This month I discovered a terrific follow-up subject to my last five posts -- three on Zest for Living and two on Solace for Dying. It's the new movie "The Grey," starring Liam Neeson as an oil-company marksman named John Ottway. In it, a plane carrying him and several dozen fellow workers to Anchorage from an arctic drilling site crashes in the mid-winter Alaska wilderness. Those who survive the crash succumb one-by-one to the elements and to a pack of wolves, leaving Ottway at the end to face the pack and its alpha male alone.
Three of the primary themes I discussed in the five posts are central to the film. Foremost is the non-humanness of nature and its essential alienness to human civilization. Second is the tragic riddle of human mortality: why must we live and die? Finally, when and under what circumstances does the human instinct to live give way to an acceptance of death? Though flawed in minor ways, the film as a whole masterfully weaves the three themes into its narrative of a catastrophe.
It begins at night with Ottway entering a company rec center with a neon cross by the door advertising a chapel somewhere inside. What actually greets him is a bar full of brawling drunks behaving as anything but civilized Christians. Ignoring the bedlam, he silently drinks while describing in glum voiceover what a bunch of louts and losers he and they all are.
This initial hint of a chasm between civilization and wildness in the men themselves is underscored by the frigid weather. As they embark later that night on the disastrous flight, the workers shiver inside their arctic gear, beards flecked with ice. An airline employee barks at them to hurry up so the de-icing will last through takeoff. Hours later, after earlier hitting some turbulence, the plane suddenly starts disintegrating and plunging earthward. Ottway manges to double-belt himself to his seat before trees rush by below him in the morning light. With a boom the screen goes blank.
He wakes up face-down in an empty field of wind-blown snow. Staggering to his feet, hands and feet caked with snow, he peers around stupefied. This early scene and the crash sequence leading to it dramatize with stunning force and realism the vulnerability of human beings to raw nature. Though many hardships await Ottway, none is more random and inhuman than this. The only civilization he has left are the clothes he's wearing.
Stumbling to the top of a nearby drift, he sees the wreckage of the plane and runs towards someone inside it yelling for help. Eight men somehow survive, one with a fatal chest wound. As the others watch in stricken silence, Ottway calmly tells him he's going to die and should let it "slide over" and warm him. He tells him to choose death and let those "you love take you away." Almost immediately the man does die, and one of the other men cries out in horror, "Did he just fucking die!?" Ottway says they'll all die if they don't work together fast. His demand for teamwork is another sign of the no-nonsense compassion he's just shown the dying man.
His fitness to lead them is proven that night. He hears a noise beyond the light of their fire and finds a dead stewardess being eaten by a wolf, which attacks him and retreats after a vicious fight. The other men are dressing Ottway's wounds when they hear a new noise. They warily investigate, and a huge, grey-black wolf steps into the light of their torches. The eyes of other wolves gleam from the dark. Realizing it's the pack's alpha male, Ottway tell the men to hold their ground. Eventually the alpha turns and leads the other wolves away. Ottway's company job is to kill wolves at the work-site, and he explains their territoriality and their hostility to anything that invades their den area.
For the rest of the film, the wolves are the main threat. Next morning, the men discover the body of the man who was standing watch ripped to pieces. Telling them they should leave the plane at once for the cover of woods some miles away, Ottway first has them collect wallets from the corpses for their families. Then someone else suggests offering an impromptu prayer. Only a cynical, anti-social ex-con, tongue-lashed by Ottway for stealing from a wallet, refuses to cooperate. Parallelling the wolves' deference to their alpha male, all of the men but the ex-con defer to Ottway.
They set out for the forest in a blizzard. As they plod on, one man straggles a few yards behind and is instantly killed by stalking wolves. These are driven away, but as the men approach the woods that afternoon they're attacked from behind by more stalkers trying to catch them in the open. Piling pellmell into the trees, they frantically light a fire to keep the wolves, barking and snarling on every side, at bay. Then Ottway has them fashion "bangsticks" from spears capped with shotgun shells he's scavenged from the wreck.
The ex-con ridicules and rejects everything Ottway orders. Finally Ottway stares at him and says, "I understand. You're scared." This the ex-con hotly denies, and Ottway says, "Really? I'm terrified." The ex-con says, "That's because you're a punk" and threatens him with a knife. Overpowering him, Ottway commands him to stop his "bullshit."
Suddenly the alpha wolf appears, glares at them, and withdraws. The ex-con, shaken by Ottway and the alpha, recants, apologizes, and gets to work on a bangstick. Soon another wolf appears. Ottway identifies him as an omega-outcast, sent by the the alpha to test them, and leads a successful battle to kill him. To demoralize the watching pack, the men cook and eat the carcass and throw its head back into the woods. This triumph cheers them into discussing the mortal dangers they've survived and still face. One says there must be a divine plan behind it all, but the now-sympathetic ex-con dismisses that idea as a "fairy tale" and says its all "luck" when you live and "nothing" when you die. Ottway agrees, saying he believes only what's "real," like his frozen breath. When someone challenges his lack of "faith," Ottway retorts, "I only believe what I can see and feel."
Worried they're too exposed, Ottway leads the men at once to rocks where the wolves can attack from just one side. Here they continue their cheerful talk. The funniest comes from the ex-con, who says he's determined to stay alive for more fucking because his last was with a whore so ugly he refuses to die on such an awful note. Another man says his daughter lets nobody but him cut her hair. Ottway describes his hard-boiled yet poetical Irish-Catholic father, who wrote and framed a short poem with the opening and closing lines, "Once more into the fray,/ To live and die on this day."
Suddenly the only black man among them starts hallucinating, and they bed him into the snow for the night. Next morning they wake up to another blizzard. Unable to rouse the black man, Ottway doesn't want to acknowledge he's dead, showing how determined he is to try to save everyone. He gets encouragement from a nearby tree stump left by loggers. The sound of rushing water in the distance stirs hopes of finding a logging camp downstream.
The've gone a short way towards the sound when they reach the top of a sheer, hundred-foot cliff extending straight across their path as far as the eye can see. The only way down is for someone to jump from the cliff into treetops twenty feet away with an improvised rope that the others can then cross on. After that they'll climb down the trees to the ground.
The episode struck me as the film's weakest. Mimicking the superhero stunts that currently trivialize so many action movies, it comes off mostly as melodrama. After the leaper makes it, one of the others breaks through snow at the top of the cliff and is barely caught by someone else who also almost falls. This kind of triteness is worsened by the cheesiness of the computer-generated cliff, the only phony special effect of its kind in the film.
This is not to say the episode isn't exciting or nerve-wracking, just that it needn't have been so hyperbolic and full of cliches. When in a panic the last man to cross breaks the rope, swings helplessly into the trees, falls through branches, and hits the ground on his back with a sickening thud, the effect is shattering. He's lying in shock, hallucinating that his daughter's with him, when he's killed and dragged away by wolves.
Scrambling down to help, the ex-con falls and critically injures his knee. Realizing the wolves can somehow navigate the cliff, they hurry toward the river, the ex-con hobbling behind. At the river's edge the ex-con stops and refuses the others' pleas to keep going. He says he;s just had the "clearest thought" of his life, which is that he's too tired to take another step and will die here. He asks Ottway if death will slide over and warm him, and Ottway, himself exhausted, reluctantly answers, "Yes."
I found this the film's most powerful scene emotionally. The man who earlier mocked everyone for following Ottway and who denied fear, now seeks and gets Ottway's approval for choosing to die. He asks the others why he'd ever want to return to his drunken, oil-rig life when he's had "this," motioning at mountains forested with snow-covered trees in the distance. Ottway and the other remaining survivor, named Pete, try to dissuade him but can't. As a final token of comradeship they shake hands and tell each other their first names. They also accept his wallet. When they've gone, the ec-con faces the mountains and whispers, "I'm afraid."
This is similar to what Ottway's wife says in a recurring dream or flashback he has of one of their last moments together, facing each other in bed. But she murmurs, "Don't be afraid." Ottway first has the flashback in his barracks before the flight while tearfully writing her some kind of farewell letter that concludes, "I'm past doing any good to the world." After he and Pete leave the ex-con and trudge downriver, Pete says that the look on the ex-con's face was like the one he'd seen on Ottway's just before Ottway left the bar the night of the flight. What Pete doesn't know is that Ottway left the bar to kill himself. We know, because we saw Ottway put a rifle in his mouth and reach for the trigger, stopping only when he heard wolves howling in the distance. We also know he brought the letter to his wife on the flight, retrieved it from the wreckage, and still has it. Pete asks him why he left the bar, suspecting he meant to commit suicide. Ottway answers, "It really doesn't matter now, does it?"
