Book of Immortality

by Adam Leith Gollner

  Forget symbols. Immortalists don’t see their viewpoint as a modern appropriation of the everlasting need to believe. They’re engineering “the scientific conquest of death.” To them, death is unconstitutional, an infringement on our fundamental liberties. Their paradise is physical, here for now and forever. It’s a magically mechanistic place, endlessly stocked with enough new gadgets and products to sate even the most atrophied attention span.

  Thinking about death, says Ray Kurzweil, “is such a profoundly sad, lonely feeling that I really can’t bear it. So I go back to thinking about how I’m not going to die.” One of the ways he goes back to thinking about not dying is by fantasizing about the nature of progress. Believing that history’s terminal will be a point in which we’re all perfect and immortal is, if nothing else, a useful way of alleviating the fear of mortality.

  The notion of progress as the general mechanism whereby time and history function is only a few centuries old. Until the Enlightenment, we couldn’t have conceived of improvement as a fundamental law: all anyone had to do was look back to ancient Rome or Greece to be confronted with reminders of present-day shortcomings. Architecture, philosophy, culture, politics, agriculture, civilization—life, in short—was better then. We didn’t dream of things getting better; we hoped for a return to prelapsarian perfection.

  Throughout the Middle Ages, the dominating outlook in the West was that our lives are ruled by providence. The fates determined everything. People believed in their Islamo-Judeo-Christian God. Not doing so was punishable by death. Europeans didn’t believe in progress: sometimes things got better, sometimes worse, but in general, the world, like us, simply got older. Time moved in cycles. We followed the seasons. In that era’s “circle of life” worldview, everything came from the ground—and eventually returned to it.

  The idea of progress emerged as knowledge was becoming its own end and not something that depended on or led to godliness. Our brains were the way forward. Europeans had found the New World—shouldn’t eternal life be around the corner, too? Doctors started thinking about ways of extending lives. Medical authorities assured us that human life expectancy is malleable. By understanding it, we’d be able to improve on it. We’d just get healthier and healthier until we found ourselves living forever.

  Our belief in cycles fell from fashion. The Enlightenment led us to start seeing history as a continual advance into the brightness of perfection. Da Vinci’s straight lines pointed toward the vanishing point of life getting better and better, and longer and longer. Intoxicated by the possibilities, thinkers took up the argument that humankind’s history consists of irreversible betterment. Political theorists spoke of creating a society without inequality. In no time, democracy would secure freedom for all future ages.

  Science was on its way to replacing God. All our problems seemed soluble. The end point of evolution would be the advent of perfected humans—read immortals—in a perfect world: “The ultimate development of the ideal man is logically certain,” wrote Herbert Spencer. “Always towards perfection is the mighty movement.”

  Education seemed as if it could elevate us above the human condition. If we studied something enough, so the reasoning went, we could know it fully. And the perpetual and unlimited augmentation of our mental faculties would inevitably yield heaven on earth. Our minds promised us nothing short of a full comprehension of the complete workings of the universe. Knowledge became boundless in its possibilities: it could stamp out all misery, save the world, and make us live forever. We just needed to start believing in science.

  We never suspected we were under a magic spell.

  Of all the wars that have taken place since then, none has endured so long as the conflict between knowledge and belief. For centuries now, knowledge has attempted, unsuccessfully, to supersede belief. But the entire clash stems from a misapprehension of the nature of belief. We can’t not believe; and we won’t ever know everything. We know this much: knowledge remains an endless advance toward an end point that endlessly recedes. Like the forms on Keats’s Grecian urn, we’re forever panting, forever pining, forever in pursuit of something we can’t ever possess: Truth and Understanding.

  We haven’t yet found certainty. We can uncertainly state that we likely never will. All definitions are by definition incompletable. We can either believe that we’re ascending an escalator of increasing rationality that will somehow deposit us in the realm of Absolute Knowledge, or we can try to accept the inevitability of unresolvable conflict.

  * * *

  The twentieth century prided itself on invalidating the metaphysical. Doubts about the afterlife arose even as so-called nonbelievers attempted to locate surrogates for the loss of meaning atheism occasioned. Enraptured with progress, we deepened our collective worship of science. As incredulity to metanarratives rose, so did a massive publicity campaign to convince us of the omnipotence of science. Research institutions and organizations enlisted PR companies to spread the message that their findings—if amply funded, of course—would rid society of disease and even death. Much-talked-about books such as The Conquest of Disease (1925) promised readers that all illness would soon be eliminated. The bestseller Men Against Death (1932) profiled scientists working toward immortality. The undertow of progress grew fiercer. If we could create an atom bomb, why, then, shouldn’t we be able to live forever? In the boom years after World War II, Westerners came to see themselves as invincible, an “affluent society” forever young, forever healthy.

