Observatio

I’ve been working out in my layman’s way these thoughts about mortality brought on by my dad’s death. Nothing makes sense -- either way you care to read that phrase.

I keep coming back to the religious idea that we might exist after this life in some eternal, nonphysical state, since that’s the default belief. But, like I said before, eternity is the absence of time by definition, so to “exist” is not really a correct way to refer to such a state. Existence is tied to space and time.

Only a state of nothingness can ever be thought of -- given the limits of our imagination -- as eternal, yet our physical lives are proof that nothingness is not eternal. It was perking right along in all its non-existential glory until we were born, or at least till our self-awareness kicked in, at which time nothingness ended. Therefore, we can say that nothingness isn’t eternal because it came to an end when we came into existence. If even nothingness isn’t eternal, then there’s no other kind of state that can have that characteristic because all other conceivable states depend on the presence of the “self” or a subject, an I (eye), or change of some kind (like the transformation of dead dinosaurs into oil), and that implies time. Since eternity is the absence of time, no state that requires those kinds of things can be eternal.

But if nothingness ended when we came to be, it’s not eternal and must have a beginning too, since anything that ends has been in existence for some period of time -- an unfathomably long time, but some estimable length -- implying that it also had a beginning. Anything with a beginning and an end can’t be said to be eternal, so nothingness can’t be said to be eternal.

Now that that’s settled...

If we accept that no consciousness-based afterlife can be truly eternal, and nothingness is not eternal, then what are the possibilities for the state of our “selves” after death?

Well, we might imagine existing in a non-physical state after death, but not eternally. In other words, if our identities are somehow preserved after death, then we still exist in time (if not literal space) because we’ll still be subjects and observers of (and in) the universe. This kind of existence is hard to imagine because we can’t quite grasp what it is to have a mind but no body. Are our bodies just suits of clothes during life, prisons of our true spirits? Or are mind and body really one neurobiological system, with the mind dependent on the physical body for its own existence? If it’s the latter, as science seems to be concluding, then any afterlife will have to be tied to some other system we don’t yet know about that provides a platform for the mind to retain its integrity. That means it will be “physical” in some sense, or at least anchored to time and space.

Another possibility is that we cease to exist altogether, entering the same nothingness we must have inhabited (in the form of a potential being) before birth. This state, though, isn’t eternal either, according to the rules of the game, so it might well be interrupted again, by other periods of consciousness, other lives, or other states of awareness of space and time, whether via the mind we’re used to or a new one, and presumably with some kind of body. (By the way, Seneca touches on just these points in Letter LXXXVIII, way back in the first century A.D.)

And still another possibility is that this life will be the only interruption of nothingness that we will ever experience and our state after death will be as if eternal. After all, eons passed before we were born, and we weren’t aware of ourselves in any way. It’s easy to imagine that eons will pass after we’re dead too, with no interruptions to make this nothingness anything but a de facto state of eternity, even if it’s constantly interrupted by other people’s momentary awareness.

But there’s one big difference between the prior state of nothingness and the one that’s ahead for each of us. We will have existed. We will have possessed a consciousness, a viewpoint, and that consciousness is something that did not exist in the prior state of nothingness.

We deduce that the universe existed during that state, though. We accept that the stars and planets existed, that life on Earth existed, that all of it wasn’t created out of nothing when we were born just to give us a context. So something existed in the midst and in spite of our personal nothingness. And something existed before there were any subjects or observers to notice it.

I’m not sure where this leads. Heavy drinking, probably. What I do know is that life certainly gives us plenty to chew on during the brief time we’re wading through it.