The conversation's interrupted by two wolves who start chasing them along the riverbank. Pete falls into rapids and is swept away, Ottway running alongside and yelling at him to hang on. Then Ottway jumps in too, and they both bob wildly down the torrent. Suddenly Pete's foot wedges in a rock. Ottway tries to save him, but Pete's too panicked. He drowns.
Ottway drags himself out of the water and sits down in the snow. In the film's intellectual climax, he stares up into a blank, grey sky and cries, "If I ever needed you, I need you now! Show me something real, do something real for me, and I'll believe in you for the rest of my life!" Nothing happens. After waiting a few more seconds, he mutters derisively, "I'd rather do it myself anyway," and gets up.
He has, out of supreme need and misery, asked the universe to care about and help him the way he's been caring about and helping those who've died since the crash. Getting no response, he concludes that his empirical materialism (he'd never use those words) is best after all. He is, like the ex-con, finally ready for the death he's been trying so hard -- and vainly -- to save other from and that he himself rejected two nights earlier.
He strips himself of his outer clothing and everything else but the bag of wallets, walks into the woods, and kneels down to kill himself, probably with his knife. After looking at their photos of girlfriends, children, and wives, including his own, he tearfully stacks the wallets into a sort of shrine, laying his and the letter to his wife on top. It's his final affirmation of a human lovingness alien to the immense wilderness around him.
He also has a final flashback of his wife saying, "Don't be afraid," but this time we see her medical drip. She's dying and either consoling him for that or else hallucinatorily consoling him in his present ordeal. Either way, it helps explain his jadedness when the film opens, why he has such a strange job, and why he tries to kill himself: -- he's still mourning her so desperately that he writes her a suicide note beginning, "Dearest one, I've been meaning to write you for a long time."
He suddenly becomes aware of wolves around him. Standing up, he sees he's in the middle of their den. This final twist annoyed me with its echoes of the heavy-handed determinism of novelists like Thomas Hardy and Jack London. Their worldview, premised on Newtonian physics, has long since been superseded by quantum indeterminism. To this point, the film dramatizes the modern, indeterminate worldview well, even in its title hinting at the ambiguity and "greyness" of the natural order. But in trapping Ottway in the irony of reaching the very destination he most wants to avoid, it carelessly implies that nature's a Newtonian machine.
That said, the final scene also deftly ties together the film's three main themes. Confronted by the alpha and ringed by his pack, Ottway knows he's going to be killed by ruthless wildness. But he's also affirmed his doctrine of material proof as the right answer for him to the riddle of mortality, and he chooses to die, not passively like the ex-con, but by fighting for his life, as he has throughout, to the bitter end.
He breaks three small bottles of liquor and grips them in the fingers of his left hand and his knife in his right hand. Facing the alpha, he recites his father's poem about living and dying on this day. With a flash of grey and a boom like that of the plane crash, the screen goes blank and the credits roll. This time Ottway will not wake up.
"The Grey" is a tragic and, despite some adolescent gimmicks, uncompromisingly intelligent and mature film. Its portrayal of human confusion, death, and vulnerability in face of an inhuman irrationality and violence is unusually grim.
Yet beneath the grimness is an affirmation of human courage, dedication, and compassion that will touch all thoughtful and sensitive men and women, no matter what their worldview is. Ottway is deeply skeptical, of course, but his is an agnosticism of the best kind. He's open to every possibility, demanding only reasonably solid evidence for claims to truth. And he clearly cares about other people and dearly loves his wife, perhaps too much.
He even sympathizes with the wolves he kills. This is reinforced at the end of the closing credits by a quick shot of the alpha male lying on his side mortally wounded, heaving final breaths like those of a dying wolf Ottway had earlier shot and laid a comforting hand on. This time Ottway's dead too. But if he could, he'd comfort this one too.
************
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Sunday, February 5, 2012
CONSOLATION FOURTEEN: SOLACE FOR DYING (2)
In my last post I stressed the human cost of dying. I said that the abhorrence of it we human beings feel in every fiber of our being was engrained in us by billions of years of evolution. Contradicting this instinctive abhorrence is our rational knowledge of death's certainty, leaving us trapped in a tragic riddle: why are we born and why do we die?
I argued that no humanly satisfying answer to the riddle exists, because the All that created us is non-human. It consists finally of a material substance whose infinite potential, indeterminateness, and unpredictability somehow transforms itself into finite matter. At least in this cosmos, and despite its basic irrationality, this finite matter has acquired the chaotic orderliness of our space, time, gravity, electromagnetism, and strong and weak nuclear forces. Humanity emerged from the random interaction of such lawless laws.
I said that none of this makes human sense. The origins and ends of the cosmos are an impenetrable mystery. Human life is often so bizarre and farcical that dying seems like its appropriately absurd punchline. Sooner or later most people sense both this absurdity and how alien death is to them. It negates everything they've hoped and lived for and forever extinguishes their zest for life.
This was my last, downbeat post. In contrast, today's upbeat post affirms the availability of solace for dying even to people like me, who believe that nothing survives human death but leftover chemicals. It also affirms that such solace is sufficient compensation for our mortality. Atheism's three bedrock principles -- realism, rationality, and moderation -- helped me arrive at these affirmations, but many other people, especially theists, probably won't find them useful. That's cool. We all have to find our own solace for dying, and whatever works for you is fine with me.
Mine rests on the assumption that when I die I'll fall into a deeper sleep than I've ever had, like the oblivion I was in before my parents' genes shaped me. I'll know nothing and feel nothing. I'll be at perfect rest, as void of sentience as the pebbles of the neighborhood path where I walk. I'll share their stony indifference to sunlight and moonlight, ice and fire, the smell of saltwater marsh or of mountaintop spruce. I'll exist only as inorganic matter no more aware than those pebbles are of anything else in the All.
In this state of oblivion, I'll obviously have no conscious afterlife. Unlike Hamlet, who fears "the rub" of being able as a corpse "to dream," I take as proven fact (see for example Sebastian Seung's new book Connectome) that my brain is powered by electrochemical currents that will end as permanently at my death as those of a dead car battery. Empirical evidence has convinced me I have no supernatural soul or spirit and that my personality, selfhood, imagination, feelings, and thoughts are material objects produced by my neuronal and synaptic brain circuitry. I contain no supernatural or immaterial ingredients whatsoever -- no transcendental flours, ineffable sugars, or sacred salts.
Nor will I have to endure any postdeath sensation, consciousness, or other psychic grotesquerie. Since I regard all such claims of death-survival as human fictions, they don't attract, theaten, inspire, or interest me except as literary devices. I like good sci-fi, ghost, and angel-demon yarns, not because I think they're real but because they amuse, entertain, even move me. This willing suspension of disbelief is as useful to today's poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and fellow artists as it was to Homer and Michelangelo. Unfortunately, it's also useful to religious zealots and con-men bent on persuading people, who should know better from the available evidence, that their "souls" or "spirits" are immortal. As W.C. Fields said, a sucker's born a minute -- and no religionist will ever give her a break.
But if my belief that dying leads to a peace past all understanding helps compensate me for my death sentence, my luck in having been able to see, know, and to some extent comprehend the wilderness around me and to share it with other human beings compensates me even more. I've elsewhere in this blog explained my use of the word "wilderness" as denoting everything that did, does, and will exist in our cosmos. It refers to all the spacetime events and processes precipitated by the Big Bang, which in turn precipitated me. It also connotes my sense of cosmic grandeur, beauty, and indifference. I know I'm as much the offspring of the wilderness as I was of my parents. But unlike my parents, it neither cares for me nor in any way reciprocates what I feel for it.
Yet I sincerely love it and the bonus of living, thinking, and feeling that it's unwittingly given me. On balance, I would much rather have lived the life I have lived and endured the death I will endure than not to have lived or died at all. To those who question whether the pleasure of human existence is worth the pain of losing (or living) it, my answer is, It most certainly is. To have experienced sunlit or snowy days, moonlit or rainy nights, the morning sounds of birds, the tastes of fresh fruit, and the smells of new-cut fields has been enough for me.
