves and exposes how fragile, artificial, and essentially unimportant these creations of the living human brain really are. Will you live again? Once more, it is the present self-in-charge that wants to know. And perhaps the best, most reassuring answer we can give it is that death is like a spring cleaning of the mind, a replacement of body and brain – the opportunity to start again and see the world through a fresh pair of eyes. You will live again. But it will seem, as always, as if it were for the first time.
People often wonder: Is there a purpose to life? Are we here for a reason? Or are we trivial bystanders – brief, tiny sparks of awareness in a universe so vast and ancient that it is wholly indifferent to our presence? In seeking the answers to these questions we shall need to broaden the scope of our inquiry, beyond brain science, to include two seemingly very disparate worldviews: those of modern physics and of mysticism. This will lead us to consider more deeply the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the cosmos a a whole. And so, eventually, we shall come back to look at ourselves – but perhaps in a new light, not as frail individuals limited by small, uncertain lives, but as eternal participants in a much greater adventure that extends throughout time and space.