Death can't be imagined

What do you think will happen to you after you die? If you're religious, many answers are possible. "I'll be in heaven." "My soul will exist without a body." "God and I will be a single consciousness."

But even if you're a non-believer, there's a good chance that you still harbor notions of your continued existence.

Seemingly it's super tough, if not impossible, for the human mind to conceive of nothingness. We're hard-wired to imagine that we'll always be something, rather than nothing.

This is the premise of a fascinating Scientific American article by Jesse Bering, "Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death." Read it. You'll gain a fresh perspective on belief in an afterlife.

Bering says that new research casts doubt on the common notion that fear of death is what drives religious conceptions of immortality.

According to proponents, you possess a secret arsenal of psychological defenses designed to keep your death anxiety at bay (and to keep you from ending up in the fetal position listening to Nick Drake on your iPod). My writing this article, for example, would be interpreted as an exercise in “symbolic immortality”; terror management theorists would likely tell you that I wrote it for posterity, to enable a concrete set of my ephemeral ideas to outlive me, the biological organism. (I would tell you that I’d be happy enough if a year from now it still had a faint pulse.)

Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.

He presents evidence to support this thesis, including the fact that the younger children are, the more difficulty they have imagining that someone who has died really is dead -- meaning that the deceased has no awareness of anything.

If religion was the primary cause of belief in an afterlife, then we'd expect to find that people with more exposure to religious dogma would be less inclined to say, "After death, there's nothing" (and really mean it).

However, the situation isn't that simple. Bering says that our innate psychological inability to imagine non-existence forms the floor upon which forms of religiosity are built:

In fact, exposure to the concept of an afterlife plays a crucial role in enriching and elaborating this natural cognitive stance; it’s sort of like an architectural scaffolding process, whereby culture develops and decorates the innate psychological building blocks of religious belief. The end product can be as ornate or austere as you like, from the headache-inducing reincarnation beliefs of Theravada Buddhists to the man on the street’s “I believe there’s something” brand of philosophy—but it’s made of the same brick and mortar just the same.

I've spent a lot of time pondering death. But there's one thing I can't conceive of: what's it like to be incapable of conceiving. Even the idea of "nothing" is much more of a something than nothingness actually is.

I liked this quote from philosopher Thomas W. Clark. I also found it deeply disturbing (guess I like to be disturbed).

Here ... is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error contained in that view: It is to reify nothingness—make it a positive condition or quality (for example, of “blackness”)—and then to place the individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to remain there eternally.

There's a lot more to like in the article. It challenges some ideas I've accepted rather uncritically.

Like, that deep sleep gives us a foretaste of death. "Hey, I was asleep much of the night and wasn't aware of anything, so how bad could death be if it's just like a really long sleep?"

Some Eastern mystics liken enlightenment to the state of dreamless sleep. I've always wondered what's so great about not being conscious of an elevated consciousness. If I'm not aware of my expanded awareness, what's the point?

Bering points out that when you wake up and say to yourself, "I experienced dreamless deep sleep last night," you're not telling the truth.

For us extinctivists, it’s kind of like staring into a hallway of mirrors—but rather than confronting a visual trick, we’re dealing with cognitive reverberations of subjective experience. In Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s 1913 existential screed, The Tragic Sense of Life, one can almost see the author tearing out his hair contemplating this very fact. “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness,” he writes, “and you will see the impossibility of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.”

Wait, you say, isn’t Unamuno forgetting something? We certainly do have experience with nothingness. Every night, in fact, when we’re in dreamless sleep. But you’d be mistaken in this assumption. Clark puts it this way (emphasis mine): “We may occasionally have the impression of having experienced or ‘undergone’ a period of unconsciousness, but, of course, this is impossible. The ‘nothingness’ of unconsciousness cannot be an experienced actuality.”

So death is a mystery. We can't begin to imagine what not-existing would be like, because all we know is existence. Our imagination fills the can't begin to imagine void with beliefs about an afterlife.

Those ideas are comforting, and God knows, people need all the comfort they can get in a world that can be so harsh, painful, and cruel.

We just shouldn't fool ourselves: Nothing is the most likely non-something that we're going to be after death.

Since that is impossible to imagine, we should recognize our psychological blind spot for what it is -- and not mistake it for a grand spiritual vision.

Comments

[radiohead]

Brian: It's virtually impossible to comment on "nothing". It appears no one else has nothing to say about this either, up to this point in time. Which brings me to my comment: The existence of nothingness assumes that there is a time factor involved. Time must be moving forward as we perceive it in our existence in this world to define an existence in nothingness. If on the other hand, time doesn't exist outside of our consciousnesses in this life then nothingness can't exist either. If time is in fact a vertical line instead of a horizontal line outside of this physical existence we call life, then nothingness after death has no existence because everything exists at one moment all at the same time.

I will now take the marbles out of my mouth.

[Adam]

nice thoughts Radiohead.

It is virtually impossible to talk of nothingness, but I also have thought about our collective 6 billion little movies we are all filming with our senses, our brains automatically organizing them into stories about ourselves and those around us. This sense of linearity surely depends on us.

[Paulo]

Hi,have you ever considered to stop thinking and worring about death,since she does not exist?Like stop thinking and worring about werewolves?Have you ever questioned why do you are eager to know were lies beyond death?

[Brian Hines]

Paulo, I'm not sure what you mean by "does not exist." Death obviously exists. Are you saying it doesn't?

However, if you mean that awareness of being dead does not exist, I agree with you. After all, if we're aware, we're not dead, so we can't be aware of being dead.

But we can be aware of death, because we see other living beings dying.

[Paulo]

If the awareness of being dead does not exist,death does not exist either.The only thing that exists is experience,if death is the absence of experience,she really does not exist,is just some fairy tale!