Moreover, I've also had the chance to interact with other human beings. Granted, many of these interactions have been disappointing. But no one I've ever encountered has been truly vicious or life-threatening (I've been lucky), and though my wife and I were divorced after thirty years, our marriage gave us two children I prize as best friends. My wife and I still keep in touch.
My best friend is the life partner I met eight months after my wife and I separated. We'd been high school sweethearts who hadn't seen each other in thirty years. Then in the late 1980s, a couple of years after her husband died of a brain tumor in Baltimore, she read in our high school alumni magazine that I lived nearby and contacted me. We've been together since.
But many other boyhood, high school, college, graduate school, teaching-career, and retirement friends have brightened my life too. And some of my most durable friendships have been with people like Gaius Lucretius, Philip Freneau, Herman Melville, and John Updike, who introduced themselves to me solely in print. The web of sympathy, help, and knowledge these and countless other "strangers" have been weaving for me for thousands of years much consoles me for having to die.
A final kind of solace I feels flows less from the fact that life is good than from the fact that dying's not so bad. Personal experience with scores of terminal patients during the past fourteen months has taught me that, with good medical care, no one needs to fear major discomfort, much less agony, when they die. Once a week I volunteer a six-hour shift with hospice patients at the extreme end of life. Few of these so-called "actively dying" patients show much sign of pain, agitation, or restlessness, and if they do I summon help. A nurse then gives them whatever pain-killer, anti-coagulant, relaxant, or other medicine they may need. Sometimes the problem is positioning in the bed or reflex muscle motion. Many of my patients sleep the whole time I'm there.
In the past year, I've been alone with four who have died. None of these showed any perturbation, alarm, or pain. Two gradually stopped breathing, one slightly opening her eyelids after a final breath, the other breathing a few bubbles of saliva onto her lips. The other two died so quietly I didn't even notice. One must have died when she was being repositioned by two aides, because neither the aides nor I saw she was dead until they'd left and, looking at her closely, I saw she wasn't breathing. The other died while I was reading to myself next to his bed. Though as always I was glancing up every fifteen or twenty seconds to see, and keeping an ear cocked to hear, whether his breathing had changed, I never saw or heard it stop. He died without a sound or movement.
I consider this kind of death the best a person can have. The worst is to die in an agony caused by physical violence or disease without medical help. In between are of course many others, one of which is life's becoming the enemy and death the friend. I have no idea whether Freud's death-wish theory is true, but I do know several people who want to die. One's a 101-year-old who's been in hospice for years and who cheerfully tells me every time I see him that he's tired of life and wants it to end. Another is a 93-year-old who worries she'll use up all her money and not have enough to support herself, much less leave her heirs, before she dies.
I'm sure many other, younger people want to have done with it too. I myself, at age seventy-five, feel my life's already been satisfying enough not to need anything more to make it worthwhile -- and I'm still fit (despite recent medical problems), clear-headed, and jolly enough to enjoy being alive. On the other hand, people who suffer grinding pain, hopeless disappointment or failure, or abject poverty may find more solace for dying in death itself than in my kind of satisfaction with life. To them, dying may be a welcome release from the torment of living.
This leads to a final question: Should we try to control death by timing it? I think all reasonable people would like to know in advance, at least roughly, when they will die. I for one hope to die well before I fall apart physically or metally. I and many other people don't want to be profoundly debilitated in old age. We'd rather, like the sufferers in the last paragraph, find our solace for dying in literally dying. We feel our lives might become so diminished that dying would be the better alternative. Unlike the voice-over narrator in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, who at one point says that "the dead know only one thing -- it's better to be alive," we say that the dead's utter obliviousness to such nonsense and their freedom from misery rightly makes them attractive role models to many people.
The only way I know of to try to time death is either to refuse medical treatment for a mortal illness or injury or to commit suicide. While I plan to ponder the first option carefully when and if the time comes, I plan never to do the second, mainly because my own father's suicide would make mine seem like an Ernest Hemingway-like imitation. I simply will not burden my own children with that.
But in general, and with the standard caveats against rashness, immaturity, treatable depression, abandonment of dependents, botched attempts, killing yourself to kill others, and the like, I respect suicide as a last resort for anyone whose life has become intolerable. I see it as a genuinely inalienable right, not because a higher power says it is but because it's available to almost anyone who needs it and is willing to pay the physical price it can cost. Its availability and permanence (if successful) makes it, oddly enough, a sort of sure-fire solace for dying to anyone determined to control his own death by causing it.
**********
I argued that no humanly satisfying answer to the riddle exists, because the All that created us is non-human. It consists finally of a material substance whose infinite potential, indeterminateness, and unpredictability somehow transforms itself into finite matter. At least in this cosmos, and despite its basic irrationality, this finite matter has acquired the chaotic orderliness of our space, time, gravity, electromagnetism, and strong and weak nuclear forces. Humanity emerged from the random interaction of such lawless laws.
I said that none of this makes human sense. The origins and ends of the cosmos are an impenetrable mystery. Human life is often so bizarre and farcical that dying seems like its appropriately absurd punchline. Sooner or later most people sense both this absurdity and how alien death is to them. It negates everything they've hoped and lived for and forever extinguishes their zest for life.
This was my last, downbeat post. In contrast, today's upbeat post affirms the availability of solace for dying even to people like me, who believe that nothing survives human death but leftover chemicals. It also affirms that such solace is sufficient compensation for our mortality. Atheism's three bedrock principles -- realism, rationality, and moderation -- helped me arrive at these affirmations, but many other people, especially theists, probably won't find them useful. That's cool. We all have to find our own solace for dying, and whatever works for you is fine with me.
Mine rests on the assumption that when I die I'll fall into a deeper sleep than I've ever had, like the oblivion I was in before my parents' genes shaped me. I'll know nothing and feel nothing. I'll be at perfect rest, as void of sentience as the pebbles of the neighborhood path where I walk. I'll share their stony indifference to sunlight and moonlight, ice and fire, the smell of saltwater marsh or of mountaintop spruce. I'll exist only as inorganic matter no more aware than those pebbles are of anything else in the All.
In this state of oblivion, I'll obviously have no conscious afterlife. Unlike Hamlet, who fears "the rub" of being able as a corpse "to dream," I take as proven fact (see for example Sebastian Seung's new book Connectome) that my brain is powered by electrochemical currents that will end as permanently at my death as those of a dead car battery. Empirical evidence has convinced me I have no supernatural soul or spirit and that my personality, selfhood, imagination, feelings, and thoughts are material objects produced by my neuronal and synaptic brain circuitry. I contain no supernatural or immaterial ingredients whatsoever -- no transcendental flours, ineffable sugars, or sacred salts.
Nor will I have to endure any postdeath sensation, consciousness, or other psychic grotesquerie. Since I regard all such claims of death-survival as human fictions, they don't attract, theaten, inspire, or interest me except as literary devices. I like good sci-fi, ghost, and angel-demon yarns, not because I think they're real but because they amuse, entertain, even move me. This willing suspension of disbelief is as useful to today's poets, novelists, playwrights, film-makers, and fellow artists as it was to Homer and Michelangelo. Unfortunately, it's also useful to religious zealots and con-men bent on persuading people, who should know better from the available evidence, that their "souls" or "spirits" are immortal. As W.C. Fields said, a sucker's born a minute -- and no religionist will ever give her a break.
But if my belief that dying leads to a peace past all understanding helps compensate me for my death sentence, my luck in having been able to see, know, and to some extent comprehend the wilderness around me and to share it with other human beings compensates me even more. I've elsewhere in this blog explained my use of the word "wilderness" as denoting everything that did, does, and will exist in our cosmos. It refers to all the spacetime events and processes precipitated by the Big Bang, which in turn precipitated me. It also connotes my sense of cosmic grandeur, beauty, and indifference. I know I'm as much the offspring of the wilderness as I was of my parents. But unlike my parents, it neither cares for me nor in any way reciprocates what I feel for it.
