| ZEN PHYSICS (what is this?) The Science of Death, the Logic of Reincarnation David Darling 
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A wise man thinks of nothing less than death.
– Spinoza
Soon, very soon, thou wilt be ashes, or a skeleton ...
– Marcus Aurelius
When life is full and we are young, a bright world surrounds us, open to inquiry. Only in the far distance is there a speck of darkness, a missing point of the picture. But as we age, this speck grows larger. As our lives draw to a close, this region of darkness fills the ground before us like the opening of a forbidding cave. Others have entered that cave before us – billions of others, including our relatives and friends – and it is claimed even that some have returned from a brief sortie across its threshold during so-called near-death experiences (NDEs) or, less convincingly, as ghosts. Yet, despite what comfort we may choose to draw from accounts of NDEs, tales of spiritual manifestations, or the reassurances of various religions, most of us remain deeply uncertain, and afraid, as to what lies ahead. Death is the great question mark at the end of life, the mystery we long to solve but seem unable to. And yet it is an event, a transition, a portal, we must each go through sooner or later. It is a question that, in the end, holds an answer for every one of us.
Your death became a future fact at the moment a particular sperm cell from your father united with a particular ovum inside your mother. At that instant your personal hourglass was upturned and the sands of your life began to fall. Now no matter how hard you try to stay vigorous in body and mind, it will not affect the final outcome. No amount of progress to combat the effects of aging, through drugs, surgery, or other means, can do more than briefly postpone the inevitable. Your body is destined progressively to wear out and ultimately to fail. And then?
As soon as a person's heart stops beating, gravity takes hold. Within minutes a purple-red stain starts to appear on the lowermost parts of the body, where blood quickly settles. The skin and muscles sag, the body cools, and within two to six hours rigor mortis sets in. Beginning with a stiffening of the eyelids, the rigidity extends inexorably to all parts of the body and may last for between one and four days before the muscles finally relax.
Two or three days after death, a greenish discoloration of the skin on the right side of the lower abdomen above the cecum (the part of the large intestine nearest the surface) provides the first visible sign of decay. This gradually spreads over the whole abdomen and then on to the chest and upper thighs, the color being simply a result of sulfur-containing gases from the intestines reacting with hemoglobin liberated from the blood in the vessels of the abdominal wall. By the end of the first week, most of the body is tinged green, a green that steadily darkens and changes to purple and finally to black. Blood-colored blisters, two to three inches across, develop on the skin, the merest touch being sufficient to cause their top layer to slide off.
By the end of the second week the abdomen is bloated. The lungs rupture because of bacterial attack in the air passages, and the resulting release of gas pressure from within the body forces a blood-stained fluid from the nose and mouth – a startling effect that helped to spawn many a vampire legend among peasants who had witnessed exhumations in medieval Europe. The eyes bulge and the tongue swells to fill the mouth and protrude beyond the teeth. After three to four weeks, the hair, nails, and teeth loosen, and the internal organs disintegrate before turning to liquid.
On average, it takes ten to twelve years for an unembalmed adult body buried six feet deep in ordinary soil without a coffin to be completely reduced to a skeleton. This period may shrink dramatically to between a few months and a year if the grave is shallow, since the body is then more accessible to maggots and worms. However, soil chemistry, humidity, and other ambient factors have a powerful effect on the rate of decomposition. Acid water and the almost complete absence of oxygen in peat, for instance, make it an outstanding preservative. From Danish peat bogs alone, more than 150 well-kept bodies up to five thousand years old have been recovered in the last two centuries. And likewise, astonishingly fresh after five millennia was "Otzi the Iceman," found in 1991, complete with skin tattoos and Bronze Age tool kit, trapped in a glacier in the Otztal Alps on the Austro-Italian border.
