The Death€Delusion

By Bard Canning
“Afraid of dying? Don’t be. It’s never going to happen to you, and I can prove it.”
It’s said that Albert Einstein once commented that the most fundamental question w
e can ever ask ourselves is whether or not the universe we live in is friendly o
r hostile. He hypothesized that your answer to that question would determine you
r destiny.
Surely death is the greatest threat that we all face. For many people it gives t
he universe a decidedly hostile bent. They believe that the race of life can nev
er be won; that we are born to lose.
I do not agree. In fact, I believe that the race was never started to begin with
and that death itself is an illusion.
Before outlining my hypothesis, I should make it clear that the aim of my writin
g is the excavation and study of the truth. The truth as a pure product, consist
ent for all time. Through reasoned logic I intend to demonstrate that your own c
onsciousness is not as finite in scope and lifespan as you may think.
To put it simply: I do not believe in death.
I do not think that we are immortal, far from it. My belief is that we are exemp
t from the unpleasant matter of death altogether. I believe that our general def
inition of sentience needs to evolve with our understanding of the nature of the
universe and of human consciousness.
It has been my experience that once the spectre of death is stripped of its shad
owy mask it becomes much easier to contend with as a concept.€I believe that nothi
ng truly known can be truly feared. If this article gives you solace and enables
you to live your life with a little less fear then in many ways I have achieved
my goal.
The Alpha and the Omega
“Death, in itself, is nothing; but we fear, To be we know not what, we know not wh
ere.”
John Dryden
Everyone eventually reaches the point in their lives where they become fully awa
re of the inevitability of their own death. It is at this point that they choose
to either embrace the overwhelming significance of the realization or to recoil
in horror.€They may be tempted to abandon reason in favor of prescribed answers a
nd short term comforts – such as spirituality, superstition or religion. Yet, what
is the price that we pay when we allow fear and wish-thinking to€warp our percept
ion of reality? A very high one, in my opinion.
Maintaining a strictly rational approach can be the harder choice in the short t
erm but in the long term, I believe, yields far greater rewards. I believe that
the most powerful and courageous choice we can make is to embrace the power of r
eason, no matter how difficult or uncertain the journey may be.€We should attempt
to approach life as the ultimate scientist; with an open mind and without precon
ceptions. The reward for our efforts will be the truth, and that is to be prized
above all else.
A common belief is that to live a€fulfilling€life we should simply pursue happiness
for ourselves and for others. Yet, even our very happiness is subject to the law
s of truth. How can we be sure that our actions are making us truly happy if we
don’t have a rational understanding of ourselves and the universe that we live in?
I find no satisfaction in the apparent grandeur of religious myth and dogma. Wha
t I do have is a deep sense of wonder at the possibility that we may be able to
explain our universe using reason alone. The beauty and majesty of any explanati
on is enhanced by its truthfulness.
“Sapiens” is Latin for “being wise” or “knowing”; coupled with the human genus it forms “Ho
Sapiens”. Literally, we are the only animals that€know - about ourselves and about t
he world around us. Surely the greatest gift of sentience is the ability to cons
ider one’s own€existence€and mortality. I cannot think of anything more appalling than
the thought of someone having lived and died without ever having considered the
nature of their own existence. €This is what fundamentally separates us from anim
als. This self-awareness is the crowning€achievement€of the human intellect; to negl
ect it is to abandon what makes us uniquely human.
It’s All in Your Mind
“If real is what you can feel, smell, taste and see, then ‘real’ is simply electrical
signals interpreted by your brain.”
Morpheus – The Matrix
Though science-fiction, the film The Matrix touches on a very important scientif
ic problem: that there is currently no way for us to know for certain if what we
experience is real or a sensory fantasy fed to our brains directly. All of the
input information that we receive arrives to us from our eyes, ears and other se
nses.
Prominent scientists and philosophers have calculated that there is at least a t
wenty-percent likelihood that we are all, in fact, living in a simulation.
Scientists are currently fitting deaf children with Cochlear brain implants that
allow them to hear despite having no physical ear-drums at all. Similarly, ther
e are a number of devices under development that can be implanted directly into
the visual cortex of the brain, allowing blind people to “see” a digital video image
of the world around them.
Reality is all in our own minds. We do not actually experience the real world, o
nly the images, sounds and sensations fed to us by our senses.€It’s true that this f
antasy is directly influenced by the physical universe but research has shown th
at we all perceive the outside world in very different ways.
Since all experience occurs within your mind, the memories that you hold leading
right up to this very moment are as valid as any dream.