Yet I sincerely love it and the bonus of living, thinking, and feeling that it's unwittingly given me. On balance, I would much rather have lived the life I have lived and endured the death I will endure than not to have lived or died at all. To those who question whether the pleasure of human existence is worth the pain of losing (or living) it, my answer is, It most certainly is. To have experienced sunlit or snowy days, moonlit or rainy nights, the morning sounds of birds, the tastes of fresh fruit, and the smells of new-cut fields has been enough for me.
Moreover, I've also had the chance to interact with other human beings. Granted, many of these interactions have been disappointing. But no one I've ever encountered has been truly vicious or life-threatening (I've been lucky), and though my wife and I were divorced after thirty years, our marriage gave us two children I prize as best friends. My wife and I still keep in touch.
My best friend is the life partner I met eight months after my wife and I separated. We'd been high school sweethearts who hadn't seen each other in thirty years. Then in the late 1980s, a couple of years after her husband died of a brain tumor in Baltimore, she read in our high school alumni magazine that I lived nearby and contacted me. We've been together since.
But many other boyhood, high school, college, graduate school, teaching-career, and retirement friends have brightened my life too. And some of my most durable friendships have been with people like Gaius Lucretius, Philip Freneau, Herman Melville, and John Updike, who introduced themselves to me solely in print. The web of sympathy, help, and knowledge these and countless other "strangers" have been weaving for me for thousands of years much consoles me for having to die.
A final kind of solace I feels flows less from the fact that life is good than from the fact that dying's not so bad. Personal experience with scores of terminal patients during the past fourteen months has taught me that, with good medical care, no one needs to fear major discomfort, much less agony, when they die. Once a week I volunteer a six-hour shift with hospice patients at the extreme end of life. Few of these so-called "actively dying" patients show much sign of pain, agitation, or restlessness, and if they do I summon help. A nurse then gives them whatever pain-killer, anti-coagulant, relaxant, or other medicine they may need. Sometimes the problem is positioning in the bed or reflex muscle motion. Many of my patients sleep the whole time I'm there.
In the past year, I've been alone with four who have died. None of these showed any perturbation, alarm, or pain. Two gradually stopped breathing, one slightly opening her eyelids after a final breath, the other breathing a few bubbles of saliva onto her lips. The other two died so quietly I didn't even notice. One must have died when she was being repositioned by two aides, because neither the aides nor I saw she was dead until they'd left and, looking at her closely, I saw she wasn't breathing. The other died while I was reading to myself next to his bed. Though as always I was glancing up every fifteen or twenty seconds to see, and keeping an ear cocked to hear, whether his breathing had changed, I never saw or heard it stop. He died without a sound or movement.
I consider this kind of death the best a person can have. The worst is to die in an agony caused by physical violence or disease without medical help. In between are of course many others, one of which is life's becoming the enemy and death the friend. I have no idea whether Freud's death-wish theory is true, but I do know several people who want to die. One's a 101-year-old who's been in hospice for years and who cheerfully tells me every time I see him that he's tired of life and wants it to end. Another is a 93-year-old who worries she'll use up all her money and not have enough to support herself, much less leave her heirs, before she dies.
I'm sure many other, younger people want to have done with it too. I myself, at age seventy-five, feel my life's already been satisfying enough not to need anything more to make it worthwhile -- and I'm still fit (despite recent medical problems), clear-headed, and jolly enough to enjoy being alive. On the other hand, people who suffer grinding pain, hopeless disappointment or failure, or abject poverty may find more solace for dying in death itself than in my kind of satisfaction with life. To them, dying may be a welcome release from the torment of living.
This leads to a final question: Should we try to control death by timing it? I think all reasonable people would like to know in advance, at least roughly, when they will die. I for one hope to die well before I fall apart physically or metally. I and many other people don't want to be profoundly debilitated in old age. We'd rather, like the sufferers in the last paragraph, find our solace for dying in literally dying. We feel our lives might become so diminished that dying would be the better alternative. Unlike the voice-over narrator in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, who at one point says that "the dead know only one thing -- it's better to be alive," we say that the dead's utter obliviousness to such nonsense and their freedom from misery rightly makes them attractive role models to many people.
The only way I know of to try to time death is either to refuse medical treatment for a mortal illness or injury or to commit suicide. While I plan to ponder the first option carefully when and if the time comes, I plan never to do the second, mainly because my own father's suicide would make mine seem like an Ernest Hemingway-like imitation. I simply will not burden my own children with that.
But in general, and with the standard caveats against rashness, immaturity, treatable depression, abandonment of dependents, botched attempts, killing yourself to kill others, and the like, I respect suicide as a last resort for anyone whose life has become intolerable. I see it as a genuinely inalienable right, not because a higher power says it is but because it's available to almost anyone who needs it and is willing to pay the physical price it can cost. Its availability and permanence (if successful) makes it, oddly enough, a sort of sure-fire solace for dying to anyone determined to control his own death by causing it.
**********
Friday, January 13, 2012
CONSOLATION THIRTEEN: SOLACE FOR DYING (1)
My last three posts were easy to write. They explained humanity's zest for living as an evolutionary freak that made human beings cravers of life and sex and high-level reasoners and fantasizers. Evolution has hardwired us to love life, not death. Finding genuine solace for dying is hard.
Some think it's impossible. Dying is so contrary to what most people want that a vast majority of the earth's population denies, ignores, and euphemizes it. All the major religions preach some type of immortality. Most people who say they believe in a god without belonging to a church usually claim to believe in life after death, as do many agnostics and skeptics, among them the composer Brahms. Omitting direct reference to Christianity from his Requiem, Brahms nonetheless avows immortality throughout the work as humanity's only real compensation for dying.
The human wish to hide and soften death is equally understandable. From mashed and bloody roadkill seen through a car window to the stench of an unseen carcass in the woods hitting your nose like a fist, it can be ugly. Slaughterhouses aren't for the weak of heart or stomach. Nor are the institutions that process human remains -- morgues, mortuaries, medical schools, and the like. Little wonder dead animals in general and dead human beings in particular are so rarely seen. Seeing them can be shocking to those who don't handle them professionally or kill them for sport or a living. Euphemisms like"passed on" or "passed away" counteract our instinctive recoil from imagining ourselves as rotting cadavers or being eaten alive.
Such denials and evasions mirror a tragic contradiction at the heart of human existence. We're born with instincts that drive us toward life and away from death. We yearn to live, yet all our experience of the world teaches us we unfailingly die.
The contradiction is intractable. Though religionists claim to have found supernatural answers to it, they've in fact found only human fraudulence, self-deception, and craziness. Their so-called revelations and miracles never withstand scientific scrutiny, which tells us instead that sentient intelligence is nothing but a random offshoot of insentient and unintelligent natural processes.
These processes are, I believe, ultimately linked to an unpredictable and immeasurable substance or stuff at the core of reality. This stuff or substance is an infinite potentiality capable of becoming countless kinds of finite matter by somehow transforming its potential into the chaotic lawfulness we see around us in our own cosmos. In 6th century B.C.E. Greece, Heraclitus explained this chaotic lawfulness as the product of an endless flux of warring elements, an explanation that, while wonderfully insightful at the time, needs some updating. Heraclitus' hard-matter universe of flux is today better imagined as an infinite, meta-dimensional energy field or reservoir that somehow unpredictably morphs itself into countless subsidiary kinds of finite matter. It might be thought of as quantum uncertainty writ infinitely large.
So alien to life in general and human thought and feeling in particular is this basic energy that human existence seems altogether incidental and insignificant in relation to it. So far as we know, it in no way echoes or responds to human intelligence or emotion. If this isn't discouraging enough, its infinite particularity or singularity also alienates us from one another.
This is because all material reality is infinitely divisible. No matter how far you burrow into smallness or expand into bigness, you never reach an end. You never find a final, indivisible object. There is always an infinity of additional particulars and singularities awaiting you, and they always have an inimitable and unrepeatable uniqueness no other material objects ever have. They are all absolutely separate and different from each other, no matter where in the All they are and no matter what kind of dimensionality, compactness, diffuseness, monotonousness, or other feature they have. What unites them is the basic substance they're made of. And one of the key attributes of that substance, along with its infinite potentiality and unpredictability, is an infinite divisibility that entails uniqueness on every object it becomes.