  Every technological leap—from refrigerators and rockets to tablets and unmanned drones—intensified our unconscious faith in progress. Most of us still take it for granted that it’s only a matter of time before we eliminate poverty, illness, and, eventually, mortality. Without even realizing it, our civilization remains in thrall to the obsolete ideologies of Hegel, Voltaire, and Locke. We still elevate certain people to the level of an expert—spiritual leader, techno-pundit, atheist bestseller writer—but the problem with venerating proselytizers is that they are as error-prone, unknowing, and ultimately as human as the rest of us.

  The Enlightenment touted the arrival of omnipotent leadership that would dispense global equality; but the faith that governments can solve problems is by no means universal today. That epoch’s rationality promised to be emancipatory; instead it led to strip-mining and nuclear warfare. It’s how our oceans ended up peppered with plastic. Particles of petrochemical waste aren’t just clogging up landfills and the craws of pelicans—they’re also coursing through our bloodstream. To support an unsupportable lifestyle we ravage our surroundings.

  Progress has not brought about universal happiness; realizing that simply requires opening a newspaper. Are we better off than hunter-gatherers? We’d like to think we are, but there’s no way of knowing. Affluence isn’t a guarantor, or even an indicator, of contentment. We aren’t yet drivin’ Buicks to the moon. The more we’ve surrounded ourselves with devices ostensibly intended to free our time, the less time we have to pursue our interests. A continual stream of gadgets reminds us that continual improvement is the way life works. Car manufacturers, credit-card companies, and smartphone makers all use taglines like “progress is great” or “the world is getting better.” But progress isn’t simply great; it’s other, more problematic things as well. To deny this is to inhabit a make-believe land in which technology is humankind’s savior.

  In the past, the religious notion of salvation helped us find meaning when dealing with the universe’s immense imponderables. To this day, we have no idea what time is or how it functions. In a century or two, we’ll have a very different perspective. In the meantime, we’re all ineluctably caught in the tension between who we are and what we might become. And so belief persists.

  * * *

  We can believe whatever we want to believe, which means we often don’t realize it when we’re believing. Our faith in science and progress is part of the reason people believe in physical immortality today. Mythologizing the unknown gives a s
torybook sense to our lives—and their termination. In mythology, science can make us live forever. In reality, however, science’s aims are much humbler.

  The scientific program consists of finding interrelations linking perceptible phenomena. Its purpose is to establish rules explaining reciprocal connections between objects. Successfully detecting patterns in nature always brings with it an opportunity for self-deception, of falling prey to illusions. While we can perceive traces of reasonableness in the structure of reality, the fact that certain events appear ordered doesn’t mean that all of existence is open to logical apprehension.

  There are limits to the purely rational conception of existence. Crossing those limits brings us into belief. To think there’s no problem science cannot solve is a form of faith. “The scientific method can teach us nothing else,” Einstein pointed out, “beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other.” But not everything is a fact. Science can attempt to determine what is factual and what isn’t, but then it cannot approach those aspects of experience beyond facts. Nature’s profoundest chasms are off-limits to intelligence, inaccessible to the thinking mind. They give themselves not to demonstration but to revelation.

  By refusing to acknowledge the vastness of all that cannot be proven or disproven, the uncertain mind shifts into a place of certainty, of conviction, of belief. In countless ways, phenomena have a uniformity and regularity that suggests they will keep on happening the same way over and over. This reliability has taught us how to move megatons of water through city pipes, how to make plasma screens receive hi-res signals from outer space, how to treat ovarian cancer with platinum—but there are still vast swaths of reality that we don’t understand. One’s attitude toward those unknowables reveals one’s belief system: Will all of them one day be understood, or will complete understanding necessarily elude our grasping mind? Do we worship at the altar of science, or do we stick to the facts and calculate its limitations?

  Materialism is predicated on the belief that only things that can be proven with evidence are real. “We shall end up understanding literally everything,” declares radical atheist Richard Dawkins, a position statement triumphantly lacking any evidence. The scientific method is incredibly effective at dealing with material concerns, but can it deal with things that cannot be known? Are double-blind, quantitative, randomized, clinical experiments the only way of accessing reality? Reason distinguishes and defines; ultimate reality, being indivisible and irreducible, is impervious to such activities.

  The benefits of science are undeniable, but those who task science with providing an answer to every question are simply subverting religious belief into scientism. Mystery can be dismissed as inconsequential or revered as an inexhaustible source of wonder, but it’s hard to test the belief that untestable things aren’t real. In the end, only faith can address unprovables. All science begins with the possibility of a world comprehensible to reason, a knowable cosmos, a harmony pervading the universe. “This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion,” Einstein wrote. “I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith.”

  In this sense, the otherwise “non-overlapping magisteria” of belief and knowledge can coexist. Einstein called his belief system “cosmic religion.” At its heart is a sense of awe, wonder, and reverence before the inner workings of nature. “The ancients knew something which we seem to have forgotten,” he wrote, in Out of My Later Years. “All means prove but a blunt instrument, if they have not behind them a living spirit.” Even though he derided the notion of a punishing or rewarding Creator concerned with human actions, he spoke openly of wanting “to know how God created this world.” Einstein’s solutions demonstrated links between energy and matter, but he himself acknowledged the impossibility of scientifically proving the existence of Truth. Scientific hypotheses don’t lead to Truth—they lead to experiments that can then be replicated.