Is “reality” a dream? I believe that it’s more like a memory of what our senses percei
ved a millisecond ago. A story told to us by our minds to represent our experien
ce of the physical universe.
From an objective viewpoint your “mind” wouldn’t exist at all. An objective observer w
ould only see the movement of atoms and electrons within your brain. Subjective
experience is eternally, absolutely subjective.
The Veil of Perception
“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
Albert Einstein
Understanding the nature of death naturally requires an understanding of one’s own
existence.
“Cogito Ergo Sum” (“I think, therefore I am”) is the profound€philosophical€observation mad
by Rene Descartes in 1637; that there is little that we can prove absolutely ex
cept that we, ourselves,€exist.
All experience and meaning is created within our minds. The objective universe d
oes not “see” any “meaning”, it simply is.
The confusion occurs for many people when they try to merge the concept of their
own subjective intelligence with the objective reality of the universe.
It’s true that at some point we will appear to “die”, but there is no reason to assume
that our experience will be anything like how we imagine death to be.
Our brains are “experience machines”. All we can be is what we experience and anythi
ng outside of that is a subjective€impossibility. Death denotes a complete lack of
experience, and so is, by definition, something that we cannot participate in.
Death is Impossible
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I
was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
Mark Twain
“…your lifetime is but a parenthesis in eternity.”
Dr Wayne Dyer
The spectre of death is an illusion, and one that you will never have to face. I
t’s not something that should concern you since you won’t be taking any part in it.
Death may be a frightening concept, but, just like an imaginary bogeyman in your
closet, you won’t be present when it comes knocking.
You felt no pain, happiness, love or fear before you were born, and you won’t feel
anything when your time is done. If it saddens you to think that at some point
in the future you will no longer physically€exist then why does it not sadden you
to think of the trillions of years before you were born in which you were also a
bsent.
“Death” describes an infinite “nothingness”. We cannot experience “nothing”. If you are exp
riencing nothing, then you are not experiencing anything at all.
You cannot truly fear something which cannot exist for you. You can fear the con
cept of death, but it is nothing more than a shared myth, an illusion.
The Ghost in the Machine
“We are not physical beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings
having a physical experience.”
Dr Wayne Dyer
Many terms have been used to define our “spirit”, “soul”, “mind” or “qualia”. When the supe
ral elements are removed, I believe that these terms fundamentally refer to the
same concept. Since our conciousness exists in the dimension of pure thought it
could be said that we are living in a “spiritual plane” every day of our lives.
A subjective experience may be created by the functioning of a complex system, b
ut the subjective qualia cannot be experienced by an outside observer, only by t
he mind within the system itself.
The 19th century psychologist Hermann von Helmholtz proposed an experiment to de
monstrate the nature of qualia: his instructions were to stand in front of a fam
iliar landscape, turn around, bend down and put your head between your legs. He
suggested that it would then be difficult in the upside-down view to recognize w
hat you found familiar before.€What you were seeing was not the landscape, but you
r mental representation of it.
Dream On
“Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were
unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dr
eam world and the real world?”
Morpheus – The Matrix
All subjective human experience exists in the dimension of pure thought. It is t
herefore impossible to truly conceive of anything in the physical universe.
All of our experience occurs within our brain. Even the world that we see around
us is still a representation formed within our brain as an interpretation of wh
at our senses perceive.
For example, the visual experience of color is entirely created in our brain. Li
ght waves bounce off of objects and return to us at different wavelengths. Our b
rain attempts to delineate these differences by assigning different colors to th
ese wavelengths. This evolutionary trait developed because it served a useful pu
rpose for our species. Conversely, it was not sufficiently useful for us to perc
eive the ultraviolet or infra-red spectrums, so we did not evolve this capabilit
y, whilst other creatures did.
In truth, most of what we see is simply a representation for the physical world
which helps us to understand and interpret it. This is highlighted in cases wher
e these representations break down, such as during psychoactive drug experiences
or in severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia.
The same is true for the other senses and experiences, such as pain. For example
, if you hold your hand over a fire you experience the sensation of pain. The ex
perience of pain is not intrinsic to the flame, it is simply a signal sent by th
e pain receptors in your hand to alert you that your body is being injured. It i
s a interpretation of what is occurring and it exists only within your mind.
Your experience of daily life is as real as your dreams, since both exist comple
tely within your own mind. It is for this reason that our experience of life cou
ld be compared to a dream-state.
When you wake up, does the person that you were in the dream die? No, who you we
re was only an illusion created in your own mind. But, then, the same can be sai
d for when you are awake.
