Doubting Death

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”

 

--Wittgenstien

Basic argument: Just as the word “nothing” doesn’t refer to anything observable, the word “death” also does not refer to anything observable. Because of this, it seems an accurate statement to say that “death does not actually occur” or to say that “death does not exist”. This is the essence of my argument and for clarity’s sake I am stating it here in a simple and bare way.

     The term “death” in the way it is commonly understood is defined as something like “the absence of consciousness” or “a state in which consciousness doesn’t exists any longer”. The term “death” as well as those definitions I wrote above do not correspond with anything that we encounter that is observable. Accordingly, it is accurate to say that death does not exist or that death does not occur. In this essay I will attempt to argue this point as well as address other related issues.

       When a person sees a carcass of an animal, say on a sunny roadside, they may be inclined to say something like "this carcass is an example of death" or perhaps, with phrasing that is less clear, "this is death.” It is important to remember, though, that the carcass is itself something that exists, which corresponds with visual or kinesthetic data that we immediately experience which would lead us to make those assessments. Adding the term “death” into the claim, then, is putting in some extra thing beyond the obviously existing elements. A clearer approach to the matter would be to describe the things that concretely exist and then stop there and reflect before adding a claim with the term “death” or a word that is an equivalent in meaning. When someone says “death has occurred” it seems they will often have the thought that consciousness itself has vanished or been extinguished in some way so that it no longer exists. It is often thought by people of secular persuasion that this state of consciousness being extinguished happens “forever”. It doesn’t seem to be beyond an unnecessarily dramatic atheist to say something like, “when I die, that’s it. Zero, Zippo, Nada. For all time.”

    The word "death" as I defined it above seems, upon the scrutiny of exactitude, to be a meaningless term, which is to say that it is not clear or well-formed semantically to begin with so that it could qualify as a scientific hypothesis that evidence could possibly support. The word seems to correspond with a garbled idea and a fiction--an inconvenient one at that!--that might be a concept our mind places upon a totally existent and deathless reality as Kantian categories are thought by some to be. It seems like for a set of terms to be well-formed they have to correspond with things that exist or with clearly conceivable images. It seems, further, that if the words correspond with a clear image then theoretically you should be able to draw the thing on paper. An example of a term that is not well-formed and that it seems like you can’t do this with is “round square”: the words do not cash out into a single, clear image. It seems like someone simply cannot draw this, considering the restrictions of classic geometry--no sarcastically intentioned objects like a mobius strips allowed this time around--or that someone cannot picture this abstractly using the mind’s knack for visual imagining. If this is the case then it means that there was never any entity that existed behind the words “round square”. It seems like it would have always been from the outset, a vapid collection of words, like “green ideas sleep furiously”,  a phrase often invoked in linguistics. Not all possible combinations of words in English or some other language correspond with a clear image. Words are not entitled heirs to having a clear image or depiction about them just because they can be assembled together.

      Sometimes, it seems, there are images or thoughts behind our words that are kind of murky, aberrant, and cockneyed that seem at first to correspond meaningfully to something and to be “well-formed” but upon a closer look are actually not clear ideas at all or are not something that we could portrayed neatly and concretely on a piece of paper. I suspect that, technically, “death” is one of those things, a would-be entity that dissolves away in sucrose flimsiness upon close scrutiny and inspection. The intuitive idea or image of “death” that surfaces when I try to reflect on the word and its meaning is something like a black 2-dimensional plane. The other image that comes up in my mind is a timeline that lays out in a span from left to right. When I think about it reflectively and deeply--skull of course in hand--I realize that these things are actually not what I intend to refer to when I use the term “death”. I would refer to, for instance, a black 2-dimensional sheet as, well, “a black 2-dimensional plane”. A black 2-dimensional sheet plane is obviously not one and the same as whatever I am trying to get at with “death”. It seems metaphorical and distinctly removed from whatever entity I could be possibly be trying to get at with that word.

     At this point I have laid out the basic argument of the paper, which is that “death” as it is commonly defined is a nonsense term, that doesn’t correspond with something clearly conceivable or able to be observed. Now let’s now take a look a bit at the sophisticated definition of “death” as used in the field of medicine. In medicine, “death” is defined as is “irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions or irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem”. People sometimes when presenting the sophisticated definition may say that death is not a thing but a “process”. This sort of re-categorization doesn’t seem helpful, like someone saying something, in a plastic manner of book on positive thinking, “think less of the thing as a what, but instead ss a how”. In the above definition, as you can see, there is a notion of “cessation” that is present. It seems like this definition is removed from the common, everyday definition that we first looked at, which seems worth noting for the progression of the argument in this paper. If these states of circulatory and respiratory functioning and states of brain functioning can be observed that would qualify someone as “dead”, then those things would be technically be things that exist as opposed to “not existing”. Also, a process is still thought to be something that exists, or something that pairs the progression of time in some way with singular events that are able to be separated out and recognized individually. These definitions are not the same thing as the “death” as we looked at it in commonplace contexts, or a term that would mean the same thing as “nothing”. Even though this definition is the one used in medical contexts, it is more helpful for the purposes of this paper to look at the first definition we looked at, simply because the focus of this paper is looking at the word as a synonym for “nothing”. That is the definition that I wish to analyze, and is the definition as many people use it and as have, connected with it, practical emotional concern. People approaching old age whose bodies will eventually not maintain the same pattern of homeostasis do exist, people with fevers on death beds do exist, brains that have undergone decay do exist, bodies donated to science do exist, but none of those things entail these is this unlovely add-on death also exists. All of those things can be existing entities without there being some “state of nothing” that occurs at the end of life, whatever that means. Saying that “nothing exists” is an out and out contradiction. 

