Legacy Matters
A fellow at New York City's Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Sam Parnia is one of the world's leading experts on the scientific study of death. Last week Parnia and his colleagues at the Human Consciousness Project announced their first major undertaking: a 3-year exploration of the biology behind "out-of-body" experiences. The study, known as AWARE (AWAreness during REsuscitation), involves the collaboration of 25 major medical centers through Europe, Canada and the U.S. and will examine some 1,500 survivors of cardiac arrest. TIME spoke with Parnia about the project's origins, its skeptics and the difference between the mind and the brain
What Happens When We Die?
What was your first interview like with someone who had reported an out-of-body experience?
Eye-opening and very humbling. Because what you see is that, first of all, they are completely genuine people who are not looking for any kind of fame or attention. In many cases they haven't even told anybody else about it because they're afraid of what people will think of them. I have about 500 or so cases of people that I've interviewed since I first started out more than 10 years ago. It's the consistency of the experiences, the reality of what they were describing.
Living without God isn't easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation—that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking—with good humor, but without God.
In the New York Review of Books, Steven Weinberg writes about living and dying Without God.
The problem for religious belief is not just that science has explained a lot of odds and ends about the world. There is a second source of tension: that these explanations have cast increasing doubt on the special role of man, as an actor created by God to play a starring part in a great cosmic drama of sin and salvation
On consciousness
The problem is how to integrate the conscious mind with the physical brain—how to reveal a unity beneath this apparent diversity. That problem is very hard, and I do not believe anyone has any good ideas about how to solve it.
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I want just to offer a few opinions, on the basis of no expertise whatever, for those who have already lost their religious beliefs, or who may be losing them, or fear that they will lose their beliefs, about how it is possible to live without God.
Warnings for those who want to try it.
First, a warning: we had better beware of substitutes. It has often been noted that the greatest horrors of the twentieth century were perpetrated by regimes—Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, Mao's China—that while rejecting some or all of the teachings of religion, copied characteristics of religion at its worst: infallible leaders, sacred writings, mass rituals, the execution of apostates, and a sense of community that justified exterminating those outside the community.
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Worse, the worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature, of the sort imagined by philosophers from Anaximander and Plato to Emerson. We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair.
To survive without God or a god-substitute, he recommends
Humor, the ordinary pleasures of life and the high arts
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He admits the loss of great consolation
The more we reflect on the pleasures of life, the more we miss the greatest consolation that used to be provided by religious belief: the promise that our lives will continue after death, and that in the afterlife we will meet the people we have loved. As religious belief weakens, more and more of us know that after death there is nothing. This is the thing that makes cowards of us all.
1. Get married in China
2. Unwind with a few friends
3. Tour the globe as a scandalous work of art
4. Fuel a city
5. Get sold, chop-chop style
6. Become a Soviet tourist attraction
7. Snuggle up with your stalker
8. Don't spread an epidemic
9. Stand trial
10. Stave off freezer burn
Complete gory and gruesome details at Mental Floss via CNN.
With no family or relatives, worried that no one would care about throwing a feast after her death, a rich 80-year-old Indian widow spent tens of thousands of dollars on a feast for 100,000 in the hope it would please the gods and open the doors of heaven.
Widow throws party to find place in heaven.
For nature appears to me to have ordained this station here for us, as a place of sojournment, a transitory abode only, and not as a fixed settlement or permanent habitation.
But oh the glorious day, when freed from this troublesome rout, this heap of confusion and corruption below, I shall repair to that divine Assembly, the heavenly Congregation of Souls!
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Now these, my friends, are the means (since it was these you wanted to know) by which I make my old age sit easy and light upon me; and thus I not only disarm it of every uneasiness, but render it even sweet and delightful.
But if I should be mistaken in this belief, that our souls are immortal, I am however pleased and happy in my mistake;nor while I live, shall it ever be in the power of man, to beat my out on an opinion, that yields me so solid a comfort and so durable a satisfaction.
Cicero's Discourse on Old Age
What are your odds of dying? 1 in 1.
What you will die from is a totally different story. Mother Pie tipped me to this wonderful graphic in a post
exploring for the first time the idea of the Singularity.
I've written about the singularity in The Curve of Change, Digital Immortality or The Rapture for Nerds, and How We Are Going to Die,
It's no surprise that some, bedazzled at our technological progress, believe that the same progress can be made with biotechnology. There is a human inchoate yearning for immortality that believers say points to heaven. But to that age-old question Quo vadis or Where are we going, the singularians answer We ain't going nowhere, we're staying.
They fail to recognize the very humanness of our nature, especially our susceptibility to boredom. Even William Buckley, by all accounts a prodigious lover of life, confessed to Charlie Rose near the end of hhis life confessed that he was tired of life. The time will come, no matter how long we live, when the will to live is lost and death soon follows.
An atheist until two years ago, Jennifer visits a funeral home for the first time since her conversion to Catholicism
Yesterday I found myself alone in a room with the body of a deceased person.
What surprised me about that was that it didn't feel all that different from the last time I went to a viewing before a funeral, back when I was a teenager. Not that I expected a chorus of angels or to hear the voice of God or anything, but I guess I thought it would feel noticeably different to see death face-to-face now that I'm aware of God's existence. But it didn't. It didn't feel different because seeing death so close up, then as now, stripped away any high-minded theories or explanations I might try to invoke and left me only with a certain unmistakable feeling, a feeling that came from some primordial part of my mind.
Yesterday, I was able to put my finger on just what that feeling was. I realized in that moment, standing next to a body in an open coffin in a silent room, that I was aware of something at the very deepest level of my consciousness. It was something simultaneously obvious yet easy to ignore, like the fact that there was a ceiling above my head and a floor beneath my feet. It was something I'd felt before, when I looked at my grandmother in her coffin as an atheist teenager so many years ago:
This is only a body. The soul lives on