THE RATIONAL ROAD
Chapter 1
Death is Impossible
Afraid of dying? Don’t be! It’s never going to happen to you, and I can prove it.
Albert Einstein once commented that the most fundamental question we can ever ask ourselves is whether or not the universe we live in is friendly or hostile. He hypothesized that your answer to that question would determine your destiny. Surely death is the greatest threat that we all face. For many people it gives the universe a decidedly hostile bent. These people believe that we can never win the race of life; that we are born to lose. I do not agree. In fact, I believe that the race was never begun and that death itself is an illusion. Through rational scientific reasoning I intend to demonstrate that in our universe consciousness is not as finite in scope and lifespan as we may have once thought. To put it simply: I do not believe in death. That is not to say that I think we are immortal, far from it. My belief is that we are in fact exempt from dying altogether. I believe that our common understanding of what it is to be a sentient being needs to evolve to fit with our growing understanding of the structure of the universe and the nature of consciousness.
This article is an attempt to prove my hypothesis. If, through reading it, you are enabled to live your life with a little less anxiety or fear, then I have achieved my goal. Once the specter of death is stripped of it’s mystery it becomes much easier to contend with.
Everyone eventually reaches the point in their lives where they become fully aware of the inevitability of their own death. It is at this point that they choose to either embrace the overwhelming significance of this realization or to recoil in horror, abandoning reason in favor of short term comforts such as spirituality and religion. Yet, what is the price that we pay when we allow our frightened egos to control our thinking and distort our views of reality? Maintaining a strictly rational, honest approach can be the harder choice in the short term but the one that I believe yields far greater rewards in the long term. Stick with it, my friends, and continue travelling the rational road, no matter how difficult or terrifying it may sometimes seem. The reward waiting for you is the greatest that you can have: a profound understanding of a truth.
So that there is no ambiguity, my standard view on religion is as follows: Surely there is nothing more important than pursuing the truth. It has been argued that ultimate ideal goal for an individual should be to pursue happiness for themselves and for others. Yet, even happiness is subject to the rules of truth, since, how can you know what happiness is unless you know some truth about the universe that you live in. We should try to approach life as the ultimate scientist; someone whose mind is totally open, without preconceptions and ready to accept the truth, whatever it may be.
I am not a sentimental person, and I don’t find much joy in the apparent grandeur of myths and religious fairytales. But I do have a deep sense of wonder at the possibility that we may really be able to explain our universe using simple reason alone. The beauty of the explanation would be so much more satisfying if it were accompanied by the knowledge that it were true.
An earnestly objective, utterly subjective and hopefully accurate treatise against death. I intend to disarm the Grim Reaper
It’s All in Your Mind
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
Albert Einstein
As we enter this new era of technological, scientific and philosophical awakening, I believe that there are a certain number of facts that we can all agree upon. The first and surely most important is that ‘I think, therefore I am’. To put it another way: we think, therefore we know we exist, but that is all that we can be a hundred percent certain about.
Remember when you first saw The Matrix? For many people of my generation, this was the first time we had experienced the philosophy of consciousness and perception explored through the medium of pop culture. The question this movie begs of us is: how can we be sure that anything we see is truly real? What we perceive may be a sensory fantasy fed to our brains by some outside force. God forbid that we ever wake up in an embryonic cell plugged into some vast neural network built by deranged robots. It sounds absurd, but it is conceivably possible. In fact, a recent consortium of some of the world’s preeminent scientists and philosophers set about trying to calculate the probability value of the “virtual reality” hypothesis being correct. With the limited data available they still managed to reach a consensus, and the final value agreed upon was this: fifty percent. They calculated that there was at least a fifty – fifty chance that the reality we perceive is in fact a simulation. How would we know otherwise? All the information we have is coming from our eyes, ears and other senses. Scientists are currently fitting deaf children with Cochlear brain implants that allow them to hear clearly despite having no physical ear drums at all. There are currently a number of similar devices under development that can be implanted into the visual cortex of the brain and will allow blind people to ’see’ a digital video image fed directly into their brain.
The point hardly needs further pressing: reality is all in our own minds. We do not actually experience the real world, only the images, sounds and sensations fed to us by our five senses and interpreted by our brains. Yes, it’s true that this fantasy is directly influenced by the physical world, but no-one can ever know what the world really looks like; indeed research has suggested that we all perceive the world in very different ways.
Your past exists as a holographic dream imprinted in your mind; your ‘memories’. These memories, and therefore your existence right up to this very moment, are as real and valid as the dream you had last night.
In fact, as far as the universe is concerned, your ‘mind’ doesn’t exist at all. An objective observer would only see the movement of atoms and electrons within your brain. Subjective experience is exactly that: subjective.
So, does what we perceive truly exist?