I say "entails" because the separateness of material objects from each other that follows from the infinite divisibility of ultimate matter is in my opinion an inescapable fact of existence. Imagining the All, as I do, as a material stuff or substance whose potential to become subsidiary objects is infinite, yet which never itself objectifies, implies that every existing object is finally indefinable.
This in turn implies not only that all material objects are radically separate from and alien to each other but that finally what they're made of and where they come from can't be fixed or specified. All objects are totally alien to all other objects and have absolutely indeterminate origins.
I find little solace for dying in these convincing (to me) speculations. Unlike the All, human beings are instinctively affectionate. They're capable of strong emotional attachments to each other and to pets, homes, nature, and countless other things. Unlike inorganic objects, they can sense and comprehend the world around them, imagine fictional worlds, generate and reciprocate love. Compelled to try to understand the workings and origins of nature, they've repeatedly explained it as the handiwork of deities onto whom they project their own capacity to think and feel. While such explanations have been completely undermined by modern science, they're still at least partly believed in by most people and have an enormous impact on their notions of reality. Most people persist in believing that the universe personally cares about them and their well-being. They refuse to think of themselves as radically alienated objects in a material All made of some absolutely indefinable, uncaring stuff.
Those of us who do think of ourselves in this way find living and dying in such cosmic -- and metacosmic -- isolation cold comfort at best. I myself find it dubious luck to have been born, through no choice of my own, with a capacity to think and feel that I'll lose forever when I die. I get little solace from knowing that the beauty and vibrancy of living will completely end with my death. As Clint Eastwood puts it in The Unforgiven, when a man dies he loses "all he has and all he's ever going to have."
Materialists have always acknowledged the harshness of human mortality. Lucretius says he wrote De Rerum Natura in verse to help sweeten the bitterness of its doctrine of personal annihilation. Even religious skeptics like Kierkegaard prefer leaps of faith to what they see as the existential horror of the Lucretian viewpoint. Dostoevsky's rumination on the decapitated head that for an instant grasps what has happened to it before it dies has chilled everyone who's read it -- theists, agnostics, and atheists alike.
I've had two close encounters with the Grim Reaper myself. Since I narrate one of them at length in the "Wilderness" section of the May 19, 2011 post of this blog, I won't rehash it here except to say it's about the heart attack I had in 1995 hiking alone in the Sierra Nevadas.
The other happened in the summer of 1951 when I was driving through rural upstate New York with my brother. We were returning to school in New England from our first summer with our guardian aunt and uncle in San Diego after our mother's death the winter before. Though only fifteen, I was an experienced driver and realized I had to slow for a hill I'd just started down in a light rain. Touching the brakes, I felt the tires hydroplaning us into a long, horrible skid I couldn't control. As we spun halfway round and began hurtling backwards down the two-lane road, I thought, So this is how I'll die.
Along with fear, shock, and disbelief, I remember above all tensing for a huge, crushing blow. Nothing flashed before my eyes but what was flashing by outside the car: every nerve and muscle in me was too busy trying to protect itself from that pulverizing blow. When suddenly I realized the car had spun all the way round and was again heading frontwards down the road, I fought without success to control it. We bounced off the left shoulder down a steep bank onto somebody's back lawn, which the front bumper hit with a frame-springing jolt. We sat a moment, dazed but unhurt. The skid had slowed us almost to a stop before we went off the highway.
Both of these near-death experiences showed me how little I want to die. Like everything else in this post, they suggest how hard it is for most human beings to find much solace in their own destruction. It can be even harder when close friends or relatives die, especially if they're one's own children.
Yet I do think such solace is possible. In my next post I'll explain why.
*********
requi
Some think it's impossible. Dying is so contrary to what most people want that a vast majority of the earth's population denies, ignores, and euphemizes it. All the major religions preach some type of immortality. Most people who say they believe in a god without belonging to a church usually claim to believe in life after death, as do many agnostics and skeptics, among them the composer Brahms. Omitting direct reference to Christianity from his Requiem, Brahms nonetheless avows immortality throughout the work as humanity's only real compensation for dying.
The human wish to hide and soften death is equally understandable. From mashed and bloody roadkill seen through a car window to the stench of an unseen carcass in the woods hitting your nose like a fist, it can be ugly. Slaughterhouses aren't for the weak of heart or stomach. Nor are the institutions that process human remains -- morgues, mortuaries, medical schools, and the like. Little wonder dead animals in general and dead human beings in particular are so rarely seen. Seeing them can be shocking to those who don't handle them professionally or kill them for sport or a living. Euphemisms like"passed on" or "passed away" counteract our instinctive recoil from imagining ourselves as rotting cadavers or being eaten alive.
Such denials and evasions mirror a tragic contradiction at the heart of human existence. We're born with instincts that drive us toward life and away from death. We yearn to live, yet all our experience of the world teaches us we unfailingly die.
The contradiction is intractable. Though religionists claim to have found supernatural answers to it, they've in fact found only human fraudulence, self-deception, and craziness. Their so-called revelations and miracles never withstand scientific scrutiny, which tells us instead that sentient intelligence is nothing but a random offshoot of insentient and unintelligent natural processes.
These processes are, I believe, ultimately linked to an unpredictable and immeasurable substance or stuff at the core of reality. This stuff or substance is an infinite potentiality capable of becoming countless kinds of finite matter by somehow transforming its potential into the chaotic lawfulness we see around us in our own cosmos. In 6th century B.C.E. Greece, Heraclitus explained this chaotic lawfulness as the product of an endless flux of warring elements, an explanation that, while wonderfully insightful at the time, needs some updating. Heraclitus' hard-matter universe of flux is today better imagined as an infinite, meta-dimensional energy field or reservoir that somehow unpredictably morphs itself into countless subsidiary kinds of finite matter. It might be thought of as quantum uncertainty writ infinitely large.
So alien to life in general and human thought and feeling in particular is this basic energy that human existence seems altogether incidental and insignificant in relation to it. So far as we know, it in no way echoes or responds to human intelligence or emotion. If this isn't discouraging enough, its infinite particularity or singularity also alienates us from one another.
This is because all material reality is infinitely divisible. No matter how far you burrow into smallness or expand into bigness, you never reach an end. You never find a final, indivisible object. There is always an infinity of additional particulars and singularities awaiting you, and they always have an inimitable and unrepeatable uniqueness no other material objects ever have. They are all absolutely separate and different from each other, no matter where in the All they are and no matter what kind of dimensionality, compactness, diffuseness, monotonousness, or other feature they have. What unites them is the basic substance they're made of. And one of the key attributes of that substance, along with its infinite potentiality and unpredictability, is an infinite divisibility that entails uniqueness on every object it becomes.
I say "entails" because the separateness of material objects from each other that follows from the infinite divisibility of ultimate matter is in my opinion an inescapable fact of existence. Imagining the All, as I do, as a material stuff or substance whose potential to become subsidiary objects is infinite, yet which never itself objectifies, implies that every existing object is finally indefinable.
This in turn implies not only that all material objects are radically separate from and alien to each other but that finally what they're made of and where they come from can't be fixed or specified. All objects are totally alien to all other objects and have absolutely indeterminate origins.
I find little solace for dying in these convincing (to me) speculations. Unlike the All, human beings are instinctively affectionate. They're capable of strong emotional attachments to each other and to pets, homes, nature, and countless other things. Unlike inorganic objects, they can sense and comprehend the world around them, imagine fictional worlds, generate and reciprocate love. Compelled to try to understand the workings and origins of nature, they've repeatedly explained it as the handiwork of deities onto whom they project their own capacity to think and feel. While such explanations have been completely undermined by modern science, they're still at least partly believed in by most people and have an enormous impact on their notions of reality. Most people persist in believing that the universe personally cares about them and their well-being. They refuse to think of themselves as radically alienated objects in a material All made of some absolutely indefinable, uncaring stuff.
Those of us who do think of ourselves in this way find living and dying in such cosmic -- and metacosmic -- isolation cold comfort at best. I myself find it dubious luck to have been born, through no choice of my own, with a capacity to think and feel that I'll lose forever when I die. I get little solace from knowing that the beauty and vibrancy of living will completely end with my death. As Clint Eastwood puts it in The Unforgiven, when a man dies he loses "all he has and all he's ever going to have."
