In a previous post, I talked about the downside of immortality – the depressing idea that, if we continue to change and grow, then the time will come (and not too far off) when we would have become unrecognizable to our original selves. And of what value would “survival” be then? I would rather not have a monument to my having existed in the form of someone claiming to be me that I might loathe on sight.
Of course, there is always the terrible fear of death. It naturally dwarfs all our other fears, as it comprehends most of them in its fell domain. I fear being sick. Death means never being well, because I won’t be ‘being’ at all. I fear loss. Death is the loss of everything. I fear poverty…well, you get the idea. But, if death could only be deprived of its finality somehow…It’s really the utter finality of it that is its only terror.
I propose the following thought experiment. It has a bit of a mathematical flavor, I think. It may be no help at all. But, it meets the one requirement of these thoughts – it is, as far as I know, original, and it may well be absurd. (I recently heard that Supreme Court Justice Scalia, when asked to decide an issue about a the nature of the game of golf and whether walking the course was essential to it, said something like “this is an incredibly difficult and silly question.”)
So, here it is. Suppose I was a supernatural being, and I came to you with good news: death is not final! You shall live again, in any way like. As pure spirit, in your own body, on a parallel earth or in heaven, or reincarnated in some more desired form. There’s only one thing….
There’s a waiting period. You (your essence, spirit, mind, memory) will be asleep for a time. A sound and dreamless sleep. I guarantee you that, when you awaken, you will have no sense of time having passed. Your first thought will be the last one you had when you died. There will be no change in you. No sleep crumbs in your eyes, no odd disconnected sense of having missed things.
Would you mind? Would it terrify you that this deep, dreamless sleep, a coma really, is a form of nonexistence?
I don’t suppose you would mind that much. So long as death isn’t final, and so long as you aren’t aware in any way of being nonexistent. After all, you will close your eyes, and without any sense of the passage of time, you will open them again upon your new and endless life. (If you have thought of an objection – that your friends would have gone on without you and lived again after their deaths during this waiting period, and you would have missed sharing their afterlife – no worries; everyone waits for a like interval.)
So, you don’t mind not existing. That’s what it comes down to. You don’t mind not existing; you just mind never coming back.
So, how long would you be willing to be in suspended animation? A year? Ten? A hundred?
What about a billion….a trillion….a number so large there is no name for it?
Perhaps you are horrified at the scope of such a time period. It’s a natural feeling. The vertiginous quality of such a yawning abyss of time would give anyone the heebie jeebies. But, the important thing is, you’re no more aware of an eon than of an instant. So…may I take it you don’t object to a time period of indeterminate length?
But this is leading to the concept mathematicians call “infinity.” Or, in the context of time, eternity. In other words, if you pick an interval, be it ever so large…may I add a year to it? Just a year. But of course your interval plus my year is another interval, and as the original interval was arbitrary anyway, we may take yours plus a year to be the original, and I renew my question…may I add a year? Just one?
So…you will rest easily for an infinite time, and then, awaken to a wonderful new life. We can guarantee this awakening, and make it any kind you like, since it won’t happen in any time period that requires us to prove that it CAN happen in that time period.
I don’t even need actual infinity for this. I can set it up as a theorem that neatly avoids infinity (as Riemann and other did for calculus.)
Afterlife Theorem: Any afterlife you wish will and does exist, so long as it needn’t be realized in any period of time short enough that the physical objections to its existence become an insurmountable obstacle to its existence.
You see? You needn’t sleep forever. Just…long enough. And, who is to say how long that is?
But…you really weren’t worried about sleeping…remember? It wasn’t nonexistence, however long, that bothered you.
So…don’t be bothered.
(Postscript: Recall Lovecraft’s couplet: “That is not dead which can aeternal lie/ And with strange eons, even death may die.”)