by Stephen Cave
But, for all its attractions, this super-macro version of the biological immortality narrative faces two major challenges. The first is the consciousness problem that we met above when looking at our genetic legacy. The second is the end of the world—a prospect that looks set to stop even Gaia’s aspirations to eternity.
WE saw above that if biological legacy is to deliver meaningful survival, then it must deliver some kind of continuity of consciousness. But I know that my consciousness does not continue in my children. Can the biosphere step in to help?
There is much about consciousness that we do not yet understand. But as we saw in chapter 7, we do know that your consciousness as a human being emerges from the massively complex interactions of billions of individual brain cells—even if we don’t know exactly how. Now we have just seen that ant colonies, human societies and even the entire earth function much like organisms. These entities all seem to sense and respond to their environment in ways that transcend the actions of any of their component parts. In humans, such purposeful behavior and consciousness go hand in hand. The possibility therefore suggests itself that the seemingly purposeful behavior in entities like cities or Gaia is also accompanied by a kind of consciousness, produced by the interaction of the countless humans and other organisms. In other words, Earth, as an interconnected system comparable in complexity to a brain, might literally have a mind of her own.
We don’t know. Worse, we don’t even know how we could know, as no one has yet invented a conscious-o-meter to measure whether cities, anthills or bacterial communities have minds of their own. There is increasing awareness among scientists that the kind of complex interconnectivity that produces consciousness in the brain can be found in other systems, from biospheres even down to microbial communities. This gives some measure of plausibility to ideas of global or cosmic consciousness that have long been popular with philosophers and mystics. The question for the biological immortalist, then, is this: Do we have reason to think that when we die, our consciousness somehow lives on in that of a higher entity, whether society, Gaia or the cosmos?
It does not look promising. Although there is much we do not understand, the idea that your consciousness can survive the death of your body certainly does not sit very well with what we do understand—that, as we saw in chapter 7, your individual mind seems dependent upon the functioning of your brain.
The argument from neuroscience against the existence of the soul was this: If a soul enables your memory or sight or beliefs or emotions to continue after the destruction of your whole brain and body on death, why does it not enable the continuation of these faculties after the failure of merely parts of your brain when you are alive? This argument applies equally well to the claim that your individual consciousness survives at some other level of being: If the various aspects of your consciousness can reside in Gaia after your death, then why before death do we lose aspects of our consciousness—or lose consciousness completely—when just parts of our brain shut down? Why isn’t the cosmic consciousness kicking in to fill in the gap when our brain is shut down by general anesthetic, for example?
Of course, believers can find answers to these questions, but only with additional ad hoc and unprovable hypotheses. There is nothing about the way consciousness seems to work that would support the idea that it can transfer from one entity to another. In fact, to the extent that consciousness seems to arise as an emergent property from a complex physical system—and therefore to be dependent on that system—it seems difficult to even make sense of the idea that it is a thing that might be transferred. If consciousness is something my brain does, then talk of it being transferred makes as much sense as talk of my digestion being transferred or my idiosyncratic gait.
In the believer-versus-skeptic bout, this argument is a strong enough blow to award victory to the skeptic on points. Positive scientific evidence is lacking for other levels of consciousness, and our best understanding of consciousness does not support the idea of its being transferred. But the argument is not a knockout: the believer could reply that there is some evidence that people can tap into the consciousness of entities, such as Gaia, of which we are a part. This is the anecdotal report of mystics who, for thousands of years, have claimed to attain new levels of consciousness in which they become one with all other living things, or even with the cosmos itself.
Such claims are ancient and widespread. And they can even respond to the criticism that one’s own individual consciousness could not survive as part of this greater entity: that is the point, they say. Freedom from the petty concerns, troublesome memories and shallow desires of individual life is for many Buddhists, Hindus and Taoists the highest aim. This is the extinguishing of the self—the literal meaning of “nirvana.” If the individual consciousness has been left behind in the process of identifying with the higher consciousness, then the goal of transcendence has been achieved.
And if you are wondering why you have not experienced higher-level awareness, the yogi’s answer is straightforward: You haven’t learned how. Years of training are required to master one’s own consciousness, and this is exactly what practices such as Buddhism have spent millennia doing.
The problem with these reports is that we cannot distinguish whether the mystics have really experienced another level of consciousness or whether they simply interpret certain unusual individual states of consciousness that way. Nor can we find an answer through taking all such mystical experiences at face value, as many simply contradict each other (e.g., some people experience the presence of a personal God, some an impersonal cosmos; some the persistence of the individual, some the extinguishing of the self). We could therefore only begin to see these experiences as useful evidence if we had a theoretical framework of consciousness in which they (or some of them) would make sense. Currently, such a framework is lacking, and indeed our best framework points strongly to these states being distinctive individual experiences, even if they feel pretty cosmic. There might be all sorts of reasons why such states of consciousness are worth striving for, but they are unlikely to be intimations of immortality.