My answer is that it all exists. Every thought that we have is as real as the earth beneath our feet, maybe even more so. You see, as far as we’re concerned, the physical dimension is the one that may not exist, since we are utterly unable to conceive of it in an objective way.
So, is ‘reality’ a dream? I believe that it’s more like a memory of what our senses perceived a millisecond ago. A story told to us by our mind to represent the physical universe that surrounds us.
Death is Impossible
When we ‘die’ our brain stops working and our consciousness ceases to exist. We cannot experience an absence of experience; therefore, technically, we cannot participate in this idea of ‘death’. Death is an illusion, and something you will never have to experience because it is simply impossible for you to do so.
‘Death’ describes a ‘nothingness’. The ‘nothingness’ that surrounds our subjective consciousnesses is infinite. Our lives are, indeed, “a parenthesis in eternity”, to quote Dr. Wayne Dyer. We cannot experience ‘nothing’. If you are experiencing nothing, then you are not experiencing anything. You cannot fear ‘nothing’ since it does not exist. If something does not exist for you, then why should you fear it?
Dream On
I assert that all human experience exists in the dimension of pure thought. It is therefore impossible to truly conceive of anything in the physical universe. All we have are the experiences created in our own minds influenced by the sensory input of our own bodies.
Your experience of daily life is as real as your dreams, since both exist totally within your own mind. It is for this reason that our experience of life could be compared to a dream-state. When you wake up, does the person you were in the dream die? Of course not, who you were was only an illusion created in your own mind. But, then again, the same can be said for when you are awake. The truth is, who you are right now is an illusion. Your illusion.
I’ll Be There in Spirit
As you might have heard in science class, all of the atoms in your body are in constant transition. They are shed from your body at a constant rate with new atoms taking their place. It is said that within your brain most atoms are replaced about every twelve months. Therefore, how can you say you are the same person that you were a year ago? You can, of course, because your mind is not a physical entity. It exists instead on a separate plane, in a different dimension to the physical world.
Our ‘spirit’, ‘soul’ or ‘mind’ is who we are, it is our subjective self, and since it exists in the dimension of pure thought it means that we are already living in a spiritual plane. Indeed, we are having a ‘spiritual experience’ every moment of our lives.
To quote Wayne Dyer: “We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a physical experience.”
The Chemistry Between Us
Scientists can describe a human thought by recording the electrical and chemical activity in the brain, yet what they are mapping is simply matter and energy moving through space, it is not an actual thought. An objective observer would see only maths and physics, whereas the subjective consciousness experiences a thought. The two are not a part of the same dimension. They are on different meta-levels of existence that separate objective facts and subjective experience. The two often influence each other, but between is a fundamental divide that cannot be bridged. For example: The fundamental laws of logic hold true whether there is anyone around to define them as true, yet it takes a mind to conceive of those laws, and of ‘truth’ itself.
If you take the chemicals that create the emotion of love and combine them on a Petri dish then have you created love? Of course not, all you have is a puddle of electrically-charged chemicals. But when this reaction occurs within a human brain a thought is said to have occurred. But what’s the difference? I don’t believe that there is any.
My point here is that all concepts and realities are created in our minds. The objective universe does not ‘see’ any ‘realities’, it simply is. The confusion occurs for many people when they try to merge the concept of their own subjective intelligence with the objective reality of the universe. It’s true that the forces of time and physics will ultimately destroy the structure of our brains and we will appear to ‘die’ to those around us, but there is no reason to assume that our experience will be anything like ‘death’. You must remember, we were never part of that physical world to begin with. Our brains are ‘experience machines’. All we can be is what we experience and anything outside of that is subjectively impossible and irrelevant to us.
God Consciousness
Changing context does not change the physical event, and therefore if you believe that your thoughts occur within the physical realm then you must also accept that random thoughts are occurring throughout the universe whenever the right electrically charged chemical reactions take place. Therefore the universe must be filled with an omnipresent intelligence. A ‘God Consciousness’, if you like. The only difference with humans is that our brains create linear cohesion and a home for these thoughts to interact and evolve.
When your physical body ‘dies’ your consciousness does not disappear, it merely becomes disorganized and less constrained by the linear concepts of time and space. You will have rejoined the ‘God Consciousness’.
One argument against this idea is that we are who we are because of the ordered complexity of our minds. But would that mean that if, sometime in the future, you were able to ‘upgrade’ your mind to have a higher level of ordered complexity, that you would somehow be more ‘real’? Of course not. You are real now, and you would be real if someone removed half your brain. Maybe you would be a bit dumber, but you would still be a real person. The same is true if the order of your brain is completely eroded, and your body ceases to function. You might become significantly dumber, but you would still exist as microscopic flashes of intelligence appearing throughout the universe. Except by then you would have lost the division between yourself and other minds because your thoughts would have spread out and merged with the general intelligence ‘fog’.