Materialists have always acknowledged the harshness of human mortality. Lucretius says he wrote De Rerum Natura in verse to help sweeten the bitterness of its doctrine of personal annihilation. Even religious skeptics like Kierkegaard prefer leaps of faith to what they see as the existential horror of the Lucretian viewpoint. Dostoevsky's rumination on the decapitated head that for an instant grasps what has happened to it before it dies has chilled everyone who's read it -- theists, agnostics, and atheists alike.
I've had two close encounters with the Grim Reaper myself. Since I narrate one of them at length in the "Wilderness" section of the May 19, 2011 post of this blog, I won't rehash it here except to say it's about the heart attack I had in 1995 hiking alone in the Sierra Nevadas.
The other happened in the summer of 1951 when I was driving through rural upstate New York with my brother. We were returning to school in New England from our first summer with our guardian aunt and uncle in San Diego after our mother's death the winter before. Though only fifteen, I was an experienced driver and realized I had to slow for a hill I'd just started down in a light rain. Touching the brakes, I felt the tires hydroplaning us into a long, horrible skid I couldn't control. As we spun halfway round and began hurtling backwards down the two-lane road, I thought, So this is how I'll die.
Along with fear, shock, and disbelief, I remember above all tensing for a huge, crushing blow. Nothing flashed before my eyes but what was flashing by outside the car: every nerve and muscle in me was too busy trying to protect itself from that pulverizing blow. When suddenly I realized the car had spun all the way round and was again heading frontwards down the road, I fought without success to control it. We bounced off the left shoulder down a steep bank onto somebody's back lawn, which the front bumper hit with a frame-springing jolt. We sat a moment, dazed but unhurt. The skid had slowed us almost to a stop before we went off the highway.
Both of these near-death experiences showed me how little I want to die. Like everything else in this post, they suggest how hard it is for most human beings to find much solace in their own destruction. It can be even harder when close friends or relatives die, especially if they're one's own children.
Yet I do think such solace is possible. In my next post I'll explain why.
*********
requi
Sunday, December 11, 2011
CONSOLATION TWELVE: ZEST FOR LIVING (3)
In my last post, I argued that a zest for living is the strongest instinct terrestrial organisms have. Reinforced by billions of years of evolution, it helps them survive long enough to mate and perpetuate the genetic advantages natural selection's given them over the course of countless generations. It also helps blind them to their own mortality.
But in human beings and perhaps other large-brained mammals like whales and elephants, the chance emergence of high-level intelligence has created a personal awareness of dying that runs counter to their survival instincts. Though all human beings recoil naturally from their own extinction, many for example choosing to believe that the sensual/cognitive mechanisms they call "soul" or "spirit" are immaterial and immortal, atheists reject such notions, insisting that human death is total and irreversible.
In today's post I'll conclude my Zest for Living series by arguing not only that human self-awareness is a product of insentient nature but also that it both enhances and undermines our will to live. Obviously, all organic brains on planet earth have always consisted of nothing but a vast number of several atomic elements, chiefly hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. Jumbled into more and more complex molecules by evolutionary process, these atoms eventually became self-enclosed, self-regulating biological systems able to sense the outside world. As these sensing mechanisms got increasingly acute, neuronal circuitry to harness the information they fed their owners' brains got increasingly elaborate. Currently, the most complex terrestrial product of the process has been the human brain.
In other words, humanity's ability to apprehend, reason, imagine, fantasize, dream, sense, and so on emerged from chance combinations of atoms, each without a hint of any such ability. Human percipience and cognition arose from the oblivion of atomic mass and energy and consists now of nothing but trillions of electrochemical events constantly occuring in the human brain, each as void of consciousness as a grain of sand. The components of human intelligence are literally dumb as dirt.
But while we're alive and our brains are working, we have a vibrant sense of being alive and conscious that may be utterly unlike anything in this or any other cosmos. While the odds of human-like intelligence elsewhere in this cosmos seem high, given the billions of known galaxies and the billions of stars in each galaxy, there's no question that, even if intelligence has evolved elsewhere, it's as unique to each brain that manufactures it there as ours is here.
Throughout these Zest for Living posts I've stressed this uniqueness, which I've also called particularity or singularity, as essential to cosmic objects and by extrapolation to the All. I find it deeply consoling. If the All's basic stuff is infinitely singular, a conclusion implied by the empirical evidence of our cosmos, every thing it constitutes is infinitely unique and original. Every human life is as fresh and radiant as the entire cosmos but, unlike the cosmos, aware of being so -- another reason I love being alive.
The assumption that at bottom the All is as insentient as the natural order of our own cosmos, and that sentience is its rare and accidental offshoot, diminishes neither kind of being. It makes both more wonderful. Though consciousness is inorganic matter fortuitously jumbled awake, it can change itself and its surroundings in amazing ways. Rather than bemoaning the All's indifference to humanity, I cherish our great good luck in being able to experience and savor our human existence at all.
A billion years before it evolved, human intelligence was foreshadowed by primitive forms of mentation that were already miracles of happenstance. But with human intelligence a huge range of new realities materialized. Though the brain of an early sea-creature could neuronally re-create its surroundings, it couldn't make tools or fantasize. The human brain could.
When and in what sequence human beings began making tools, fantasizing, communicating, and doing the things that require human brainpower isn't known. But without an ability to communicate through sounds (speech) or markings (writing), they couldn't have reported real events or told made-up stories, though then as now fact and fiction often blurred. Nor could they have created and maintained social, religious, political, and military systems of order.
All such creativity depended on the communication of consciousness from brain to brain by one brain's putting its thoughts into some kind of symbolic code like spoken or written language, then a second brain's translating the code back into its own electrochemical impulses. All communication consists of a constant translation of brain impulses into and out of coding systems. No human thought or feeling ever exists except as a material brain event or as codified matter.
Many philosophers dismiss the theory that human consciousness is streaming electrons as crudely reductionist. They argue that the theory doesn't account for the creativeness and originality of what they call purely mental states of being. I disagree. Human thought and feeling are obviously generated by brain electricity, and accounting for them in this way is anything but crudely reductionist. In the first place, more than a century of brain research has shown that all animal intelligence is so generated. To deny or ignore this research and cling to exploded theories of immaterial mentation is like insisting the sun orbits the earth daily.
A related claim is that yes, human consciousness consists of electrons but no, the thoughts and feelings it produces aren't the same thing as electrons. Electrons can't know or feel, yet human brains throb with knowing and feeling. To equate electrons with thought and feeling is both to mix apples and oranges and to deny that the brain creats a brand-new emergent reality out of electrons.
While I agree that a thought or feeling is in some ways unlike an electron, I disagree they're fundamentally different. Like an internal combustion made of individually impotent but collectively potent parts, the brain is made of countless neruonal circuits that organize electrons into doing what brains do. Just as an engine is nothing but the sum of its parts, so too is a brain. Without gas for the engine and electrochemistry for the brain, neither works. No material system ever mysteriously transcends the sum of its parts. The most basic part or component of reality is an unknown stuff or substance with an infinite potential to realize itself in new combinations. The only difference between an engine and a brain is that one's a product of intelligent design and the other isn't.
The newness, freshness, and originality of brain products is what I think the anti-reductionists are getting at in not wanting to "reduce" intelligence to electrical energy. They don't want to lessen the uniqueness of the different stages of cosmic evolution or suggest that they were planned or pre-determined in any way. Nor do I. I too see every event in cosmic history s having a uniqueness that nothing else in the All has. One of the most astounding and unlikely of these events was the evolution here on earth of the human brain.
Human intelligence has created countless new realities, among them many interesting fictions about, and one solid factual explanation of, cosmic origins. Jews, Christians, and Muslims have traditionally held that a single deity created heaven and earth is six days, populating it with fish and birds on day five and animals and a man and woman made in the deity's own image on day six, and then on day seven rested. Though scores of other creation stories exist, they tend to echo this one's fictional charm and factual emptiness. Very different is the scientific explanation know as the Big Bang theory. It rests on centuries of experimental proof that gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces separated thirteen billion years ago in the Big Bang and now dominate cosmic mass and energy.