     Now let’s look at the phenomena sleep which is sometimes thought to be similar to death. It is thought by some that when we sleep we cease to be conscious in some way. It is thought that this “state” persists and then is interrupted upon waking in, say, the some time occurring in the morning. Recent scientific research, however, indicates that when we get the impression that we are not conscious during sleep we really are just not remembering the fact that we were actually experiencing things such as dreams, at least for some of the time we were asleep. It seems from an empirical perspective that memory can be unreliable at least some of the time and that not all our memories about life as we think it occurred are accurate.  From a perspective of Cartesian doubt, the enigmatic and insular situation we seem to find ourselves in again and again and again, memory must always be unreliable in the sense that we can’t verify that the memories are accurate or accurately correspond with a thing called the “past”; In the present moment we are not directly observing the past itself (which seems to follow by necessity of definition). It seems to me that some of the experience of sleep may be the experience of a black two-dimensional span--which seems to be what I often experience right before I go off to sleep--the same sort of thing that I said comes to mind when I try to find a definition of “death”. This may just be the read that shows up in our mind of our eyelids being closed. As a side note, I should put it forward that it is possible that this sheet-like experience of blackness has evolved to resemble night and provide a display screen that allows humans to be alerted quickly if their lazy ocelot slumber party should happen to be interrupted by a lurking danger in the proximity that is not sympathetic to the need for a little fun.

       Now let's take a look at another idea related to the idea of death, the phenomena of “blacking out”. I personally have blacked out once, for some reason I still don’t fully understand, and when I woke--at first glance, whiff, and blush--I had the impression that I had “not been conscious” for that amount of time. However, at some later point, with a marked sense of surprise, as mind my regained clarity, composure, and sharpness, a video-like memory surfaced of what had occurred during the blackout, which of course contradicted the impression I initially had that I had not been conscious during that time. Perhaps there were other ways to explain the fluxing, video-like data--maybe it came from a different part of my mind or brain--but at any rate it made the hypothesis of “blacking out” seem much less likely to me at the time. Again, I think thorough reflection shows that “nothing” or--with a more profound reverberation--”nothingness” does not make sense as an idea. In other words, it is oxymoronic to the point of literal contradiction to say that there is a thing like “experienced nothingness”. I am stating this point many times, in many different ways, at the risk of being a redundant fuddy-duddy.

      I want to share a heuristic I recently came to as it is relevant to the ideas discussed here. I had the idea that if something becomes mysticism-inducing when capitalized and written in the singular then it is something I should be critical of in terms of whether it exists or not and that I should preempt with doubt. This seems true of when people, like someone who looks like he should be named Shaman Gary, talk about “Great Time” or “Great Space”--“Sure, of course there is small space. But then my thinking is: what about Great Space?” Sometimes things that lead into a sense of awe and mystery are there as a way of keeping things mysterious-seeming, so if it seems mysterious, you can count on it probably being pedestrian. It seems like a weird tell that death is talked about in the singular but is also somewhere immanent, draping, enveloping, and haunting enough to exist--as it seems makes sense-- at all the locations of everyone’s death, ready to round up souls with a handbroom and push them into a bedpan. If death occurs for many people then isn’t it a complicated thing with countable parts? Does it progress in time or it is outside of it? Does it have a spatial layout? Does it come ready with a plush interior? The seeming unwillingness of death of qua nothing to reduce to intelligible scrutiny makes it seem like a poor fit for reality and belief.

       I think the same thing that could be said about “nothing” and “death” can also be said about the term “ending” or anything that is a synonym for “ending”--I am thinking of things like the endings of movies and songs and plays and cadenzas and dollar store flipbooks. This word “ending”, along with the words “beginning” and “middle”--seem to be involved in the way we frame and section off things, often in a way that resembles a story arc. This term “ending” is not, however, an affirmatory, definitive, declarative description of what exists. We can describe all the things in a movie, a violin concerto, or anything else we superimpose our grimey, unworthy human story arcs upon, as a set of things that exist, without any talk about what doesn’t exist. We can, if we wanted, let all talk of “things that don’t exist” pass over in mindful silence and only use our words to describe things that are observable and evident. One imagines that the eventual theory of everything will be a description of many things that do exist, if only because it would be cumbersome and irksome and exhausting to enumerate lots and lots of statements about what does not exist in respect to a given place--which is like a “slot of space” where particular things could possibly exist. We may not have enough words and symbols in the universe to talk about all the things that are “not true” of a particular location or thing. It seems that the theory of everything we will come up with will be composed of a very, very large number of statements, mathematical or otherwise, that are about the things that do exist definitely in the universe.