THE END REALLY IS NIGH
NONETHELESS, it might at the very least be reassuring that some consciousness will continue after you and I are gone, or that we are parts of greater wholes who will outlive any individual humans. We all yearn to be part of a greater drama, and life on earth is certainly that. But immortality is supposed to be forever; humanity, Gaia, and even the universe seem, however, to be fleeting things.
In the longevity stakes, the planet Earth is doing well at some 4.5 billion years old, and life has been around for much of that time. There have been at least five major extinctions in which half of existing species were wiped out, such as the one that finished the dinosaurs, but life has always endured, despite bombardment from asteroids, volcanic eruptions and major changes to earth’s atmosphere and climate. No doubt many more cataclysms will come this planet’s way, some of them perhaps man-made, but life, with or without humans, should pull through.
There are, however, some cosmic shocks that nothing could survive: a close encounter with a black hole, for example, or getting in the way of a massive gamma-ray burst from a nearby exploding star. And even if earth is lucky enough to avoid these, in about five billion years our sun will have grown so large that it will burn away all life—at least as we know it. More worrying still, the sun could suck in and engulf the entire planet. But even if not, after another few billion years, the sun will shrivel and grow cold and it will be lights-out in our solar system for good. Not even Gaia will be around forever.
Some Gaia supporters, however, believe that, like all organisms, earth will reproduce, and we humans, with our aspirations to travel into space and colonize new planets, are the means—we are Gaia’s spores. This is an imaginative response to the challenge of a doomed earth, and perhaps, if we have not already destroyed ourselves by then, we will one day have the technology to start anew in different solar systems or faraway gala
xies.
But it seems that we cannot keep running forever: the majority of cosmologists believe that the entire universe will one day end. They disagree on how; current theories include a Big Freeze (wherein energy spreads out until the universe is effectively empty with a temperature so close to absolute zero that nothing can happen anymore), a Big Rip (all matter eventually being torn apart into fundamental particles) or a Big Crunch (the universe collapsing in on itself). Whichever of these theories proves to be closest to the truth, it does not look good for our prospects of being at home in the cosmos forever.
Fortunately, all these scenarios are a very long way away. And they may all be wrong. For now, all we can say is that the universe, life, and certainly human science are still young. Perhaps one day we—or some far more evolved successor—will be able to seed new universes that are fit for life. Indeed, perhaps we are already in one, seeded by some earlier civilization.
RISE AND FALL
THE Legacy Narrative in both its forms is a hugely productive force. The impulse to produce something of us that will live on beyond the individual body drives us to heroic deeds and high art, and to care for our families, tribes, nations or all of life. And of course each one of us is the product of two people’s attempt to create something that will live on after their own bodies have failed.
But we have also seen that it can quickly turn into a darker force too. Olympias, for example, in her desire to secure the position of her grandson, Alexander IV, was happy to continue the killing practiced on such a grand scale by the little boy’s great father. When she established herself as regent in Macedon, she tore into the heart of the country’s elite, torturing, imprisoning and killing those who she believed opposed her. But in doing so she turned the people against her, and when the son of one of Alexander’s generals raised another army, he found it easy to win support among the Macedonian nobility. Olympias was quickly defeated, tried and condemned to death.
For all her failings and transgressions, ancient reports are in agreement that Olympias faced her death with courage and composure. One report says that she went out to meet her executioners so boldly that they could not bring themselves to do their duty and others had to be sent for, another that she was in the end stoned by the relatives of those whom she had herself killed. Perhaps she believed that she had already done enough to pave the way for her grandson to one day take the throne for himself alone. But it was not to be: once the new regime was well entrenched, the boy-king Alexander IV was quietly done away with. After all the bloodshed across three continents, Olympias’s dynasty was finished.
Nowadays we know that the genetic difference between Olympias’s direct descendants and any other Macedonian—indeed any other human being—would be minuscule. If the biological immortality narrative has any plausibility at all, then it is not in promoting your own offspring at the expense of others, but rather in identifying as broadly as possible with the wider community—whether of humanity or even of all living things. But as with the cultural half of the Legacy Narrative, this plausibility is limited: there are many benefits to identifying widely with our fellow creatures, but eternal life is not one of them.
Which means all four fundamental immortality narratives are illusions. None of them will enable us to live forever. Yet we have seen that they serve both to fuel human progress and to protect us from a crippling fear of death. The question therefore becomes whether we can live without them. I believe we can, and as my witness I call a king whose epic adventure was recorded at the very beginnings of civilization: Gilgamesh.
10
HE WHO SAW THE DEEP
WISDOM AND MORTALITY
A MAN walked into a bar. He looked haggard, tired, like he had been sleeping rough, his face raw from the wind and the sun. A hunter, perhaps, thought the barmaid—one of the rugged types who were among the few to make it out to this remote inn. But then something in his manner told her he was—or had been—more than just a woodsman. Either way, he looked like he badly needed a drink.
“What’s up, stranger?” she asked, handing him a beer. He took a sip, then looked up and told his story.
