Immortality

by Stephen Cave

  To return to our analogies: If a ship is damaged and is stuck for a time out at sea, once it is repaired and returns to port we expect the captain to be able to tell us what it was like throughout the ordeal. If captain and ship are quite separate things, then the ship not working should not affect the captain. And so if consciousness is in your body like the captain of a ship, immaterial and able to survive the body’s destruction, then a failure of the body should not stop consciousness from working. But it does.

  Believers in a soul can and do find ways of explaining away this uncomfortable fact. They can, for example, argue that we really are conscious when, for example, under general anesthetic—but because the brain is not working, we cannot create new memories, so it retrospectively seems like we were unconscious. This is a terrifying thought, suggesting we really do experience what must be the agony of, for example, invasive surgery. The eerie feeling of falling off into darkness only to emerge after what seems like a few seconds but can be hours would be just a trick of the memory.

  Islam takes a different approach. According to the Qur’an, “God takes the souls of the dead and the souls of the living while they sleep—He keeps hold of those whose death he has ordained and sends the others back until their appointed time” (39:42); this argument could be extended to unconsciousness: when under general anesthetic, as when asleep, your soul returns to God. This is a wonderfully poetic retort but does not explain why we have no memory of going to, being with or returning from Allah.

  Many more such explanations are possible, and they all have three things in common: they are ad hoc, untestable and pose as many questions as they answer. And this, as any philosopher or scientist knows, means we ought to be very skeptical. The basic fact remains: what happens when you are knocked hard on the head or injected with general anesthetic is exactly what we would expect if your consciousness is entirely dependent on your brain and not at all what we would expect if consciousness is dependent on an immaterial soul.

  Therefore even the very pared-down soul of Buddhism is not a plausible doctrine. Reincarnation, like going to heaven, requires that some essential part of you can separate off from the corpse and carry on in some other form. But what the overwhelming evidence of science teaches, and what many have long suspected, is that there is no essential part of us that is not wholly dependent on the body. If you have a soul, yet it does not take your mind, personality or consciousness with it, then its survival after the death of your body should be of as much interest to you as the survival of your toenails.

  THE problem with the Soul Narrative is therefore not that, having looked closely, science has not yet found the soul, nor that it has just not yet looked in the right place. Many scientists have indeed been believers who desperately hoped to find proof of an immortal core to their being. An American doctor by the name of Duncan MacDougall, for example, constructed an elaborate hospital bed–cum–scales that weighed patients immediately before and after death. Assuming that any difference between the two measurements would be caused by the departing spirit, he concluded in 1907 that the soul weighed twenty-one grams. He later expressed the hope that he could use an X-ray machine to photograph the soul as it left the body. Needless to say, neither his results nor his hopes have been borne out by subsequent research.

  But the problem is not that scientists have not yet looked hard enough. The problem is that everything the soul was supposed to explain—thoughts, consciousness, life itself—has been shown to be dependent on the body. We therefore have every reason to believe that all these faculties—from memory to emotion to the most basic form of awareness—cease when the body ceases. There is simply nothing left over for the soul. As a hypothesis, it is redundant.

  Some people argue in response that the statement “You do not have a soul” is a negative, and it is not possible to prove a negative—we can therefore never really know if you have a soul or not. But this is of course a fallacy: we prove negatives every day. The claim that you do not have a carton of milk in your fridge is a negative, yet it would be very easy to prove. We know what would count as reliable evidence of your having a carton of milk in your fridge (we would be able to see it, touch it and so on). It can then quickly be established whether such evidence exists or not. Similarly, we can work out what would count as evidence for the existence of a soul that supports your mental life—for example, the various facets of your mind being independent of the functioning of your brain—and what would count as evidence against the existence of such a soul, such as your falling unconscious when hit on the head. And, as we have seen, the evidence is overwhelmingly against.

  The more we know about ourselves, the less surprising it is that we have no souls. We have evolved over billions of years from simple creatures that had no mental life whatsoever—and before that from things that weren’t creatures at all. We each of us arise from the physical meeting of a sperm and an egg and develop cell by cell. The mental life that emerges is one that is intimately linked at all times to the state of the body. Indeed, the best modern theories of consciousness tell us that the mind is just the representation that a physical organism makes of itself and its environment in order to help it survive in a complex world full of very physical dangers. And the evidence also tells us that this vastly intricate brain that produces everything from emotion to art, reason to religion, is a far more wonderful thing than the simple soul of Plato and the theologians.

  DISSIPATION

  THE Dalai Lama tries hard to be both modern and at the same time true to the traditions that he embodies. Being a good Buddhist, he daily considers the prospect of his own death as part of his religious practice—and indeed he has more reason to than most, as his death will spark the search for the next incarnation of this highest lama, which is likely to be a highly politicized affair given the dispute over Tibet’s sovereignty. But he has also said that if his people no longer need him, then he might not return at all. And one day, as scientific education spreads and the evidence for the materialist worldview continues to mount, he surely won’t.

