Life is meaningless and death is terrifying.
These are the simple truths that we humans have spent all of recorded history trying to come to terms with. On a purely experiential level, it is not difficult to connect the dots between biological death, the fundamental absence of the deceased from our realm of experience, and the idea that once a person dies they no longer are. When this idea is coupled with the empathic notion that we are the same as other people, the conclusion is that one day we, too, will die and therefore not be.
Being refers to the stream of consciousness that we maintain throughout our lives across our long-term memories, our ephemeral short-term memory, our moment-to-moment subjective experience, and our plans and fantasies about our own future-state experiences.
Trying to understand what not being actually means is impossible. Our entire frame of reference— every single thing that every single person knows and has experienced— is all built on the foundation of the sensory input and the brain computations that we call being. People tend to imagine ”non-existence” or ”nothingness” as something like a still, black, empty void… which sounds like something being experienced by a subject that has concepts of stillness, blackness, and emptiness. Nothingness means there are no concepts, and there is no observer. We have no way to imagine experiencing nothingness, because it is itself just a concept that by definition cannot be experienced.
The contemporary scientific consensus is that the qualia (or personal, subjective experience) of self-existence— what we refer to as consciousness— is an emergent phenomena that “spontaneously” formed as various functions of the brain became more complex and interconnected. An emergent phenomena or system is really just our symbol-driven brains connecting dots and defining a pattern; like infinity (or mathematics in general), it doesn’t meaningfully exist outside of the context of human consciousness.
So basically, the sensation of consciousness is an evolutionary byproduct of all the other things the brain does to keep us alive to allow us to replicate our genes, and our concept of consciousness is a .
This is, of course, just a theory. No one knows what consciousness is, which is why we have spent millenia creating religions and philosophies to try to explain it. But from a purely observational, scientific standpoint, it’s a pretty good theory and it has the most supporting evidence thus far.
One can argue that even if this is the case, this mechanism could have been ”intelligently designed” and human consciousness has some greater meaning or purpose in the universe. However, one cannot deny that, if this is the case, it means that once our biological brains stop functioning, our consciousness— our being, our self— ceases to exist, at least upon the plane of reality that living humans exist. Regardless of whether we ascend to heaven, achieve oneness with the universe, get uploaded into the singularity, or very literally become nothing, we can no longer experience that existence the way we did with our human bodies and brains.
As we developed self-awareness and came to understand the impermanence of our existence, we crafted intricate belief systems to explain how we actually survive death and continue to exist in some form, usually in a form that somehow retains our sense of self, our memories and personalities and emotional connections and all the other things that are very clearly dependent on our physical brains… Even though we die, we somehow continue being.
If we don’t retain these things, what’s the point in our beliefes in the afterlife, or reincarnation, or any other coping mechanism for our mortality? No explanation allows our self to persist, nor does any explanation reconcile the inevitable end of our current consciousness, the moment when we stop being. Nor do they answer the question of what or where we were before we started being.
If one were really desperate to reconcile this contradiction, perhaps they could argue that our “immortal soul” imbues us with our innate sense of self, and all our memories are “transferred” to it as we live or when we die… but at that point one could argue that we’re unicorns before we’re born and platypuses when we die and support it using the same amount of mental gymnastics. The simple fact is that our conscious time on this plane of existence– from the moment our brains look inward to the moment they cease to be able to– is isolated from any other plane, if any other plane even exists.
This is the ultimate threshold, a pale past which we cannot see, and once we cross we can never return. Evolution has molded us to be fearful of the unknown, and non-existence represents the most fundamentally unknowable of things. Of course we fear death, and of course we are terrified of the idea that there is nothing afterwards.
Most living creatures exhibit a “survival instinct,” reflecting at least an implicit, biological aversion to death, though that behavior is almost certainly an evolutionary hardwiring for the purpose of genetic propagation and devoid of any complex concepts about nonexistence. There is evidence that other animals understand mortality to some degree; our higher ape siblings, elephants, and even crows have all been observed holding mourning rituals, which implies some distinction between life and death. But thus far, humans stand alone in exhibiting self-consciousness and awareness of our own personal death, not just death in general.
Perhaps our impending self-destruction is simply an inevitable part of evolution. Whether it’s nuclear war or ecological destruction, maybe we will only serve proof that this meaningless universe could not sustain a species with brains so advanced that they grasp the meaningless, because they will inevitably try to create meaning through nation-states and capitalism and all the other tools of their own demise.
