{"id":795,"date":"2018-12-31T02:57:51","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T02:57:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joshmitteldorf.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=795"},"modified":"2018-12-31T03:18:41","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T03:18:41","slug":"denial-of-death-or-denial-of-immortality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/joshmitteldorf\/2018\/12\/31\/denial-of-death-or-denial-of-immortality\/","title":{"rendered":"Denial of Death or Denial of Immortality"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

At year end, I have a tradition of writing a column more speculative and personal than usual.\u00a0 In this post, I consider critically the standard physicalist belief that our consciousness depends on a physical brain, and hence death is the end of all awareness.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

I was 46 years old when I first considered the question, what is aging and where does it come from? \u00a0Before that, I had been a physicist with diverse scientific interests pretty much all my life. What was I thinking? \u00a0Why had I never considered this topic before? I think the answer is: fear.<\/p>\n

Ever since I can remember, I\u2019ve been interested in preserving my health and extending my life. \u00a0But it was several years into a committed study of aging science that I thought to ask, why? Do I love life especially well, or am I afraid of death?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve gradually come to realize that fear of death has cast a shadow over my thinking about aging, and possibly about many other other things as well. \u00a0I was a young child when I taught myself to avoid thinking about death because I couldn\u2019t handle the abyss of terror into which my thoughts spun. As I developed the habit of tiptoeing around thoughts and discussions of death, what was I missing? \u00a0I\u2019ve come to think that whole areas of my humanity became occluded, and have only begun to re-emerge in recent years.<\/p>\n

In 1972, Ernest Becker wrote a book called The Denial of Death<\/i><\/b><\/a>, which I knew even then that I ought to read. \u00a0I bought it, but years went by and it never made it remained unopened on my bookshelf. \u00a0Becker proposed that all of human civilization\u2014art and literature, architecture, music, settlements and empires, stories of heroism, religious teachings, projects great and small\u2014all of it stems from a drive to compensate for our mortality by creating something more permanent than our physical selves. \u00a0Even if this is only a little true, we have to wonder: Who would we be if we weren\u2019t trying so hard to avoid death?<\/p>\n

The Bhutanese people are reputed to be the happiest in the world. \u00a0Their mountains are majestic, their lifestyle modest and close to the land; but in this they are no different from many nations whose people seem to be pitiable. \u00a0So what is their secret? Eric Weiner tells us<\/a> that their culture is steeped in death rituals, and that death is out in the open in Bhutan. \u00a0Bhutanese Buddhists contemplate their own death five times a day. Weiner goes on to cite studies that suggest thinking about death makes us more joyous. \u00a0These studies wouldn\u2019t convince anyone, unless they wanted to be convinced. Maybe I want to be convinced<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course, Buddhism is pervasive in Bhutan, with its belief that our souls cycle through birth and rebirth in karmic cycles. \u00a0Death is not a final end. The abyss that terrified me is not part of their belief system. I used to try consoling myself with such possibilities, but I got nowhere. \u00a0This is not science, it\u2019s wishful thinking. Religions have manipulated people with promises about life after death since the dawn of human civilization. I\u2019m too smart to be deceived with such fairy tales. \u00a0Even if it makes me afraid, even if it paralyzes me with terror, I prefer the realism of science.<\/p>\n

But there came a point when it occurred to me maybe that the immortal soul was the reality and the fear was the delusion. \u00a0Did I believe in the Great Void just so I could feel smarter than people who believed in heaven? I peeked out from my fear just enough to question whether the abyss was a scientific deduction, or merely an artifact of scientific culture. Science or scientism?<\/p>\n

But there came a point when I wondered whether the self-delusion was in the belief that it was all wishful thinking. \u00a0I peeked out from my fear just enough to question whether the abyss was a scientific deduction, or merely an artifact of scientific culture. Science or scientism?<\/p>\n

\n

Let\u2019s backtrack to a different scientific myth.\u00a0 We have been effective in reversing the scientific prejudice that says human lifespan is a fixed, unalterable fact of our biology. Given the intellectual bankruptcy of this thesis, why would so many people, scientists especially, have embraced it for so long? \u00a0One reason is the experience with being disappointed by charlatans, fooled by mountebanks, alchemists and snake-oil salesmen who have profited from their customers\u2019 willingness to believe. Perhaps a larger reason is the fear of death that they have walled off with a kind of despair masquerading as science. \u00a0Hope is often more frightening than despair. As Milton<\/a> wrote, \u201cSo farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear.\u201d<\/p>\n