  The Buddha said that the doctrines of religion should be examined in the light of the evidence, and this we have done. There was a time when the existence of the soul was a very plausible hypothesis, when life and the mind were barely understood. But that time has passed, and the soul hypothesis has been superseded. That so many people continue to believe in the soul regardless has nothing to do with its credentials as a rational thesis, but rather everything to do with the satisfactions it offers as an immortality narrative.

  We have seen in this chapter and chapter 6 that the Soul Narrative not only promises a route to eternal life but also comes with the significant perks of reassuring each one of us that we are unique and special, and that we live in a just and orderly universe. And all of that in a package that fits perfectly with the intuitions of the Mortality Paradox—that although the body may die, our minds will live on. This makes for a very attractive story that has been one of the most important ideas to shape our world and is very hard to give up.

  Nonetheless, it is on the defensive. We have seen this already in Europe: the idea of the soul is slowly becoming thinner and thinner, as science shaves off the functions once claimed for it. Thus the soul has lost its claim to be the animating principle, it is losing its claim to be the bearer of the mind and it will soon lose any claim to be the maintainer of consciousness or awareness of any kind. When this happens, this third immortality narrative will have lost its power altogether.

  In Hinduism and Buddhism there is an undercurrent of recognition that the individual mind cannot continue without the body. Beyond the theory of reincarnation, which requires a soul robust enough to be punished for its past sins, there are hints of something more radical. Nirvana, for example, literally means “extinguishing” or “blowing out.” But what is it that is being “blown out” like a candle? Some Buddhists say worldly desires. Others, however, go further and believe it is the self that is extinguished. For some in the a
scetic tradition, the source of worldly suffering is not just being in the world—it is being at all. Liberation therefore means to cease to be an individual altogether, or as the Hindus put it, to become one with the all, the Brahman.

  The soul was supposed to be the real you that shed the body like tattered old clothes. We have seen, however, there is no real you other than the body and brain. But we have also seen, in our exploration of the first immortality narrative, Staying Alive, that your body and brain have no prospect of existing forever. And our consideration of the Resurrection Narrative suggested that if your body, once dead, is put back together, it will not be you but a mere replica that is brought to life. So as the Soul Narrative breaks down, it takes with it the hope that you can personally survive forever in a form much like your present existence.

  What is left are the disparate parts of you that might go their separate ways, fragments or echoes of you that survive the dissipation that is death. This might mean an anonymous energy that rejoins some universal spirit, or perhaps the memories you have left in the minds of others. Some people might still call these “soul,” but then it has ceased to mean a conscious, albeit immaterial, person and instead means something more like the imprint you have left on the world. When this point is reached, we have already left the Soul Narrative and begun instead the fourth path to immortality: Legacy.

  8

  LOOK ON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY

  EVERLASTING FAME

  ALEXANDER III, newly anointed king of Macedon, very much wanted a prophecy that would endorse his impending attack on the mighty Persian Empire. On his way back from crushing an insurrection in southern Greece in 336 BCE, he therefore passed by the most famous of all oracles, that of Apollo in Delphi. But it was late November, and the oracle was closed for the winter. Alexander, however, was not a man to be denied: he sought out the high priestess and dragged her physically into the sanctuary. Recognizing that protest was useless, the quick-thinking prophetess proclaimed, “Young man, you are invincible!” Alexander immediately released her—that would do just fine as a prophecy, he decided. From then on, he took “the invincible” as one of his titles.

  And invincible he proved to be. Within ten years of receiving the perfunctory prophecy, he had overcome the Persian Empire, then the largest in the world, and gone far beyond. He is one of the few campaigning generals in history who can genuinely claim never to have been defeated—his conquests came to an end only when his Macedonian veterans, some three thousand miles from home, refused to cross the Ganges to invade yet another foreign kingdom. When he halted his eastward charge and turned back to make a new capital in Babylon, his empire included most of what are today Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  These extraordinary deeds, all achieved before he turned thirty, might at first seem to be sufficient to explain why we today call him Alexander “the Great” and tell his story in film, fiction and countless histories. But there have been many other great generals, conquerors and emperors through the ages, and most do not earn anything like the kind of attention reserved for this belligerent and short-lived ruler. And his lasting renown is no mere question of fashion; it is a remarkable fact that there has never been a period in the 2,300 years since Alexander’s conquests when he has not been famous in East and West alike. There seems to be something special about his story, something that projects him beyond the struggles of other mortals and into the realm of gods and heroes.

  Which is exactly how he wanted it to be. The reason the story of Alexander is still so popular after so many centuries is that he did everything he could to make sure this would be so—and he was as talented a mythmaker as he was a military strategist. He understood that greatness was the sum not merely of one’s actions but also of how others saw them, and so he went out of his way to cast his deeds in epic terms. As when he cut the Gordian knot, prophesied to be “solved” only by the future king of Asia, at every juncture he ensured there would be ample material for the poets and chroniclers—first by emulating the legends of the past, then by creating new ones of his own.