All such mental creations are unique. They're as fresh, new, and beautiful as my sense of winter sunlight or your sense of summer moonlight. They can be as fearsome and unsettling as a sudden insight into one's own mortality, an insight most organisms are incapable of having. Human existence is a uniquely unplanned and spontaneous product of the All, as are each of the molecules human beings are made of and each of the electrons that generate their thoughts and feelings. To equate human consciousness with the electrons that cause it is not to crudely reduce it but to link it to the infinite worth of absolute material Being. So seen, human life assumes an All-like gloriousness.
But it's also perishable in a way the All's inhuman and oblivious fecundity is not. The human joy of living and knowing ends in death. No matter how it's rationalized, dying is a hard, hurtful fact of human existence. Having a capacity to reason sequentially and to create original marvels like space travel, digital technology, and artificial intelligence has helped enhance our zest for living, to the point of making some of us want to postpone death by somehow replacing or renewing our aging minds and bodies. Though I don't share this wish, I acknowledge the tragic underside of human life and its utter transience. I know I must get myself emotionally and intellectually ready to die.
In my next post I'll begin explaining how, as an aging materialist and atheist, I'm trying to do just that.
*******
But in human beings and perhaps other large-brained mammals like whales and elephants, the chance emergence of high-level intelligence has created a personal awareness of dying that runs counter to their survival instincts. Though all human beings recoil naturally from their own extinction, many for example choosing to believe that the sensual/cognitive mechanisms they call "soul" or "spirit" are immaterial and immortal, atheists reject such notions, insisting that human death is total and irreversible.
In today's post I'll conclude my Zest for Living series by arguing not only that human self-awareness is a product of insentient nature but also that it both enhances and undermines our will to live. Obviously, all organic brains on planet earth have always consisted of nothing but a vast number of several atomic elements, chiefly hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. Jumbled into more and more complex molecules by evolutionary process, these atoms eventually became self-enclosed, self-regulating biological systems able to sense the outside world. As these sensing mechanisms got increasingly acute, neuronal circuitry to harness the information they fed their owners' brains got increasingly elaborate. Currently, the most complex terrestrial product of the process has been the human brain.
In other words, humanity's ability to apprehend, reason, imagine, fantasize, dream, sense, and so on emerged from chance combinations of atoms, each without a hint of any such ability. Human percipience and cognition arose from the oblivion of atomic mass and energy and consists now of nothing but trillions of electrochemical events constantly occuring in the human brain, each as void of consciousness as a grain of sand. The components of human intelligence are literally dumb as dirt.
But while we're alive and our brains are working, we have a vibrant sense of being alive and conscious that may be utterly unlike anything in this or any other cosmos. While the odds of human-like intelligence elsewhere in this cosmos seem high, given the billions of known galaxies and the billions of stars in each galaxy, there's no question that, even if intelligence has evolved elsewhere, it's as unique to each brain that manufactures it there as ours is here.
Throughout these Zest for Living posts I've stressed this uniqueness, which I've also called particularity or singularity, as essential to cosmic objects and by extrapolation to the All. I find it deeply consoling. If the All's basic stuff is infinitely singular, a conclusion implied by the empirical evidence of our cosmos, every thing it constitutes is infinitely unique and original. Every human life is as fresh and radiant as the entire cosmos but, unlike the cosmos, aware of being so -- another reason I love being alive.
The assumption that at bottom the All is as insentient as the natural order of our own cosmos, and that sentience is its rare and accidental offshoot, diminishes neither kind of being. It makes both more wonderful. Though consciousness is inorganic matter fortuitously jumbled awake, it can change itself and its surroundings in amazing ways. Rather than bemoaning the All's indifference to humanity, I cherish our great good luck in being able to experience and savor our human existence at all.
A billion years before it evolved, human intelligence was foreshadowed by primitive forms of mentation that were already miracles of happenstance. But with human intelligence a huge range of new realities materialized. Though the brain of an early sea-creature could neuronally re-create its surroundings, it couldn't make tools or fantasize. The human brain could.
When and in what sequence human beings began making tools, fantasizing, communicating, and doing the things that require human brainpower isn't known. But without an ability to communicate through sounds (speech) or markings (writing), they couldn't have reported real events or told made-up stories, though then as now fact and fiction often blurred. Nor could they have created and maintained social, religious, political, and military systems of order.
All such creativity depended on the communication of consciousness from brain to brain by one brain's putting its thoughts into some kind of symbolic code like spoken or written language, then a second brain's translating the code back into its own electrochemical impulses. All communication consists of a constant translation of brain impulses into and out of coding systems. No human thought or feeling ever exists except as a material brain event or as codified matter.
Many philosophers dismiss the theory that human consciousness is streaming electrons as crudely reductionist. They argue that the theory doesn't account for the creativeness and originality of what they call purely mental states of being. I disagree. Human thought and feeling are obviously generated by brain electricity, and accounting for them in this way is anything but crudely reductionist. In the first place, more than a century of brain research has shown that all animal intelligence is so generated. To deny or ignore this research and cling to exploded theories of immaterial mentation is like insisting the sun orbits the earth daily.
A related claim is that yes, human consciousness consists of electrons but no, the thoughts and feelings it produces aren't the same thing as electrons. Electrons can't know or feel, yet human brains throb with knowing and feeling. To equate electrons with thought and feeling is both to mix apples and oranges and to deny that the brain creats a brand-new emergent reality out of electrons.
While I agree that a thought or feeling is in some ways unlike an electron, I disagree they're fundamentally different. Like an internal combustion made of individually impotent but collectively potent parts, the brain is made of countless neruonal circuits that organize electrons into doing what brains do. Just as an engine is nothing but the sum of its parts, so too is a brain. Without gas for the engine and electrochemistry for the brain, neither works. No material system ever mysteriously transcends the sum of its parts. The most basic part or component of reality is an unknown stuff or substance with an infinite potential to realize itself in new combinations. The only difference between an engine and a brain is that one's a product of intelligent design and the other isn't.
The newness, freshness, and originality of brain products is what I think the anti-reductionists are getting at in not wanting to "reduce" intelligence to electrical energy. They don't want to lessen the uniqueness of the different stages of cosmic evolution or suggest that they were planned or pre-determined in any way. Nor do I. I too see every event in cosmic history s having a uniqueness that nothing else in the All has. One of the most astounding and unlikely of these events was the evolution here on earth of the human brain.
Human intelligence has created countless new realities, among them many interesting fictions about, and one solid factual explanation of, cosmic origins. Jews, Christians, and Muslims have traditionally held that a single deity created heaven and earth is six days, populating it with fish and birds on day five and animals and a man and woman made in the deity's own image on day six, and then on day seven rested. Though scores of other creation stories exist, they tend to echo this one's fictional charm and factual emptiness. Very different is the scientific explanation know as the Big Bang theory. It rests on centuries of experimental proof that gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces separated thirteen billion years ago in the Big Bang and now dominate cosmic mass and energy.
All such mental creations are unique. They're as fresh, new, and beautiful as my sense of winter sunlight or your sense of summer moonlight. They can be as fearsome and unsettling as a sudden insight into one's own mortality, an insight most organisms are incapable of having. Human existence is a uniquely unplanned and spontaneous product of the All, as are each of the molecules human beings are made of and each of the electrons that generate their thoughts and feelings. To equate human consciousness with the electrons that cause it is not to crudely reduce it but to link it to the infinite worth of absolute material Being. So seen, human life assumes an All-like gloriousness.
But it's also perishable in a way the All's inhuman and oblivious fecundity is not. The human joy of living and knowing ends in death. No matter how it's rationalized, dying is a hard, hurtful fact of human existence. Having a capacity to reason sequentially and to create original marvels like space travel, digital technology, and artificial intelligence has helped enhance our zest for living, to the point of making some of us want to postpone death by somehow replacing or renewing our aging minds and bodies. Though I don't share this wish, I acknowledge the tragic underside of human life and its utter transience. I know I must get myself emotionally and intellectually ready to die.
In my next post I'll begin explaining how, as an aging materialist and atheist, I'm trying to do just that.
*******
Saturday, November 12, 2011
CONSOLATION ELEVEN: ZEST FOR LIVING (2)
In my last post, I argued that the ultimate source of the human zest for living is the interconnectedness and unrepeatableness of the material All from which we and the rest of the cosmos came. I stressed the randomness of cosmic evolution and its collision between order and disorder, a collision I infer is in some way basic to the All. I also pointed out the solace I draw from my own existence, which I consider as valuable and self-justified as any.