They leave their hope behind so they don\u2019t have to face the discomfort of their fears. \u00a0We have exposed their unreason.<\/p>\n

Now, I wonder if we have been drawn into the same dynamic: that we have relinquished a hope that is too uncomfortable to carry. \u00a0The hope we have relinquished is that the \u201cself\u201d persists in some form and awareness continues after physical death. For most of my life, I believed that physical reality is the only reality there is, that anything I feel as a \u201cself\u201d depends on 100 billion neurons and a blood supply.<\/p>\n

And yet, my primary experience, the only thing of which I am truly certain, is that I exist as a point of consciousness, a primal self-awareness that all our science (as Chalmers<\/a> has pounded home to us all) is powerless to explain. \u00a0Many of us believe (with Dennett<\/a>) that, since physical reality is the only reality, this primal self-awareness must be an epiphenomenon of neural activity in the physical brain\u2014some would say an illusion created by computation. Maybe this is true, but there is no scientific support for this statement, nor does scientific evidence weigh against it. \u00a0The statement that our feeling of self derives from computation is an article of faith, or of Scientism, rather than anything for which we can adduce evidence.<\/p>\n

And for me, this idea is counter-intuitive. \u00a0I have a meditation practice. I have studied astrophysics and quantum mechanics. \u00a0I go for long walks in the woods and I allow my mind to run all over such topics, and the result until now has been for me to trust this feeling of selfhood more than I trust any reasoning about an alleged physical basis. \u00a0The light of my awareness is a truth unto itself.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cYeah, yeah,\u201d says my scientific training, \u201cwhere\u2019s the evidence?\u201d \u00a0Evidence there is aplenty, but it is ignored by the scientific mainstream. \u00a0Some of it is recognized as anomaly that we will understand someday, even though it seems strange now. \u00a0The more direct kinds of evidence are actively suppressed, banned from mainstream scientific journals and exiled to the Journal of Scientific Exploration<\/a> and other publications of mixed quality, where it takes some patience to separate the wheat from the chaff.<\/p>\n

In the former category are some of the anomalies cited at the beginning of the Michael Levin video<\/a> that I reported on last week. \u00a0Caterpillars whose brains are literally dissolved in morphing into a butterfly, and yet memories survive. \u00a0Monarch butterflies that pass memories about the route to return home over half a dozen generations. Ciliated protozoa that are capable of learning and memory, though they have no nerve cells. \u00a0People who develop a musical ability or an interest in motorcycles or a vegetarian conviction when they receive a heart transplant.<\/p>\n

In the latter category are a number of experiments for which the best source might be Dean Radin\u2019s books<\/a>, for example Entangled Minds<\/a> and The Conscious Universe<\/a>. \u00a0There are near-death experiences, in which people have memories, often blissful and love-filled, from the time when there was no neural activity in their brains. \u00a0Reflexively, the scientific rationalists dismiss these reports as fantasy creations of the oxygen-starved brain. But in many cases, the person recovering from an NDE reports things she would have no way of knowing if she had not been conscious during the time she was clinically dead. \u00a0My introduction to NDE science was by Pim van Lommel. His latest book is Infinite Awareness<\/a>. \u00a0Similar stories have been collected by John Hagan<\/a>, Chris Carter<\/a>, Eben Alexander<\/a>, and others. \u00a0Finally, there is the scientific study of reincarnation, pioneered in the West by the late Ian Stevenson, professor of psychiatry at University of Virginia. \u00a0His work has been continued by Jim Tucker<\/a> at UVa and Raymond Moody<\/a> (his book<\/a>), Roy Stemman<\/a>, and others elsewhere. \u00a0Carol Bowman<\/a> researched and documented one spectacular case of a Louisiana couple, non-religious skeptics, whose 2-year-old son<\/a> had persistent nightmares, then displayed uncanny knowledge about the crash of a World War II fighter plane in Iwo Jima.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/p>\n