     When looked at from the certain angle I am trying to get the reader to see this topic from, it seems like believing in a word like “nothing” or a word considered to be synonymous or interchangeable for “nothing” is obviously hullabaloo, poppycock, and downright balderdash. After having ruminates on the cud of this idea for a few years since it had first occurred to me as a possibility, this overall still seems to me an accurate way to view the matter. From the conversations I had with people on this topic, including scientists who grimace their nose with artless disgust at the idea I am proposing in this paper, I suspect that there can be proverbial scientist in a white lab coat that is a introjection in the back of the mind, perched sagaciously on the shoulder, that may have a strong persuasive effect on people in getting them to believe that death exists since it seems like the customarily and scientific and realistic thing to do.

    I think it is prudent to believe in the results of scientific consensus because the theory-building and evidence gathering abilities of a large group of minds qualified in a particular field is better than what a single person can do in almost all cases, smartypants like Charles Darwin notwithstanding. In writing this paper I don’t presume to have more knowledge or insight than a group of scientists who put their minds together like an enormous algorithm occurring between people to figure out the truths in a given area. That would be grandiose and unjustified. The reason why I think the thesis of this paper is worth considering is because it may be best in terms of understanding reality to favor the intuitive reaction of rejecting anything that seems like a contradiction or seems to be nonsensical even if a group of scientists or a group of people insist that it is so. Scientists are not infallible with this sort of thing, and have made mistakes in the past along these lines. If a scientist conversationally pressured me into believing in something like “nothingness” or “death” or a “round square”, I would likely not believe in it because it is not a clear idea, even if his or her degree was winking at me stupendously from its cozy, platinum frame. I give myself permission to not believe in things like “round squares” without waiting around for a group of scientists to give me that permission and think that makes the most sense overall. I try to choose those instances where I give myself that permission sparingly and wisely. 

   This sort of issue shows up practically in the questions of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physicists, concerning questions of whether anti-intuitive and contradictory states exist or not on a small scale level, as well as in radical behaviorism which sometimes seem to claim that the mind doesn’t exist at all. In these cases it seems like I basically favor my intuitive reaction while also trying to have a healthy self critical mindset based on the other arguments out there. I suspect that believing in things like contradictory quantum states or a mind not existing at all (a conclusion that it seems the mind itself, made of existing thoughts, reached in some way) is something like modish nonsense, and an arbitrary cultural notion that is disseminated within the scientific community. Maybe we will find out that something that fits the definition we have been using for “death” does exist, and the condemnatory and ignobility-indicating egg will justly fall on my face. If I am wrong about this, I hereby promise on this day I write this to take a picture of myself holding up a sign that reads “I’m with stupid (and boy am I)” that points to myself and put it on local town bulletin. Anything so that the truth and its avid excavators should be made known and obvious.

    All in all, I hope I have shown in this paper that it is not logical to believe in death, or at very least showed that there was something wonky and suspicious and plywood-derelict about the idea. The argument of this paper which I attempted to put forth is that mind cannot form a clear image of “death” which is the prerequisite that needs to be fulfilled before evidence could even begin to support it. Maybe you will think the point I made in the paper is good enough; maybe you will come up with a clever retort that annuls and one-ups my argument. It felt good to write this essay because I thought the main point would be something that could help people since many have anxiety and other negative emotions surrounding the idea of death. As far as I can tell, considering that everyone’s introspection including my own has blind spots (perhaps as a natural psychological defense), I don’t naturally have a strong intuitive fear of death in the way that other people like the writer Leo Tolstoy seems to have had, but I wanted to write this essay nonetheless because it seems like the fear is fairly common to people. 

       When thinking about growing old or when experiencing a midlife crisis--which of course features an ominous and fast approaching red sports car--or something relevant to the end of life, one can be made to feel a pressing and obligated need to pass off the genetic baton into the next generation by having children  It may be that if someone does not believe in death that there is less eagerness to have children. It may be that if someone does not believe in it, they will not have the same amounts of amygdala-made anxiety that normally help them pay attention to something important. These are all important and relevant questions to the topic brought up.

     I don’t know what happens to consciousness after the body decays. This is something that I think is a matter of empirical confirmation and investigation. It may be that a consciousness continues in some simple way. Maybe this resembles reincarnation to some degree. It may at some point in the history of the universe we regain consciousness that is as complex as ours. It could also be that the phenomena of time as experienced by conscious entities like us continues on for a large quantifiable duration. It could also be that time may stop and we may just be “frozen” in a state that only has elements of space and sense-data qualities, perhaps like the theoretical heat death of the universe, that is something like a sustained ending. It seems like time is a stubbornly persistent delusion and something like space that occurs or exists at the frontier of the universe, and is a phenomena that can be counted and understood if it exists at all. Perhaps if we understand it better and our experience of it more, we will have a better sense of what does exist, whether we have dismissed talk of what doesn’t exist as nonsense or not. Whatever occurs after the brain and body decay and then demonstrate something other than the pattern of functioning they had during life, the resulting state would have to be something that does exist, and it seems whatever ideas are behind “death” or “nothing” are not examples of things that fit that category.