The truth is, who you are right now is an illusion; your illusion.
I’ll Be There in Spirit
Boy: “When you take apart a Lego house and mix the pieces into the bin, where does
 the house go?”
Girl: “It’s in the bin.”
Boy: “No, those are just the pieces. They could become spaceships or trains. The h
ouse was an arrangement. The arrangement doesn’t stay with the pieces and it doesn’t
go anywhere else. It’s just gone.”
XKCD
A popular scientific observation is that all of the atoms in our bodies are in c
onstant transition. They are shed from our bodies and replaced at a constant rat
e. The atoms within your brain are replaced every twelve months and most of your
body is replaced about every seven years.
Therefore, how can you say you are the same person that you were a year ago? You
can, of course, because your subjective consciousness is not a physical entity,
it is an intangible system that is supported, but not reliant on, a physical su
bstrate.
As with any system in the universe, our minds are sustained by a physical substr
ate; in our case, the€protein-based biology of our brains. The components of the s
ystem may change, but the system itself remains.
Similarly, in a PC a program can be copied from a magnetically-encoded disk driv
e to an electronically-encoded RAM chip whilst maintaining its integrity.
If the carbon-based biology of your conciousness is constantly changing without
your mind€disappearing, then why couldn’t your mind be safely transferred to a silic
one-based substrate, such as a computer processor?
The truth is that it doesn’t matter what form your mind takes, as long as its stru
cture is maintained. This leads us to the conclusion that our minds may one day
be copied into a computer; furthermore, that this copy would itself be a sentien
t€individual.
As uncomfortable as it may make some people feel, there is no evidence to suppor
t the notion that your€consciousness€is inextricably linked with the biological pack
age of meat, bone and grey matter that houses it.
I believe that the concept of a “soul” has been created by people as a means to esca
pe their existential fear and remains unsupported by evidence or reason. What we
have is consciousness; a complex system which is reliant upon, but not restrict
ed to, a particular physical substrate.
The Chemistry Between Us
If you take the chemicals that create the emotion of love and combine them on a
petri dish then have you created love itself? Most people would say that you hav
en’t, but when this reaction occurs within a human brain an emotion is said to hav
e occurred.
Scientists can describe the physical properties of a single thought by recording
the electrical and chemical activity in the brain, yet what they are mapping is
simply matter and energy moving through space, it is not the thought as experie
nced by the thinker. The qualia is “lost in translation”.
There is a gulf between the dimensions of objective facts and subjective experie
nce. The two can influence each other but are€separated€by a fundamental divide.
God Consciousness
“…this world known as the First Sirian Bank is a planet with a… crust consisting almos
t entirely of crystalline silicon… over the billenia earthquakes and so forth have
caused the formation of billions of transistor junctions within that crust, for
ming by natural means the largest computer in the galaxy… €we find the First Sirian
Bank not only alive, but possessed of a universe-view sufficiently advanced to c
all him Human.”
The Dark Side of the Sun – Terry Pratchett
If you accept that your thoughts occur as an organised system, supported by a ph
ysical€substrate€then you must also accept that random thoughts are occurring throug
hout the universe whenever a sufficiently complex and ordered system is formed.
Through pure chance, emergence, evolution or€conscious€design, complex electro-chemi
cal reactions could be formed to create a precise analogue of the processes taki
ng place within a human brain.
Therefore the universe could be filled with a diffuse, disorganized intelligence
. A “God Consciousness” if you like.
The only difference with the human mind is that our brains create linear cohesio
n and a home for these thoughts to interact and evolve.
It is a common assertion that we are sentient individuals because of the ordered
complexity of our minds. Yet, it would be absurd to suggest that we would becom
e more real or more sentient if our brains were increased in size or complexity.
You are real now, and you would be real if someone removed half your brain. You
might lose some of your capabilities, but you would still be a real, sentient i
ndividual. There are tumour patients who have had half of their brains removed.
It would be absurd to consider them to be half as real or half an individual. Th
e same is true if the order of your brain was to be eroded completely. You might
become significantly less intelligent but you would still exist as microscopic
flashes of intelligence appearing throughout the universe. Except by then you wo
uld have lost the division between yourself and other minds because your thought
s would have spread out and merged with the general intelligence “fog”.
When your physical body dies your consciousness does not disappear, it merely be
comes disorganized and less constrained by the linear concepts of time and space
. Some people consider this to be rejoining the “God Consciousness”.
Artificial Intelligence
“For thousands of years, we have tried to understand how we think: that is, how a
mere handful of matter can perceive, understand, predict, and manipulate a world
far larger and more complicated than itself.”
