As humans, we possess the seemingly-unique awareness of our own mortality. Although some other animals exhibit behavior that suggests at least some cognition of death– such as elephants’ mourning rituals– there is little evidence to suggest that they aware innately aware of their own eventual and inevitable demise.
Relatedly, we alone seem to have a highly-developed sense of self, one that allows us to fully immerse ourselves in imagined situations and circumstances to the extent that we can temporarily displace ourselves from our current, physical existence and “lose” ourselves in imagination. Cognitive scientists posit that dreams are a manifestation of this ability and, again, there is evidence that certain other creatures also dream, and therefore may have some degree of this ability.
Regardless, we will likely never know whether these abilities are uniquely human since we cannot experience the qualia (or subjective experience) of other creatures; for that matter, we cannot be certain that we humans ourselves share similar understandings of our mortality, but this is a digression into a different subject.
It is safe to assume that early mythologies and religions were developed to counteract the natural anxiety of mortality. Our mind— that is, our very sense of self– is predicated on a stream of consciousness that continuous and ongoing. Once we began to ponder what happens to us when we die, we realized that it is literally impossible to answer this question based on the assumption that death means we cease to exist, as we have no meaningful way of conceptualizing non-existence. Thus, we devised concepts of afterlives, reincarnations, celestial redistributions, spectral hauntings, and all manner of other inconsistent theories that still kept our subjective selves intact even after death.
Of course, philosophers debated these notions long before neuroscience provided indisputable evidence that our subjective experience is a product of our physical brains and, thus, the concept of surviving our biological death is meaningless. Nontheists and other “enlightened” scientific thinkers have claimed that they have made peace with this idea of nonexistence, with many claiming to find some type of comfort in it.
I cannot argue that such claims are superficial or disingenuous since, as we previously alluded to, we cannot evaluate the genuine qualia of other people; we must simply take their assertions in good faith. However, I believe that our intellectual desire for self-preservation– separate from our biological survival instinct– cannot logically reconcile this notion of nonexistence. Ostensibly, we did not exist before we were born and– within the context of our sense of self– continued nonexistence long afterwards until we achieved self-awareness somewhere in our mental development process. However, our minds were not aware of this nonexistence because, obviously, they did not exist. Thus, the totality of the mind is built upon our subjective experience of existence and we cannot meaningfully conceive of something outside of this boundary.
To illustrate this idea more simply, I will ask you to imagine an entirely new color, one outside of the visible light spectrum that we are . You may certainly be able to grasp the idea of some unknown color in the abstract, but despite your best efforts, you fundamentally cannot construct a new color in your mind because it is beyond the frame of reference of the entirety of your knowledge and experience.
To illustrate the idea more complexly, consider the concept of “infinity.” For a person that is untrained in mathematical thinking, our brains may be able to generally conceive of “something without end,” but we ultimately substitute this with a more understandable idea of “something very, very large.” Indeed, to the best of our scientific calculation and measurement abilities, there is no infinity in the physical world; both the cosmic universe and the subatomic .
All of this is to say that no one can truly handle dwelling on the concept of nonexistence. Theists and spiritualists avoid the issue with a belief that their self-existence persists in some form, and nontheists may ultimately accept the concept, but they most assuredly do not think about it regularly.
This is true, too, of our overall sense of self. The more introspective among us may occasionally consider the inevitable deterioration of aging, or the potential consequences of our self-destructive habits, or the possibility of random death, dismemberment, or disease in our day-to-day lives, but we are unequipped to think about these things too deeply or to really consider their , lest we suffer an anxiety or panic attack as our brain cannot cope with the stress of these scenarios.
Thus, we each live within our own perpetual delusion of immortality, a subconscious rejection of these difficult and unpleasant realities. We would be paralyzed in fear if we were to admit that we are not immune to drunk drivers and mass shooters and the countless other horrors, accidents, and senseless tragedies that befall anonymous millions every single day. Most of us would succumb to mental breakdowns if we acknowledged the contradictions of our spiritual beliefs and attempted to understand the true nature of existence and mortality.
So we don’t.
This applies equally to those of us in the relative safety of the global North, and to those relegated to war-torn, violent, or impoverished parts of the world. The interminable hope and fascinating adaptability of the human “spirit” impels us all forward, day after day, with the memories of our past traumas eventually fading and the knowledge of our future traumas subconsciously suppressed.
We proceed in a momentary bubble of tolerable existence. Even in our greatest suffering, we press forward with the hope that our suffering will abate with time and that what lays ahead of us is better than what is behind us. Without hope is despair, and a person cannot sustain in despair for very long.
However, equally distressing is the notion of actual immortality. Our memories compress as time proceeds; we increasingly discard chunks of unimportant time and memories in our past, retaining only the flashes that fostered deep synaptic connections for one reason or another. What would we discard on an “infinite” timeline? What would really be left of us as individuals? How would we experience the tapestry of our past selves across thousands, millions of years?
How bored would we be?
Once again, our notion of immortality is clearly defined within our frame of reference of mortality. Perhaps we would transcend into a form that exists outside of linear time, experiencing past and present and future all at once, liberated from the restrictive causality that shapes our current reality. Or perhaps we figure out how to preserved digitally, an part of the singularity, intertwined with all other consciousnesses and omnipresent in a digital infinity.
But with any such fundamental reshaping of our experiential framework, would we really still be ourselves, in any meaningful sense? Does such transcendence allay any fears about the destruction of our subjective selves?
This is a lot of words to say that existence is torment and death is terrifying.