Accidental preservations aside, people throughout the ages have frequently gone to surprising lengths to ensure that their corpses remained in good shape. Most famously, the ancient Egyptians were obsessed by corporeal preservation, to the extent of mummifying not just themselves but also many kinds of animals which they held to be sacred. The underground labyrinths of Tuna-el-Gebel, for instance, are eerily crowded with the mummies of baboons and ibis. Incredibly, at least four million of the latter went through the elaborate embalming process – a process that made copious use of the dehydrating salt natron, excavated from around the Nile and parched desert lakes.
All mummies preserved by the old Egyptian method are very long dead – with one bizarre exception. In 1995, the Egyptologist and philosopher Robert Brier of Long Island University completed the first mummification in this traditional style in more than 2,000 years. His subject was a seventy-six-year-old American who had given his body to science. Brier went to great pains to follow the old methods, traveling to Egypt to harvest his natron (principally a mixture of sodium carbonate and bicarbonate) from the dry shores of Wadi Natrun, and using authentic replicas of embalming tools from the first millennium B.C. Just as the mortician-priests of the pharaonic tombs would have done, Brier drew out the man's brain (The Egyptians discarded the brain because they drew no connection between it and the person's mind or soul. Mental life, they believed, was concentrated in the heart. To us this seems odd since it "feels" as if thought takes place inside our heads. If we concentrate hard for too long our head aches. Did the Egyptians experience "heartache" instead?) by way of the nostrils, extracted the major organs before storing them individually in canopic jars, and finally left the body for several weeks to completely dehydrate, swaddled and packed in the special salt. Only the subject's feet were visible, wrapped in blue surgical booties. Rejecting criticisms that his research was in poor taste, Brier claimed the experiment had shown beyond doubt that it is the action of natron, more than any other factor, that affords mummies their well-kept look.
The Romans, too, were familiar with the drying and preservative properties of certain chemicals. So-called plaster burials, in which lime or chalk (both drying agents) or gypsum (a natural antiseptic) was packed around the body in the coffin, have turned up in Roman cemeteries in Britain and North Africa.
More recently, wealthy Victorians went to enormous trouble to carefully dispose of their corpses. Burial in crypts and catacombs came into fashion – and not only because it gave the well-heeled, through the ostentatious grandeur of family vaults, a way to display their social standing. There were more sinister reasons to try to ensure a safe place for burial. Locked doors were a deterrent to body snatchers who might otherwise hawk your remains for illegal medical dissection or, worse, pry out your teeth for use in making dentures. Also, the Victorians had an acute fear of being buried alive – better, they reasoned, to revive in a room with some chance of escape than in a horribly cramped coffin piled over with earth.
It is no coincidence that the average interval between death and burial in Britain lengthened from about five days in the late eighteenth century to eight days in the early nineteenth century. The object was to allow plenty of time for obvious signs of decay to develop, which would serve a dual purpose: to reassure relatives that their loved one was indeed dead and also to render the body less desirable to thieves.
People at this time often included in their wills bizarre requests concerning the disposal of their bodies. They would ask, for instance, that bells be attached to their corpse or that a razor be used to cut into the flesh of their foot to make absolutely sure they were not still alive before being interred. And in Imperial Russia perhaps the most wonderfully eccentric precaution of all was dreamed up to counter the possibility of premature burial. In 1897, having witnessed the remarkable revival of a young girl during her funeral, Count Karnice-Karnicki, chamberlain to the czar, patented his "life-signaling coffin." The slightest movement of the occupant's chest would trigger a spring-loaded ball, causing a box on the surface connected to the spring by a tube to open, thereby letting light and air into the coffin. The spring was also designed to release a flag on the surface, a bell that would ring for half an hour, and a lamp that would burn after sunset. Alas, history does not record if the count's ingenious invention ever left the drawing board.