Stuart J. Russell
If the right chemical reaction was created in a test tube which exactly mimicked
the thought processes of a person sitting in a cafe eating a raspberry tart, th
en who is to say that this thought hasn’t actually occurred? Just because it has n
ot taken place in a brain does not mean that it is less real, or that the qualia
is lost.
In fact the “person” would not even realise that they existed in a test tube rather
than a cafe since they would only be aware of what they perceived through their
thoughts.
You are only aware of what you perceive through your thoughts.
Your mind can never die since death is an event restricted to the physical world
and does not exist in the dimension of pure thought.
A Wake
“They’re made out of meat. …These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector a
nd they’re made out of meat.”
“…And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you have probed?…”
“… We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we’re just a dream to
them.”
“A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat’s dream.”
Terry Bisson
If you cut open a brain you can’t see the thoughts, only the physical clues that d
emonstrate that a thought is occurring. The electrical currents and chemical rea
ctions are like a wake left in the ocean behind a boat that cannot be seen. The
wake is evidence of the boat, but it is not the boat itself. The wake provides e
vidence that the boat is moving, yet if you stood below deck and closed your eye
s you would not feel as if you were moving at all. In the same way, our consciou
sness exists on an ever-changing ocean of atoms within our skull (which is on a
planet flying through space) yet we experience ourselves as a fixed, consistent
conciousness.
The existence of our mind is evidenced by the “wake” left in our physical brains, bu
t only we can experience our own consciousness.
Hold That Thought
“Music is what feelings sound like.”
Anonymous
A thought cannot exist within any one moment in time. If that were true then you
could cryogenically freeze someone’s brain, halting the electrons and chemicals i
n that moment, and the person would be stuck forever thinking the same thought.
A thought does not exist at a fixed point in time, rather it exists in the trans
ition between points. Music is the same.€A piece of music is not the notes on the
page; rather it is the journey from one note to another that creates the song.
So are our thoughts created in the journey between moments in time.
Pause or End Game?
“You are the music while the music lasts.”
T.S. Eliot
If our consciousness is a chain of connected thoughts, like a string of musical
notes, then “death” describes a chain of thought that is no longer continuing.
No pain can be felt, no disappointment, nothing.
“Nothing” is nothing, so it cannot exist, and so therefore neither can “death”.
Thank You, Come Again
A life can only be said to have ended when there is no chance of it continuing a
gain.€In regards to our consciousness, death is more like a pause than an end.
In an infinite universe anything is possible and everything is inevitable. There
is every chance that your chain of thought may be continued again somewhere, so
metime, in the infinite possibilities of time and space.
It’s true that the atoms forming your mind will have changed, but take a look at y
our own body: in the last few years almost every atom has changed within it. Who
you were then no longer exists; they could be seen as “dead”. You are a copy of tha
t body, gradually constructed around it using the proteins and enzymes absorbed
from your dietary intake. If by random chance your final thought pattern was rec
onstructed a trillion years from now in another place, who is to say that this w
ould not be you? Amazingly, you would not feel that any time had passed at all.
Zero-Point
“Thus that which is the most awful of evils, death, is nothing to us, since when w
e exist there is no death, and when there is death we do not exist.”
Epicurus
No person should fear death. Fearing death is a logical fallacy.
It’s like a mathematician fearing that a particular formula could erase all of the
numbers. This is impossible since the numbers would always remain present; a pa
rticular formula might equal zero, but the numbers that created it would still b
e present, ready to repeat the formula once again.
Pi in the Sky
“I am incapable of conceiving infinity, and yet I do not accept finity.”
Simone de Beauvoir
To illustrate my point I ask you to look briefly at the number Pi. Pi is an infi
nite stream of chaotically generated numbers. It has been suggested that within
these numbers would be the atomic positions of every atom in your body. Every th
ought you’ve ever had is contained, somewhere, within Pi. Indeed, so is every poss
ible experience you might have.
You might say “So what? It’s just numbers; it’s just math. It’s not real experience.” Yet,
your brain right now is just atomic particles moving from one position to anoth
er. Your conciousness can be reduced to pure math.
If the universe is infinite, we are destined to live out every possible experien
ce through the infinite possibilities of time and space. We can never die. The a
toms that form us may change, but they have shifted constantly throughout your l
ife without destroying your€consciousness.
The Mind as a Meme
“You can kill a man but you can’t kill an idea.”