  Alexander was raised to have epic aspirations. His father, King Philip II of Macedon, claimed descent from the demigod Hercules, son of Zeus and a mortal princess, and was himself a hugely successful military leader. But more important still was his mother, Olympias, who claimed as a forebear the greatest of the Greek warrior-heroes—Achilles. She raised Alexander to believe that it was a hero’s blood that flowed in his veins. As a teenager, Alexander learned the story of Achilles as told in Homer’s Iliad by heart; years later when on his campaigns he slept with a copy annotated personally for him by his tutor, Aristotle, under his pillow.

  When Alexander became king, Macedon was in the ascendance and was ready to challenge the might of the Persians across the Aegean. When he set sail with his fleet, he was conscious that he was leading the first Greek army into Asia since Agamemnon a thousand years before had led the Greeks to reclaim Helen of Troy. He sacrificed at the tomb of the first Greek to be killed in the Trojan war, then immediately went to the ruins of Troy to lay a wreath on the tomb of Achilles; there he took up what was said to be Achilles’s shield and replaced it with his own. The message was clear: Alexander was following in his forebear’s footsteps and would match his heroic deeds.

  Which he did, and with remarkable speed. In defeating the mighty Persian army he triumphed over a force many times greater than that of the ancient Trojans and thereby surpassed the deeds of Achilles. Thence he needed a new role model and so turned to the feats of his other legendary forebear, Hercules, whose adventures were said to have taken him deep into Asia. Finally he outdid even this fabled hero—when on his campaign into India he heard of a fortress on an enormous rock that even Hercules had failed to conquer, he immediately laid siege to it and ensured that he was the first to get to the top.

  No mortal, not even the heroes of old, seemed Alexander’s equal; his greatness was more than that of a mere man. So it must have seemed to his ever-expanding number of subjects, and this was a belief that Alexander was keen to foster. On his way to the final battle with the Persians he took a long detour into Egypt to consult the great oracle temple of Amun, the Egyptian chief deity whom the Greeks identified with Zeus. The temple’s flattering priest fed an idea that had been planted long before by his mother: that Alexander’s real father was perhaps not Philip at all but the king of the gods himself, and that his all-conquering son might therefore count himself among the divinities.

  Having completed his conquests, Alexander instructed the other Greek states that he was to be acknowledged as a god, and obligingly they instituted cults in his honor. Ironic, perhaps, that shortly thereafter a fever sent him the way of all mortals at the age of only thirty-two. When he lay dying, Alexander was asked to whom he left his sprawling empire: “to the strongest,” he replied, and so opened the way for fifty years of bloody war as his successors fought to carve up the conquests of their departed god-king. He had done nothing to ensure that his kingdom would endure or prosper, nothing to ensure stable government or a secure inheritance for the children he had sired. He had all along only had one goal, for which in the end he sacrificed everything and won: everlasting fame.

  HERO

  IN chapter 7 we gave up the ghost of a hope that your mind might literally outlive your body and float to heaven—the conclusions of science are that there is no soul to save you from oblivion. But we also saw earlier that the chances of your dodging the Reaper and staying alive are vanishingly slim and that the very idea of physical resurrection is fundamentally flawed. Together these first three immortality narratives provide the core of all the world’s religions, from Taoism to Catholicism, as well as the inspiration for much material, economic and scientific progress. But though they might point toward the Mount of the Immortals, all three fall a long way short of reaching the summit.

  The prospects of your living forever as a full person—that is, continuing indefinitely to enjoy
a life something like the one you have now—are therefore not at all good. But there are other conceptions of immortality that do not require the survival of the individual person as such. Such conceptions—which I have grouped together under the title of Legacy—are every bit as ancient and widespread as the first three immortality narratives and every bit as popular today. Indeed, many cultural commentators believe they are positively exploding.

  I will distinguish between two forms of the Legacy Narrative—what I will call the cultural and the biological. This chapter will focus on the first, the pursuit of cultural immortality. Its influence is everywhere to be seen: alongside the effects of material progress, its products define the landscape of modern civilization. Paintings and poems, pop music and politics—all of these result from the effort of the individual to carve out some space in an undying cultural realm. And though Alexander’s exploits show everlasting fame to be a perennial pursuit, the modern cults of film stardom and TV celebrity, mass-market magazines and instant communications have transformed it from an elite occupation to the career of choice of thousands.

  WOODY ALLEN, an unquestionably famous man, was nonetheless blunt in his assessment of fame as an immortality vehicle; he once wrote, “I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.” There are many—even among those who have achieved celebrity—who are inclined to see the Legacy Narrative as nothing more than a metaphor. It cannot be true immortality, they argue, if the individual does not survive. But understandable as this skepticism might be, the Legacy Narrative has some surprising and sophisticated answers. And in the end, legacy might not be as good as living on in your apartment, but if the other immortality narratives are dead ends, then it might be as good as it gets.