Have you ever thought of this?
I think about it often.
Do you believe in the concept that each of us is appointed once to live and
once to die - as is often quoted from the Bible? If that is true, then what
does it mean to die? At what instantaneous point can we say that a person is
no longer alive, but is now dead? What does it mean to be alive? What does it
mean to be dead? If you are a person who does not believe in life after death
then would you say that after you are alive you are dead? If that is true,
then what were you before you are alive? Logic would say that you were dead.
So then, what does it mean to be dead?
I never thought much about this until several things happened in my life that
made me understand that there is no difference between being dead and being
unconscious.
The idea of being dead makes no logical sense because it is a concept that
defies description. It's like trying to describe the space in a vacuum.
Nearly everyone would define it as the "absence of matter". Yet when
someone is asked to define death do you ever here it defined as the "absence
of life"? And so most of us have to invent another idea of death - one that
rules out the idea of nothingness. Why, because nothingness is something to
be feared.
So let's think more deeply about this for awhile. Why would nothingness be
something to fear? If there is nothing, then there would be no awareness of
it, so why fear it? Have you ever experienced a period of unconsciousness?
I have experienced this several times in my life, about 15 or 20 times from
seizures when I was much younger, once from a motorcycle accident, twice
during an operation, and several times after being administered the "amnesia
drug". In every situation there was no concept of time passing or
self-awareness, whether the period of unconsciousness was 10 minutes or 5
hours. A loss of self-awareness is, in my opinion, no different an experience
than being dead. It's entirely possible that a period of unconsciousness could
go on for days or even months, yet the person who is unconscious has no
experience of any lapse of time at all. So using simple logic then, wouldn't
the experience of not being alive for, say 1 million years be no different
than the experience of being unconscious for 2 hours? Being unconscious is
not the same as being asleep. We all have a sense of how much time has
elapsed when we are asleep, but not when we are unconcious.
My point is this. If it is not possible to experience death, then it doesn't
exist, just as space doesn't exist. We experience the universe due to the
matter in it, not the space in it. It didn't matter what happened before the
big bang, just as it doesn't matter what happened before we were born or after
we die. I believe that there is never a time in which we are not alive, and
I define being alive as "having consciousness, or self-awareness". And I can
say this because time does not exist outside of consciousness. If you
believe that we live multiple lives, then there is no gap of time between
those lives, therefore we lead contiguous lives, forever and ever.
Let's look at this another way.
The universe is approximately 14 billions years old and the earth is
approximately 4 billion years old. If you were appointed by God to live only
once, then what are the odds that your tiny slice of life is existing right
now? If God created the earth 4 billion years ago so that He could give you
life for about 75 years then what are the odds that your 75 year slice would
be right now? Why not 1 million years ago, or 1 billion years ago or 1
million years from now? Why now? All probability would say that your odds of
being alive right now are 1 in about 50 million, and that's not even
considering the future billions of years that the earth will probably exist.
Furthermore, it has been discovered that there are trillions of galaxies each
with billions of solar systems and that it is very likely that billions more
planets exist that could support life. Why are you here on this planet at
this time? What are the odds of that?
Here's another view of things.
What if there were nothing at all? No universe, no people, no time. Just
nothing. What would be the odds of that? 50/50? Either there is nothing or
there is something. When there was nothing, how long a time did that
nothingness exist? Does it matter? I say that it doesn't matter, because
time cannot exist when nothing exists, just as time cannot exist if there is
no awareness of it. It only exists for people who are conscious of it. The
fact that you are conscious and reading this paragraph right now does not mean
that you have beat the odds, it means that the odds must be wrong. It means
that you don't get a 1 in 50 million chance at life. The odds are much better
than that and I'm betting that you are here because it's just as improbable
for you to not be here as it is for the universe not to exist.
I have had this discussion with a few people in my life and every time I
received the same response. Huh? This concept is as odd an idea as is the
idea that all matter in the universe came from a single point - a singularity,
and that it eventually collapses to that singularity again - a black hole.
There is now so much evidence to support this idea that the entire world
community of physicists and cosmologists believe and understand this. Yet
these same people who spend their entire lives trying to understand the
nuances of quantum mechanics don't waste a single thought on the why and how
of their existence. What does it mean to exist as a person? Is my spirit
separate from my body? If so, then why does it seem to be encapsulated in
my body and goes wherever my body goes? What happens to it when my body turns
to dust? Is is a singularity that will eventually inhabit another body in a
big bang called birth? Is my mind (my personality) separate from my spirit or
is it lost forever with the loss of my body?
When most people talk about life and death they bring to the discussion years
of baggage that was piled on from the time they were little children. Their
parents fed them "their religion" and that has been their only view for their
entire life. Nobody seems to like the idea of being dead but they have no
problem with the idea of going to some other place for eternity. So what is
eternity? Is that something like a billion years? Or is there no time in
eternity? If that's true, then how can there be any self-awareness in
eternity? The problem with religions is that they all seek to answer the same
question - "why"? Whereas science never asks that question because the why
is unknowable. There is nearly universal understanding about the nature of
things because it can be tested and proved, yet there are probably millions
of different views about why we are here and where we are going when we die.
If the why is so knowable, then how is it that there are a million different
answers? This essay does not seek to give yet another answer to the why of
life and death. It is not for us to reason why, it is for us to reason "why
not?"