‘Artificial’ Intelligence
In fact, if the right chemical reaction was somehow created in a test tube exactly mimicking the thought processes of a person sitting in a New York cafe eating a raspberry tart, then who is to say that this thought hasn’t actually occurred? Just because it has not actually taken place in a brain does not mean that it is any less real. In fact the ‘person’ would not even realise that they existed in a test tube and not in a New York Cafe since they can only be aware of what they perceive through their thoughts.
You are only aware of what you perceive through your thoughts; and physical death does not necessarily mean that these will cease to occur.
Some people might argue that a thought which occurs outside of your own brain cannot be identified as yours, yet this argument is fundamentally flawed since our brain cannot be defined as a physical constant. The universe is expanding, the earth is moving around the sun and so your fixed position in space is constantly changing. In addition, most of the atoms in your brain have changed places with new ones many times in your life. So what’s the difference?
A-Wake
If you cut open a brain you can’t see the thoughts, so where are they? The best way to look at it is to imagine that the physical evidence (the electrical currents and chemical reactions) are like a wake left in the ocean behind a boat that we can never see. The wake is evidence of the boat, but it is not the boat itself. It shows that the boat is moving, yet if you stood below deck and closed your eyes you would not feel as if you were moving at all. In the same way, our consciousness exists on an ever-changing ocean of atoms within our skulls. Similarly, we do not feel that our consciousness is ‘moving’ through space, or bouncing around as an electrical storm within our brains. Rather we feel ourselves as a fixed point, a constant individual in the dimension of pure thought, separate from the physical realm.
The existence of our mind is physically evidenced by the ‘wake’ left in our brains (the predictable movement of atoms and electrical energy) but only we experience our own consciousness.
Hold That Thought
A thought does not exist within any one moment in time. If that were so, then you could cryogenically freeze someone’s brain, freezing the electrons and chemicals in that moment, and the person would be stuck forever thinking the same thought. Yet we know that this isn’t the case.
A thought does not exist at a fixed point in time; rather it exists in the space between points. It’s like music. A piece of music is not the notes on the page; rather it is the journey from one note to another that creates the song. So too are our thoughts created in the journey between moments frozen in time.
Our experience of the universe is a one-song; a uni-verse that we all sing with our thoughts.
Pause or Eject?
If our consciousness is a chain of connected thoughts, like a string of musical notes, then the concept of ‘death’ fundamentally describes a chain of thought that is no longer extending. No pain can be felt, no disappointment, nothing. ‘Nothing’ is nothing, so it cannot exist, and so therefore neither can ‘death’. Something can only be said to have ‘ended’ when it will never continue. In regards to our consciousness, death is more like a pause rather than ‘The End’.
Thank You, Come Again
There is every chance that this chain of thoughts may be continued again somewhere, sometime, in the infinite possibilities of time and space.
It’s true that the atoms will have changed, but take a look at your own body. In the last year almost every atom has changed within it too. Who you were then no longer exists. They could be seen as ‘dead’. You are a copy of that body, gradually constructed bit by bit around the old one using the proteins and enzymes that you have consumed (you are what you eat, as they say.)
Therefore, if by random chance your final thought pattern was reconstructed a trillion years from now in another place, who is to say that this would not be you? And would you feel that any time had passed at all?
Pi in the Sky
To illustrate this point I will ask you to look briefly at the number Pi. Pi is an infinite stream of randomly generated numbers and it has been suggested that within these numbers are contained the atomic positions of every atom in your body since the day you were born. Every thought you’ve ever had is contained, somewhere, within Pi. Indeed, so is every other possible experience you might have had. You might say “so what? It’s just numbers, it’s just math. It’s not real experience.” Yet, right now your brain is just atomic particles moving from one position to another and this raw information is forms you. The ultimate conclusion of all this is that we are math, and so are therefore destined to live out every possible experience through the infinite possibilities of time and space. We can never die. The atoms that form us may change, so may their position, size, and time that they exist in, but these things have changed constantly throughout your life, yet you have remained alive and of the same identity.
The Mind as a Meme
One question that arises when we consider the constant changes that occur within the physical structure of the brain is how our minds and identities can remain so consistent and intact, despite the constant shifting of their physical foundations. My answer is that the mind is a meme.
A meme is the conceptual equivalent of a gene. It is a concept that can be shared between people without losing its fundamental integrity; like complex religious beliefs, or the simple custom of shaking hands. Memes tend to compete with each other for survival and are subject to the same laws of evolution as other forms of life. Memes have been shown to develop self-defensive adaptations with varying levels of internal intelligence. In fact, I assert that memes are as valid a form of life as our own protein-based genes.