“I was a king,” he said. She raised her eyebrows. “And the strongest in my land. But I was an idiot, full of myself, bullying my people and beating my chest. So the gods created a wild man who would be my match. Enkidu, he was called. He came into my city and challenged me—we wrestled until the foundations shook, until we both knew the match was too even and neither of us could win. Then we embraced and became the best of friends. Together we slew Humbaba, the ogre who guarded the Forest of Cedar, and killed the lions in the mountain passes.”
Still polishing earthenware cups, the barmaid asked, “Well, if you are a king, then why do you wander the wild? If you are the one who killed Humbaba, why do you now have sunken cheeks and wear a hunter’s garb?”
“Why? I’ll tell you. Because Enkidu and I slew the Bull of Heaven, sent by Ishtar to lay waste to the land, and that, for the gods, was too much. They decreed that one of us must die. Enkidu went down with a fever; twelve days he lay sick; then on the twelfth he passed into the land from which none return.
“My friend! Like a panther, he was. I loved him so much; together we went through every danger. For a week, I wept over his body and would not allow it to be taken, hoping he might rise again, until a maggot dropped from his nostril and I knew Death had taken him.
“But that is not the worst of it—it was then that I saw: I too would one day be like him. If Death can claim Enkidu, strongest of the strong, then why not also a king? One day, I too will fall, never to rise again. It is too much to bear! I can look any man in the face, but not Death! And so, since I buried my friend, I have wandered the wilds, living on the flesh of beasts. I seek the one who survived the flood, Utnapishtim, the one they say is immortal, that I might learn his secret. Tell me, where can I find him?”
“Then you must be Gilgamesh,” replied the barmaid. “But don’t you see, immortality is not for the likes of us.
“The life that you seek you never will find:
when the gods created mankind,
death they dispensed to mankind,
life they kept for themselves.
But you, Gilgamesh, let your belly be full,
enjoy yourself always by day and by night!
Make merry each day,
dance and play day and night!
Let your clothes be clean,
let your head be washed, may you bathe in water!
Gaze on the child who holds your hand,
let your wife enjoy your repeated embrace!”
Gilgamesh looked the barmaid in the eye. “Just tell me where I can find Utnapishtim.”
“You must pay the boatman to take you across the Waters of Death,” she replied. And with that, he paid up and left.
IT was 2700 BCE and civilization was young when Gilgamesh left the tavern at the end of the world and persuaded the mysterious boatman to take him to Utnapishtim. He had wandered far from his kingdom of Uruk in the fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, close to Babylon and modern-day Baghdad. According to the records of the Sumerian people who lived in this region, Gilgamesh was a historical figure—though one whose deeds had become legend.
Across the Waters of Death, the wandering king found the only immortal, Utnapishtim. The old man explained that he and his wife alone had been permitted to live forever—this was their reward for having built the ark and saved life on earth from the Deluge. This great flood had been sent to destroy a humanity that was overrunning the land; in order to prevent them from once again reaching such numbers, the gods then decreed that all subsequent humans were to be mortal.
The wise old man then challenged Gilgamesh: if he wanted to defeat Death so much, first he should show that he could defeat its little brother: Sleep. He had only to go without slumber for seven nights. Of course Gilgamesh, exhausted from his travels, failed. “See the fellow who so desired life!” said Utnapishtim m
ockingly. “Sleep like a fog already breathes over him!”
Echoing the advice of the barmaid, Utnapishtim told Gilgamesh to clean himself up, go home and start acting like a proper king. Then, in a last aside, he revealed to him the existence of an underwater plant that could turn back aging. Immediately, the hero dived into the ocean and plucked the magic herb, determined to bring it back to Uruk. This turned out, however, only to be the final taunt at his aspirations—on his journey home, when the hero was bathing, a snake stole the plant and bore it off, shedding its skin as it went. Weeping, Gilgamesh finally accepted that eternal life would never be his.
TO DWELL IN DARKNESS
WHICH is the position in which we too find ourselves. We have now examined all four immortality narratives and seen that none of them has a credible chance of delivering on its promise. Despite their ancient histories, millions of followers and enormous influence in shaping human civilization, the four paths all fall far short of the summit. Eternal life will never be ours.
This leaves us in something of a fix. We saw at the very beginning of this book that we all have the instinct to perpetuate ourselves indefinitely into the future—the will to immortality. And we saw that the flip side of this is an inborn fear of death. The four paths serve to reassure us that the will to immortality will be satisfied, and so the fear is assuaged. For thousands of years and across the globe they have served as lullabies to soothe our existential angst. What does it mean for us if they are all illusions? Must we, like Gilgamesh, wander the desert weeping?
Many have thought so. St. Paul, who did so much to encourage hope in the hereafter, was one: “If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we of all men are most miserable,” he wrote (1 Corinthians 15:19, emphasis added). Plenty of scholars, priests and poets since have agreed that a finite life cannot be a good life; so illustrious a philosopher as Immanuel Kant argued that neither happiness nor ethics was possible without an unending hereafter. The prospect of death’s finality makes all our projects seem futile and fills us with dread.
