Strategies for dealing with death

DEATH IS ONE of the few things we can be sure of. In the bad-news stakes, death must be the leading contender for top spot.

Nobody, even religious people, welcomes death, but most of us spend little time worrying about our inevitable end. In view of the relatively petty concerns we lavish worry on, our sanguinity in the face of our mortality calls for an explanation.

Michael Shermer (Scientific American, April 2012) reviews the latest book to tackle this problem: Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How it Drives Civilization, by British philosopher Steven Cave (Crown, 2012). Four ways have presented themselves as possibilities to get around the mortality problem: (A) Staying alive indefinitely; (B) Resurrection of the body after death; (C) Survival of the soul after physical death; (D) Leaving a legacy, thereby extending one’s influence into the future through children, reputation, or glory. Which of these options do we pick to help us cope with our mortality?

The longest unambiguously documented human life-span is that of the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died in 1997 aged 122 years and 164 days, but most of us can only hope to live into our 80s. Science is presently a very long way from the possibility of re-engineering the body to live beyond 120 years. So, for the foreseeable future, option A, staying alive indefinitely, is not a realistic tactic for defeating mortality.

Obviously, options B and C are mainly associated with religious belief, but resurrection can also be understood in a scientific sense. Scientific resurrection involves freezing the body at death and resurrecting it later when scientific advances have made it possible to repair the disease or debilitation that caused death. In the Christian religious sense, resurrection is understood as the physical resurrection of the dead promised in the Bible when Jesus returns to Earth in judgment.

Again, science remains a very long way from being able to resurrect and repair a dead body. Also, there would be little point in doing this unless the revival and repair would make the resurrected person immune from contracting a fatal illness for a long time.

As an atheist, Shermer cannot accept the religious concept of bodily resurrection. But even if he could, he would have a problem with the notion of resurrection restoring the same person who died because he argues that, if you were resurrected, the resurrected entity would not be you, but a copy of you. However, it seems to me that, once your memories and personality are restored, the fact that your physical body is restored using new atoms that were never present in your original body (your original body would have mostly or entirely decayed by the resurrection stage) is of no more significance than that almost all the atoms that composed your living body a year ago have now been replaced by new atoms (biological turnover). Yet, you remain you. All atoms of an element are identical.

So, from a scientific point of view, B is as far away from realisation as A. Option B may be feasible from a religious point of view, but this is no comfort to non-religious people.

Option C depends on the soul, a spiritual entity that survives the death of the body, believed in by Christians and Muslims. Shermer doesn’t believe in the soul and claims that neuroscience has proved that a soul cannot survive death because the conscious mind depends on the brain, so, when the brain dies, the mind dies with it. This assumes that the soul and the mind are identical, but religion sees the soul as more than mind. The brain is obviously the carrier of the mind in the living body but religion sees the soul, bearing consciousness, as capable of existence after bodily death. Obviously, science cannot endorse this religious concept.

And now to option D, legacy. We have a choice – we can dwell on our mortality, which could paralyse us with terror and foreboding, or we can spend our time working on more active pursuits. Mostly, we take the latter option and this seems to be enough to allow us to deal adequately with the prospect of our mortality. Religious people get additional comfort from options B and C. Cave argues, and I tend to agree, that the legacy option is the driving force behind the major artefacts of civilization – science, art, music, literature, architecture and other culture.

Although, Woody Allen wasn’t impressed with the legacy option, saying: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it by not dying.”

William Reville is an Emeritus professor of biochemistry and public awareness of science officer at UCC

[ understandingscience.ucc.ie ]