In The God Delusion Richard Dawkins describes how memetic concepts often survive the passage of time and the transition from person to person without losing their core integrity by utilizing a kind of conceptual compression; a step by step chart of their structure that eliminates less important details in favor of the core subjects. The example that Dawkins gives is that when a carpenter passes on the technique for building a chair to an apprentice he would describe a single step as “nail this leg here”, not “swing the hammer at a thirty degree angle and hammer exactly five times.” This is because, ultimately, those smaller details are not important in achieving the goal of nailing the leg onto the chair; a goal which can be achieved by whatever means the apprentice wants and still produce a faithful recreation of the ‘chair’ meme. Our minds are the same in that they are memes kept alive by neurons that transfer their memetic information from generation to generation without losing fidelity. Even though the cellular and atomic structures of our brains are constantly changing, our meme-mind stays intact. Small details may change as the ‘carriers’ change and information is passed between them, but the core integrity survives.
A meme can never die since once it has been completely diluted and disorganized, it can always be recreated accurately once again given the right circumstances. Would it become a different meme because it was resurrected by different people at a different time? No; because it was always floating on an ever-changing river of ‘carriers’. The same is true for our minds which exist on an ever-changing river of cells and neurons. Similarly, if your mind was recreated at a later date, out of different materials and in a different location then you must accept that this would, in fact, be you, since your mind was never intrinsically linked to a particular set of atoms or a particular location in space. Similarly, an image moving across a TV screen is whole and constant in of itself, but is illuminated by different pixels as it glides across the screen. A tattoo would seem to hover unchanged under the skin as the skin cells surrounding it were shed and replaced throughout the years. So is our mind a coherent meme on an ocean of ever-changing matter.
At One with the Uni-verse
What separates your mind from the outside world? Why is it that your mind exists only within your brain, and not within the liquid that surrounds it? Or in the bone that encases it? Or in the air outside? Or in the people around you? If the atoms in your brain are constantly being replaced and passing through this liquid and bone and air then is not your mind intrinsically linked with the outside world? If your thoughts are carried by electric current, then couldn’t a bolt of lightning to your head extend your mind into the sky? The truth is that your brain tissue is as much your consciousness as the ground beneath your feet or the stars above. Physically you are a part of it all, whilst in the dimension of thought you see yourself as separate.
Your mind can never die since death is an event restricted to the physical world, and does not exist in the dimension of pure thought.
It is for these reasons that no person should fear death.
Fearing death is absurd. It’s like a mathematician fearing that one day the number zero will suddenly consume all the other numbers. It would be an impossible since the other numbers would always be there; maybe a particular iteration of a formula would equal zero if carried to its conclusion, but all the numbers would still be around, ready to recreate the formula once again.
Besides, zero isn’t even really a number.
Time Enough
The universe is not linear – nor does it move at the speed of our subjective experience. This is all our own dream and unique to us. Just watch a fly buzzing around some time. Do you think it is experiencing the world at the same speed as us?
The universe does not exist exclusively within this moment, or any moment at all; rather, it exists in all possible moments of time. This is the insight of Quantum mechanics.
You really do have all the time in the world, because there’s no end to speak of, only the natural progression of your own story, which is all in your mind.
How can you rush a thought? A dream? You can only work against it or in harmony with it.
Work in harmony with your dream, your spirit, and you will enjoy happiness in your life.
Since the world that we see and feel is all created within our own minds, then so too is our experience of it. As the Buddhists have taught for thousands of years: You create your happiness; it comes from within.
The Answer?
Happiness. Joy. Peace.
Anything that does not ultimately increase your happiness is unnecessary. Discard your fears and worries about death and stop trying to cram as much into your life as possible before you ‘run out of time’. There is no end to be feared.
I believe that if we all act from what makes us truly happy then there should be no deliberate suffering in the world. Any psychologist will tell you that hatred and violence are caused by a person’s insecurities and fears. No truly happy person would ever harm another.
Any thought that does not serve to help you live your life in happiness is irrelevant. The idea of death is disturbing, and yet, as I hope I have shown, is not worth wasting your time worrying about.
Enjoy this dream of ‘life’, and never worry about time passing and the end approaching, for that too is an illusion.
The universe is not dark or cold, it is simply free of emotion and subjective experience. It exists in a state of pure enlightenment.
It is made up of energy that occasionally condenses into matter and matter that occasionally evolves into sentient beings; all of which eventually return again to rejoin the great river of energy. This energy is the source from which we have all emanated.
Indeed, we have never been apart from this source. We like to draw divisions and imagine that we are somehow separate the rest of the universe, but the truth is that we are all physically and spiritually intertwined with it.
We are truly at one with the universe.
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Thank you everyone for your comments! If you would like to share your thoughts or register your interest in my upcoming book feel free to email me at bardcan@gmail.com
- Bard Canning