Our choice of whether to be buried or not may be made on purely aesthetic grounds. We may be somewhat comforted by the idea of our bodies returning to nature as part of the grand recycling process. Alternatively, we may find the thought of being consumed by insects and bacteria too revolting to contemplate and, as a result, opt for a less organic mode of disposal. But, for some people, burial after death is important for religious reasons. Most obviously, according to Christian doctrine, there will be a resurrection of the dead on the Last Day of Judgment. The graves will be opened, say the scriptures, and saints and sinners will stand before the Son of God and be judged. Interpreted literally, this might suggest we should do our best to try to preserve whatever we can of our erstwhile selves so that there is at least something left of us to resurrect. And yet, in all honesty, it is hardly a realistic ambition. Whatever precautions we take to have our remains securely interred, nothing of our bodies – not even our bones – will survive the many millions of years that lie ahead in the Earth's future.
By contrast with burial, today's most common mode of disposal, cremation, annihilates a corpse at tremendous speed. In less than an hour, in a gas fire at temperatures of between 1100 and 1750 degrees Fahrenheit, the body reduces to just a few pounds of white ash, which can then be stored or dispersed according to whim – scattered over a favorite hillside perhaps, or, in the most exotic way imaginable, jettisoned into space from a rocket to boldly go where Gene Roddenberry, creator of Star Trek, has gone before.
Alternatively, organs of the body may be bequeathed so that they go on serving a useful function, other than as fertilizer, inside someone still alive. Yet another option was that chosen, in pretransplant days, by the British geneticist and writer J. B. S. Haldane:
When I am dead I propose to be dissected; in fact, a distinguished anatomist has already been promised my head should he survive me. I hope that I have been of some use to my fellows while alive, and I see no reason why I should not continue to be so when dead. I admit, however, that if funerals gave as much pleasure to the living in England as they do in Scotland I might change my mind.Tragedy and dark comedy often seem to be companions in death. We take ourselves so seriously, invest such effort in our public image, work so hard at building a secure and comfortable niche for ourselves – and then what? All the pretense of modern life is stripped away and we end up desiccated, dissected, or decomposed.
Or do we? Our organic forms are obviously doomed. But are we more than just our living bodies and brains? Does some part of us – an inner essence, a soul or spirit – escape the dissolution of flesh?
Haldane put the case for the prosecution:
[S]hall I be there to attend my dissection or to haunt my next-of-kin if he or she forbids it? Indeed will anything of me but my body, other men's memory of me, and the results of my life, survive my death? Certainly I cannot deny the possibility; but at no period in my life has my personal survival seemed at all a likely contingency.The basic materialist view of death, now widely held by scientists and layfolk alike, seems, on the face of it, bleak beyond despair. "We" – our minds – appear to be nothing more than outgrowths of our living brains, so that inevitably we must expire at the moment our neural support structures collapse. Death, from this perspective, amounts to a total, permanent cessation of consciousness and feeling – the end of the individual. Considering how anxious most of us are at the thought of losing merely our jobs or possessions, it is hardly surprising that, in an increasingly secular society, the fear of death – of losing everything, including ourselves – has become so deep and widespread. Yet exactly what are we afraid of?
If I die as most people die, I shall gradually lose my intellectual faculties, my senses will fail, and I shall become unconscious. And then I am asked to believe that I shall suddenly wake up to a vivid consciousness in hell, heaven, purgatory, or some other state of existence.
Now, I have lost consciousness both from blows on the head, from fever, anesthetics, want of oxygen, and other causes; and therefore I know that my consciousness depends on the physical and chemical conditions of my brain, and that very small changes in the organ will modify or destroy it.
But I am asked to believe that my mind will continue without a brain, or will be miraculously provided with a new one.
Epicurus pointed out the irrationality of fearing the end of consciousness in his Letter to Menoeceus:
Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us. For all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation. And therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it takes away the craving for immortality. For there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.Others have echoed this view, including Ludwig Wittgenstein: "We do not experience death," he insisted; "Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limit." To use a mathematical analogy, just as an asymptotic curve comes closer and closer to a line but never actually touches it, so we move closer toward death throughout life but never actually reach death in experience (if by death we mean the end of an individual's consciousness).