Medgar Evers
One question that arises when we consider the constant changes that occur within
the physical structure of the brain is how our€consciousness€can remain so consiste
nt, despite the constant shifting of the physical foundations. My answer is that
the mind is a highly complex and multi-layered meme.
A meme is the conceptual equivalent of a gene. It is a concept that can be share
d between conscious minds without losing its fundamental integrity; like complex
religious beliefs, or the simple custom of shaking hands.
Memes tend to compete with each other for survival and are subject to the same l
aws of evolution as other forms of life. Memes have been shown to develop self-d
efensive adaptations with varying levels of internal intelligence. In fact, I as
sert that since memes are complex intelligent systems they are as valid a form o
f life as our own protein-based genes or the humans which they construct.
In The God Delusion Richard Dawkins describes how memetic concepts often survive
the passage of time and the transition from person to person without losing the
ir integrity. They achieve this by utilizing a kind of conceptual compression; a
step-by-step mapping of their structure that eliminates less important details
in favor of the core concepts.
The example that Dawkins gives is that when a carpenter teaches the technique fo
r building a chair he describes a single step as “nail this here”, not “swing the hamm
er at thirty degrees and hammer five times.” These details are not important in ac
hieving the goal; a goal which can be achieved despite many small changes whilst
still producing an accurate recreation of a chair.
Our minds are the same in that they are memes kept alive by neurons that transfe
r their information from one generation to the next without losing fidelity. Eve
n though the cellular and atomic structures of our brains are constantly changin
g, our meme-mind stays intact. Small details may change as the cells die and are
replaced but the core integrity survives.
Your mind is a€substrate-independent system. It is a consistent meme on an ever-ch
anging ocean of cells and neurons.
An analogy would be if you recorded a time-lapse video of a tattoo on a person’s a
rm; it would seem to hover unchanged under the skin despite the skin cells that
surround it dying and being replaced over time. Similarly, an image moving acros
s a digital screen remains consistent despite being illuminated by different pix
els as it moves.
Your mind was never intrinsically linked to a particular set of atoms or a parti
cular location in space. Because it is a meme it can be recreated at a later dat
e, out of different materials and in a different location.
Time Enough
The universe is not linear – nor does it move at the speed of our subjective exper
ience. This is all our own dream and unique to us.
Just watch a fly buzzing around some time. Do you think it is experiencing the w
orld at the same speed as you?
Physics teaches us that the universe as we see it does not exist exclusively wit
hin this moment, or any moment at all; rather, it exists in all possible moments
of time.
You really do have all the time in the world, because there’s no end to speak of,
only the natural progression of your own story, which is all in your mind.
How can you rush a thought? A dream? You can only work against it or in harmony
with it.
Work in harmony with your dream, your spirit, and you will enjoy happiness in yo
ur life.
Since the world that we see and feel is all created within our own minds, then s
o too is our experience of it. As Buddhists have taught for thousands of years: “Y
ou create your happiness; it comes from within.”
The Answer?
“If I am killed, I can die but once; but to live in constant dread of it, is to di
e over and over again.”
Abraham Lincoln
“Some people are so afraid to die that they never begin to live.”
Henry Van Dyke
The ultimate answer is to find meaning, peace and happiness in your life.
Most importantly, discard your fears about death or time passing you by. There i
s no end to be feared.
Anything that does not ultimately increase your happiness is unnecessary. I beli
eve that if we all act from what makes us truly happy then there should be no de
liberate suffering in the world. No truly happy person would ever needlessly har
m another. People only increase suffering when they are€insecure, fearful or lacki
ng personal contentment. Therefore, any thought that does not serve to increase
your happiness is irrelevant. This is why I believe it is important to strip dea
th of its mask so that it no longer stands as a forboding figure at the end of o
ur lives.
Enjoy this dream of “life”, and don’t worry about the end approaching, for that too is
an illusion.
The universe is not dark or cold, it is simply free of emotion and subjective ex
perience. It is composed of energy that occasionally condenses into matter and m
atter that occasionally evolves into sentient beings; all of which eventually re
turns again to the great river of energy. This energy is the source from which w
e have all emanated; indeed, we have never been apart from it.
We like to draw divisions and imagine that we are somehow separate from each oth
er and the universe, but the truth is that we are all fundamentally intertwined.
We are truly “at one” with the universe.
FIN
Following is the poem that I wish to be spoken at my funeral (modified€from the or
iginal by Mary Elizabeth Frye).
“Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow;
I am the diamond glints on snow;
I am sunlight on ripened grain;
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awake to greet the dawn
I am the day as it is born.
I am birds in circling flight;
I am the soft starlight at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.”