  We can’t explain why life is rather than is not. Science handles the provable facets of reality, but we can’t scientifically prove or disprove reality itself—it’s simply there (or here) and all tests are mere by-products of its unverifiable yet ubiquitous presence. We can either operate under the illusion that an accumulation of facts necessarily leads to universal truths or side with Oscar Wilde, who believed that “Truth is independent of facts always.” Science is a clue in the darkness, a glowing password that opens many gates in the treasury of nature. But we shouldn’t overestimate its capacities.

  Scientific results don’t yield infallible proofs; they offer data from which conclusions may or may not be drawn. These purported truths tend to erode under scrutiny. The results of replicability often decrease over time, a phenomenon known as the decline effect. As the British philosopher John Gray explains, “If we know anything, it is that most of the theories that prevail at any one time are false.”

  We’re inevitably afflicted by some form of magical thinking. Self-deception is an integral component of mental activity. We often identify so deeply with our core beliefs that we only really notice whatever is in accordance with our ideology. “Publication bias” refers to the well-documented tendency for scientific researchers to favor evidence that confirms preexisting hypotheses. As William James argued in his 1896 lecture “The Will to Believe,” science is a practice in which “a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help create the fact.”

  By verifying suppositions, science allows thinkers to investigate problems within a framework of belief. As philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn has argued, no scientific paradigm can bring us closer to the Truth, or to so-called objective reality. A particular paradigm of problem solving lasts only until enough irreconcilable anomalies lead to major breakthroughs, followed by the establishment of a new paradigm. This new paradigm isn’t necessarily an improvement over the last—it’s just a different way of looking at reality, a different shared set of assumptions that can then be investigated through experiments.

  In choosing a new paradigm, scientists invariably gain in some ways while also losing in others. Institutional scientists are resistant to new discoveries and theories, primarily because they impinge on a way of making sense of the world. It’s for this same reason “extreme” scientists denigrate faith, just as zealots dismiss any evidence not in keeping with their mythologies.

  In truth, truths change and evolve, as do we, as do our attitudes to certain beliefs. There are countless things we don’t know, that we can’t know. Some aren’t necessarily only true or false; they can be both true and false. There are questions we can’t even ask, let alone answer, or prove with 100 percent certainty.

  Beliefs masquerade as knowledge even in the scientific community, as Dawkins continually reminds us. “Science can absolutely be a religion,” an eminent scientist at McGill University told me when informed that I was researching the belief in scientific immortality. “In fact, it’s my religion.”

  It isn’t hard to find examples of scientific myths. Daily newspapers are filled with pop-science fables. The Big Bang theory, to pick just one, is a hypothesis put forward by a Jesuit priest, Georges-Henri Lemaître, in the 1920s. Since then, particle physics has become predicated on the belief that the entire cosmos used to be subatomic in scale. A dimensionless, timeless universe smaller than an atom remains a concept impervious to testing. Can any equation ever replicate, let alone prove, what caused that primordial explosion? Can we observe what came before it? (Gas? Nothingness? The question of whether a something can come out of nothing has remained unresolved since Parmenides’s time, despite recent atheist contentions to the contrary.)

  The Big Bang is a lovely metaphor, simple and elegant, useful in astronomical calculations and abstract experimentation, but so riddled with inconsistencies at its physical core that it’s a creation myth. “Myths are simplifications of reality,” wrote William Irwin Thompson, “but so are scientific laws, for they magnetize the infinite information
of the universe into the fields of their own formulaic descriptions.” Our minds cannot wrap themselves around the immense endlessness of an ex-speck-size, now-ever-expanding universe. No matter how we try, we can’t make disorder orderly. We can call ourselves chaos theoreticians, but we’re not entitled to know how life began or why water came to be or what makes atoms move. Even the idea that nature is governed by laws is simply a belief. Randomness remains a guiding principle of reality. And there’s still no way to measure chance, at least not on a cosmic scale.

  All of this to reiterate that scientific immortalism isn’t scientific; it’s belief clothed in scientific garb. Eternal life, whether in this world or the next, is always a story about our inability to comprehend death.

  * * *

  As my research wound down, I often found myself thinking about selfhood: The self; the consciousness thinking these thoughts. Is it the same thing as a soul? Is it our personality? Impossible to say. I came across scientific attempts to explain it as a “distributed neuronal process,” but science cannot prove that the individual self is real.

  There’s no consensus on the nature of the self, no adequate explanation of it. We can never fully understand this self, ourselves. Not only can we not answer “Who am I?”—we can’t even answer “Am I?” No self-help book can help locate the self. If it exists, it is nonphysical. It has both conscious and unconscious qualities. Beneath an accessible surface lie the subconscious fathoms.