Ironically, one of the possibilities we tend to dread the most – that death represents a one-way trip to oblivion – turns out to be something we need have no fear of at all. Socrates even enjoined us to look forward to it. In his Apology he explained:
Death is one of two things. Either it is an annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything, or ... it is really a change – a migration of the soul from this place to another. Now if there is no consciousness but only a dreamless sleep, death must be a marvelous gain ... because the whole of time ... can be regarded as no more than a single night.We can put it even more dramatically than this. If death marks a permanent end of your consciousness, then from your point of view when you die, the entire future of the universe (running into tens of billions of years or more) must telescope down not just into a night, as Socrates described, but into a fleeting instant. Even if the universe were to go through other cycles of expansion and contraction, then all of these cycles as far as you are concerned would happen in zero time. What conceivable basis for fear could there be in such an absence of experience? We may as well be afraid of the gap between one thought and the next.
Marcus Aurelius was among those who offered another way to come to grips with the prospect of nonbeing: the period after death, he pointed out, is like the period before birth. You didn't spend the billions of years before you were born in a state of anxiety and apprehension, because there was no "you" to be aware of anything. Looking back now, it doesn't seem frightening that there was once a time when you were not conscious. Why then should you be concerned about returning to that nonexistent, nonconscious state when you die?
On a purely academic level, we can follow these arguments and appreciate the logic in them. And yet, for most of us, they ring hollow. They fail utterly to dispel the visceral dread we have of plunging into the terminal darkness, alone. The fear of death, timor mortis, the horror of the ultimate abyss that waits to claim us all, is far too deeply ingrained in our nature to be alleviated by mere rhetoric. Indeed, it is a fear whose origins go back to the very dawn of our planet.
On Earth, at least, life began as molecules of increasing complexity came together purely by chance in the primitive terrestrial ocean. In one scenario, a rich chemical broth activated by unshielded high-energy radiation from the sun and powerful lightning strikes gave rise to the first molecules that could make copies of themselves – the precursors of today's DNA. There is no mystery about this. Any assortment of objects, especially "sticky" objects like molecules, randomly stirred for long enough will give rise to every conceivable possible combination. Over millions and millions of years, the simple atomic and molecular units bumping into one another, under energetically favorable conditions, must have come together in all sorts of different ways. Most of these complicated associations would have been unstable. And even if they had been stable under normal conditions, a hard enough collision with some other particle or a well-aimed ultraviolet ray would have broken them apart. Eventually, however, a certain formation of molecular units combined to give a supermolecule that, by chance, could act as the template and docking station for making precise copies of itself. No sooner did this happen then the supermolecule spread rapidly throughout the waters of the young Earth. Possibly there were several variants of such self-replicating substances which competed for resources. Not that there was any thought of competition at the time; there was as yet no substrate for thought at all. But in the chance emergence of self-copying molecules we can discern, from our future vantage point, the first stirrings of life, the beginnings of the struggle to survive in a potentially hostile world – and the origins of self.
Nature lays down no boundaries between life and nonlife. What we choose to call living is our own affair. Is an intricate self-replicating molecule alive? What if the molecule, through natural selection, acquires a kind of protective skin? The point at which we want to say that life has developed from nonlife is open to interpretation and debate since it is purely a human issue – a question of labels.
In reality, self-copying materials just became progressively more effective at surviving, more elaborate, and more capable through a process of blind, natural competition. Having internalized, as it were, their own blueprint, they became subject to random mutation. Struck by a penetrating photon from the sun or possibly a cosmic ray, a self-replicator risked its internal code being minutely altered. And, if this happened, then in the next generation an individual built according to a slightly different design would be created (providing the change had not altogether impaired the assembly mechanism). Most commonly such a mutant would prove less effective than its parent at staying in one piece long enough to have offspring of its own. But very occasionally a mutant would be born with an advantage over its parent and peers – the ability, for instance, to make copies of itself more rapidly, or to better resist attack from competitors.