Why does the mainstream scientific community persist in dismissing all this research without evaluating it? \u00a0Because it conflicts with a strictly-materialist, \u201cscientific\u201d world-view formed in the 19th Century, when the world of science was suffering under the delusion that every natural phenomenon might soon be explained by deterministic laws. \u00a0A few decades later, quantum physics put that aspiration to rest, and offered a mechanics at the foundation of science that has room for mind, for intention, for Cartesian dualism, for those who see fit to interpret quantum mechanics in that light. \u00a0Quantum mechanics may be 90 years old, but the scientific world has yet to absorb its message.\u00a0 In particular, it has been shown in independent experiments by Radin<\/a>, Jahn<\/a>, and others that the events that are treated as \u201crandom\u201d in QM can be influenced by conscious intent, without any recognized physical connection between the brain and the quantum system.\u00a0 Furthermore, this connection is stronger when there is an emotional stake in the outcome, and its force increases non-linearly with the number of people whose attention is focused on a quantum target.<\/p>\n

My tentative conclusion from this is that there is room within what quantum mechanics treats as \u201crandom\u201d for (non-material) mind to influence material reality.\u00a0 And there is evidence from experiment and anecdotes that this actually occurs.\u00a0 Hence, the door remains open for a non-material locus of\u00a0selfhood, or some aspect thereof.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cDespite the unrivaled empirical success of quantum theory, the very suggestion that it may be literally true as a description of nature is still greeted with cynicism, incomprehension, and even anger.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0\u2014 David Deutsch<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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The surprising fact that our bodies are genetically programmed to age and to die offers an enormous opportunity for medical intervention. It may be that therapies to slow the progress of aging need not repair or regenerate anything, but only need to interfere with an existing program of self-destruction. Mitteldorf has taught a weekly yoga class for thirty years. He is an advocate for vigorous self care, including exercise, meditation and caloric restriction. After earning a PhD in astrophysicist, Mitteldorf moved to evolutionary biology as a primary field in 1996. He has taught at Harvard, Berkeley, Bryn Mawr, LaSalle and Temple University. He is presently affiliated with MIT as a visiting scholar. In private life, Mitteldorf is an advocate for election integrity as well as public health. He is an avid amateur musician, playing piano in chamber groups, French horn in community orchestras. His two daughters are among the first children adopted from China in the mid-1980s. Much to the surprise of evolutionary biologists, genetic experiments indicate that aging has been selected as an adaptation for its own sake. This poses a conundrum: the impact of aging on individual fitness is wholly negative, so aging must be regarded as a kind of evolutionary altruism. Unlike other forms of evolutionary altruism, aging offers benefits to the community that are weak, and not well focussed on near kin of the altruist. This makes the mechanism challenging to understand and to model. more at http:\\\/\\\/mathforum.org\\\/~josh\",\"sameAs\":[\"http:\\\/\\\/AgingAdvice.org\"],\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/scienceblog.com\\\/joshmitteldorf\\\/author\\\/joshmitteldorf\\\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO Premium plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Denial of Death or Denial of Immortality - Josh Mitteldorf","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/joshmitteldorf\/2018\/12\/31\/denial-of-death-or-denial-of-immortality\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Denial of Death or Denial of Immortality","og_description":"At year end, I have a tradition of writing a column more speculative and personal than usual.\u00a0 In this post, I consider critically the standard physicalist belief that our consciousness depends on a physical brain, and hence death is the end of all awareness.\u00a0 I was 46 years old when I first considered the question, ... 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The surprising fact that our bodies are genetically programmed to age and to die offers an enormous opportunity for medical intervention. It may be that therapies to slow the progress of aging need not repair or regenerate anything, but only need to interfere with an existing program of self-destruction. Mitteldorf has taught a weekly yoga class for thirty years. He is an advocate for vigorous self care, including exercise, meditation and caloric restriction. After earning a PhD in astrophysicist, Mitteldorf moved to evolutionary biology as a primary field in 1996. He has taught at Harvard, Berkeley, Bryn Mawr, LaSalle and Temple University. He is presently affiliated with MIT as a visiting scholar. In private life, Mitteldorf is an advocate for election integrity as well as public health. He is an avid amateur musician, playing piano in chamber groups, French horn in community orchestras. His two daughters are among the first children adopted from China in the mid-1980s. Much to the surprise of evolutionary biologists, genetic experiments indicate that aging has been selected as an adaptation for its own sake. This poses a conundrum: the impact of aging on individual fitness is wholly negative, so aging must be regarded as a kind of evolutionary altruism. Unlike other forms of evolutionary altruism, aging offers benefits to the community that are weak, and not well focussed on near kin of the altruist. 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