Immortality Read Online Free Page B

the future we can project; it is not as if our imagination stops at a million years, or a billion. And so, to quote the Bible’s book of Ecclesiastes, God—or nature—“has set eternity in the hearts of men.” In our own minds, we are part of the very fabric of the universe, ineradicable, here forever. The great German writer Goethe is reported to have concluded that “in this sense everyone carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.” We cannot conceive of our own nonexistence, he reasoned, and therefore our nonexistence is impossible.
    Modern cognitive psychology gives a scientific account of this ancient intuition. Our acceptance of new facts or possibilities depends upon our ability to imagine them—we accept, for example, that playing with matches could cause our house to burn down because this is something we can easily picture. But when our minds come across an obstacle to imagining a certain scenario, then we find it much more difficult to accept. Our own death is just such a scenario, as it involves the end of consciousness, and we cannot consciously simulate what it is like to not be conscious.
    Research by the psychologist Jesse Bering has shown that even young children who have not yet been socialized into any particular religion or worldview believe that the mind survives bodily death. He and his colleagues argue that this is because the alternative—that the mind is extinguished—cannot be grasped. He concludes that we have “an innate sense of immortality” that stems from this cognitive quirk—that is, the seeming impossibility of our annihilation is hardwired into our brains.
    A ND thus we have a paradox: when we peer into the future we find our wish to live forever fulfilled, as it seems inconceivable that we might one day cease to be. Thus we believe in our own immortality. Yet at the same time we are painfully aware of the countless possiblethreats to our being, from poisonous snakes to avalanches, and we see all around how other living things inevitably meet a sticky end. And thus we believe in our own mortality. Our very same overblown intellectual faculties seem to be telling us both that we are eternal and that we are not, both that death is a fact and that it is impossible. In Zygmunt Bauman’s words, “the thought of death is—and is bound to remain—
a contradiction in terms
.” Both our immortality and our mortality present themselves to our minds with equal force.
    Both these ideas, as we have seen, have found their champions among the poets, thinkers and myth makers: half suggest that we must live with the awareness of inevitable extinction, while the other half argue that we can never doubt that life is eternal. A few, of course, have also recognized the underlying paradox that both these ideas seem true. The Spanish-American philosopher and writer George Santayana, for example, captured it perfectly when he wrote of our clumsy struggle to reconcile “the observed fact of mortality and the native inconceivability of death.”
    The paradox stems from two different ways of viewing ourselves—on the one hand, objectively, or from the outside, as it were, and on the other hand, subjectively, or from the inside. When we deploy reason to view ourselves as we do other living things around us, then we realize that we, like them, will fail, die and rot. From this outside, objective perspective, we are mortals. But when we switch to our own perspective and try to make sense of what this means subjectively, then we encounter the imaginative obstacle—the inability to accept the prospect of annihilation. Our introspection tells us we are as imperishable as the angels, indivisible and everlasting; yet when we look in the mirror we see ourselves as others see us, with sagging flesh and the first signs of decay—an imperfect and impermanent creature fated to a brief existence and a miserable end.
    The difference between these two perspectives, the objective and the