In general terms, then, there is no problem in understanding how a variety of competing life-forms – primitive but steadily evolving toward greater sophistication – appeared on Earth long ago. None of these early creatures was anything more than a bundle of biochemicals wrapped up in a membrane bag. Even so, in their makeup and activity, we can recognize the inception of a new quality in the universe. These ancient gelatinous specks of matter showed the beginnings of self-interest and purpose. They had established barriers, definite, sustainable boundaries between themselves and the outside world. And although the heady heights of human intellect and introspection lay almost four billion years away, even the most elementary of life-forms harbored information at some level about what was part of their own constitution and what was not. They were, at least chemically, self-aware. Thus, the foundations for dualism – the belief in the separation of self and the rest of the world – were laid.
What we see from our biased viewpoint to be the most significant advance in evolution is the movement toward increased cerebration – the development of bigger, more elaborate brains and nervous systems. The ability of a creature to retain within itself a sophisticated representation of the world outside is held by us in high regard. But the greatest accolade of all we reserve for ourselves and the capacity we alone seem to have to be conscious of ourselves as free agents in a world amenable to our control.
Natural selection gives no vector of progress. There was never any master plan to build bigger, better brains. But with hindsight, it seems almost inevitable that once life had become established it would develop in the direction of increased self-awareness. To be aware of yourself is to have an effective knowledge of where you end and the rest of the universe begins, so you know precisely on which battle line to fight. And being an individual in the wild is a battle, a continual, desperate struggle to stay alive. Any number of events can destroy you. A terrifying array of predators are out there trying to make you their next meal. Or, if you are not sufficiently aware of what is going on around you, you may fall victim to some other unfortunate accident. Or you may simply not find enough to eat. And no one is going to help you. On the contrary, your equally determined adversaries will take full advantage of any sign of weakness that you display. Given such perilous circumstances, the stronger your sense and skills of self-preservation, the better it is for you. Indeed, being and remaining an individual necessitates that you be uncompromisingly selfish.
We sometimes wonder how humans can be so cruel and ruthless, how they can lay waste to the planet with impunity, how they can exterminate other species and kill one another in alarming numbers. But such acts are not difficult after four billion years' practice. To stay alive at any cost, at anyone else's expense, is in our nature. It is the prime directive of our genes.
We are driven relentlessly to survive. And to aid us in this quest we have become equipped with the most remarkable survival organ in the known universe – the human brain. Such is the brain's power that it can construct and maintain a vivid sense of its own identity, its own unique selfhood. And yet it can also, with equal ease, cast its thoughts into the future and see its own inevitable demise.
Here, then, is the source of our greatest fear. We know full well that the brain and body will eventually break down. Yet such is our urge to carry on living that we cannot come to grips with the notion that the self presently associated with this doomed receptacle may similarly come to an abrupt end. The world and other selves will survive our personal death, we know. But this seems like small consolation if the particular selves that are you and I cannot, at least in some recognizable form, continue indefinitely.
Perhaps it was bound to happen that our race would go through this stage of uncertainty in its development. Maybe all creatures in the universe who become self-aware pass through a lengthy phase when they wrestle with the potentially devastating contradiction of a self-conscious survival machine that knows beyond all doubt that it cannot survive. But our combined intellect is formidable, capable of revealing deep, unexpected truths about the origin and nature of the cosmos. And there are no grounds a priori to suppose that it cannot also penetrate the more personal mysteries of the human self and mortality. Considering the importance of these issues to us, the time is surely ripe to embark upon such an investigation. And, providing we are prepared to take a broad-minded scientific approach, we can expect after millennia of doubt to shed real light on the problems of who we are and what happens to us when we die.
Related books by David Darling (click on a cover to begin reading):
