Listening to public radio this afternoon there was an interview with a dying neuroscience professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute.
Dr David J. Linden explained how he has a rare form of heart cancer found inside his heart wall, prohibiting its surgical removal and resulting in him being given only 6 to 18 months to live. Among other things, he said the human brain is hardwired not to grasp the totality of our personal death.
Here is an excerpt from a piece he wrote this year for The Atlantic:
"The deep truth of being human is that there is no objective experience. Our brains are not built to measure the absolute value of anything. All that we perceive and feel is colored by expectation, comparison, and circumstance. There is no pure sensation, only inference based on sensation.
"Thirty minutes fly by in a conversation with a good friend, but seem interminable when waiting in line at the DMV. That fat raise you got at work seems nice until you learn that your co-worker got one twice as large as yours. A caress from your sweetheart during a loving, connected time feels warm and delightful, but the very same touch delivered during the middle of a heated argument feels annoying and presumptuous, bordering on violation.
"If someone had told me one year ago, when I was 59, that I had five years left to live, I would have been devastated and felt cheated by fate. Now the prospect of five more years strikes me as an impossible gift. With five more years, I could spend good times with all of my people, get some important work done, and still be able to travel and savor life’s sweetness. The point is that, in our minds, there is no such thing as objective value, even for something as fundamental as five years of life.
"The final insight of my situation is more subtle, but it’s also the most important. Although I can prepare for death in all sorts of practical ways—getting my financial affairs in order, updating my will, writing reference letters to support the trainees in my lab after I’m gone—I cannot imagine the totality of my death, or the world without me in it, in any deep or meaningful way. My mind skitters across the surface of my impending death without truly engaging. I don’t think this is a personal failing. Rather, it’s a simple result of having a human brain.
"Because our brains are organized to predict the near future, it presupposes that there will, in fact, be a near future. In this way, our brains are hardwired to prevent us from imagining the totality of death.
"If I am allowed to speculate—and I hold that a dying person should be given such dispensation—I would contend that this basic cognitive limitation is not reserved for those of us who are preparing for imminent death, but rather is a widespread glitch that has profound implications for the cross-cultural practice of religious thought. Nearly every religion has the concept of an afterlife (or its cognitive cousin, reincarnation). Why are afterlife/reincarnation stories found all over the world? For the same reason we can’t truly imagine our own deaths: because our brains are built on the faulty premise that there will always be that next moment to predict. We cannot help but imagine that our own consciousness endures.
"While not every faith has explicit afterlife/reincarnation stories (Judaism is a notable exception), most of the world’s major religions do, including Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, Daoism, Hinduism, and arguably, even Buddhism. Indeed, much religious thought takes the form of a bargain: Follow these rules in life, and you will be rewarded in the afterlife or with a favorable form of reincarnation or by melding with the divine. What would the world’s religions be like if our brains were not organized to imagine that consciousness endures? And how would this have changed our human cultures, which have been so strongly molded by religions and the conflicts between them?
"While I ponder these questions, I am also mulling my own situation. I am not a person of faith, but as I prepare for death, I have a renewed respect for the persistent and broad appeal of afterlife/reincarnation stories and their ultimately neurobiological roots. I’m not sure whether, in the end, faith in afterlife/reincarnation stories is a feature or a bug of human cognition, but if it’s a bug, it’s one for which I have sympathy. After all, how wonderfully strange would it be to return as a manatee or a tapeworm? And what a special delight it would be to see Dena and my children again after I’m gone."
******
Here is an outtake from an old study on our eternal life and I will have a new post tomorrow:
“It’s not true to say there’s no time in eternity. That would mean there’s no events. Time is the way you measure phenomena and the distance between events. If you don’t have time, there’s no movement. In eternity in God’s presence there is movement. So there has to be time in that sense," explains Richard Jordan.
“I use an illustration about Adam and Eve. Adam goes out and gets supper. He works in the Garden and comes home with a bushel of peaches and says, ‘Sugar, I think you’re going to like these. I ate one and they’re good.’ She says, ‘Man they are!’
“So the next day she takes those peaches and says, ‘You know, I bet if I sliced these up and put a little sugar on them they’d be even better.’ Adam comes home and says, ‘Man, these peaches are better than the ones yesterday!’ This is just exceeding good. So the next day, Eve bakes them and makes a peach cobbler. That’s better than the sliced peaches. It’s sort of goes like that.
No comments:
Post a Comment