In today's post, I want to highlight terrestrial evolution as the immediate source of our zest for living. Once Earth had aggregated from planetessimals into a crusted, molten ball and chanced to acquire the size, orbit, tilt, and solar position it has, it became a unique platform for organic life.
Exactly how this happened is not fully understood. For example, astronomers have just discovered a nearby star at the center of a sphere of gas with huge amounts of water frozen to near-absolute zero at the sphere's outer fringes. They theorize that earth's oceans may have resulted from similarly frozen water at the fringes of our own solar system, transported to earth's surface by comets. The theory contradicts most current assumptions about how the earth's oceans formed. Rather than filled with rainfall from earth's own clouds, our oceans may have filled with the water of comets from deep solar space.
What were the odds against human intelligence emerging from such an accidental series of events? The primordial gasses and dusts of the solar system had to be just massive and moving enough to create a sun of just the right size and heat, with just enough leftover debris to create a planet with just the right orbit and spin for collecting comet-ice (if it did), then warm it for billions of years with sunlight and vulcanism. Random molecular action in this oceanic hatchery had to produce increasingly complex, self-replicating inorganic compounds, which then had to enclose themselves in membrane sacs and turn into organic cells.
The odds against all this happening must have been off the charts. Similarly mind-boggling is that each of these cells was an absolutely new and inimitable object in the cosmos. It was a perfect singularity, not in the sense of being physically unexplainable but rather of being a unique event in cosmic space-time. Nothing else did, would, or could ever occupy its slot in the cosmos. Though organisms on countless other planets in countless other solar systems and galaxies may be constantly evolving from inorganic matter, they're as unique there as ours are here. The existence of each of these cells and of every other particle of matter in the cosmos cannot and will not be repeated elsewhere.
Whether such singularity is true of the All as a whole is impossible to know. If space, time, mass, and energy before our Big Bang were indistinguishable and interchangeable parts of a featureless soup of infinite heat/density, as the physics of post-Planck Era symmetry-breaking implies, of what precisely did their uniqueness consist? Furthermore, states of being having more or less than the four dimensions of our space-time, assuming such states exist, may not particularize objects the way our cosmos does.
Yet by extrapolating from the empirical evidence here, I suspect that the fundamental stuff of the All is infinitely singular and particular. Since this is a pretty counterintuitive proposition, let me put it another way: the basic component of ultimate reality -- the core ingredient or material of all existence -- is, like every object in space-time, infinitely divisible. No matter how many times you halve something in space-time, you can continue dividing it forever. There is no irreducible particle of stuff or matter anywhere, and when I speak of such basic stuff or matter I think of it as being somehow infinitely divisible. Since infinite divisibility implies not only endless particularity but endless equality of value among all particulars, I must be a singularity that is as valuable as anything that exists. Though obviously speculative, this inference is based not on wishful thinking but on good empirical evidence.
In other words, even before terrestrial organisms developed sensations of any kind, they were unique singularities within the cosmos and probably unique singularities within the All. The visceral belief of all human children that they're immortal stems in part from their sense of their own uniqueness as physical objects. Vastly more important, though, is their gut feeling they cannot die. So potent is this feeling that most people never outgrow or unlearn it, seduced as they are by magical thinking into seeing something in themselves as immaterial or supernatural. Against overwhelming natural evidence, they refuse to believe in their own mortality.
Their uniqueness as material objects has been transformed into a sense of immortality by the two most powerful instincts imbedded in them by natural selection. The first, of course, is the instinct to survive. Only organisms that adapt well to their environment through genetic mutation do survive, and every such mutation reinforces both their sense of their own indestructibility and their zest for living.
The second is the instinct to reproduce. Superficially, reproduction doesn't seem to be as obviously self-aggrandizing a drive as personal survival. Sexuality, controlled by more specialized biological triggers than the other three primal f's (feeding, fighting, fleeing), doesn't in the same way affect the individual organism's own quotidian survival. Yet, absent reproduction, every species will quickly die out, so in every successful species sexuality is as important as outliving famines, predators, or life-and-death battles.
These two primal instincts, along with countless supporting instincts and sensors, strengthened every organism's sense of individual selfhood to the point of overwhelming its ability to grasp or even intuit the fact of its own death. Many survival mechanisms, such as herd, flock, or school bonding, evolved to preserve and enhance this feeling of personal indestructibility, though many other instincts like self-sacrifice for the hive or colony, muscular paralysis in the jaws or claws of predators, or white-light visions at death point the other way.
I'm oversimplifying, of course. Exactly how each of the countless species that have existed on the earth's surface developed, and how intense their zest for living was, are questions answerable only in a generalized, proof-poor way. But the basic facts of organic evolution are indisputable. First, all terrestrial organisms are locked into the mortal cycle of birth, life, and death. Second, all terrestrial organisms except perhaps certain bacteria sustain themselves by absorbing the nutrients of other organisms, which has made the earth seem to some people a murderous place (others have called it a charnel house or death-kitchen.) Third and most important, all terrestrial organisms instinctively deny they will die.
This instinctive denial shows how deeply engrained our zest for living is, saturating every cell, bone, nerve, and muscle of our being. We love life because we came into existence through a multi-billion-year process of genetic mutation that brought our ancestors from sea to land, to mammalian reproduction, to bi-podal locomotion, and to extraordinary brain size. Thoroughly random, the process endowed each new species with an entirely new kind of cosmic reality and each new creature with a singularity unique in cosmic history.
In my next post, I'll discuss how the emergence of human intelligence both enhanced and challenged our zest for living.
*********
In today's post, I want to highlight terrestrial evolution as the immediate source of our zest for living. Once Earth had aggregated from planetessimals into a crusted, molten ball and chanced to acquire the size, orbit, tilt, and solar position it has, it became a unique platform for organic life.
Exactly how this happened is not fully understood. For example, astronomers have just discovered a nearby star at the center of a sphere of gas with huge amounts of water frozen to near-absolute zero at the sphere's outer fringes. They theorize that earth's oceans may have resulted from similarly frozen water at the fringes of our own solar system, transported to earth's surface by comets. The theory contradicts most current assumptions about how the earth's oceans formed. Rather than filled with rainfall from earth's own clouds, our oceans may have filled with the water of comets from deep solar space.
What were the odds against human intelligence emerging from such an accidental series of events? The primordial gasses and dusts of the solar system had to be just massive and moving enough to create a sun of just the right size and heat, with just enough leftover debris to create a planet with just the right orbit and spin for collecting comet-ice (if it did), then warm it for billions of years with sunlight and vulcanism. Random molecular action in this oceanic hatchery had to produce increasingly complex, self-replicating inorganic compounds, which then had to enclose themselves in membrane sacs and turn into organic cells.
The odds against all this happening must have been off the charts. Similarly mind-boggling is that each of these cells was an absolutely new and inimitable object in the cosmos. It was a perfect singularity, not in the sense of being physically unexplainable but rather of being a unique event in cosmic space-time. Nothing else did, would, or could ever occupy its slot in the cosmos. Though organisms on countless other planets in countless other solar systems and galaxies may be constantly evolving from inorganic matter, they're as unique there as ours are here. The existence of each of these cells and of every other particle of matter in the cosmos cannot and will not be repeated elsewhere.
Whether such singularity is true of the All as a whole is impossible to know. If space, time, mass, and energy before our Big Bang were indistinguishable and interchangeable parts of a featureless soup of infinite heat/density, as the physics of post-Planck Era symmetry-breaking implies, of what precisely did their uniqueness consist? Furthermore, states of being having more or less than the four dimensions of our space-time, assuming such states exist, may not particularize objects the way our cosmos does.
Yet by extrapolating from the empirical evidence here, I suspect that the fundamental stuff of the All is infinitely singular and particular. Since this is a pretty counterintuitive proposition, let me put it another way: the basic component of ultimate reality -- the core ingredient or material of all existence -- is, like every object in space-time, infinitely divisible. No matter how many times you halve something in space-time, you can continue dividing it forever. There is no irreducible particle of stuff or matter anywhere, and when I speak of such basic stuff or matter I think of it as being somehow infinitely divisible. Since infinite divisibility implies not only endless particularity but endless equality of value among all particulars, I must be a singularity that is as valuable as anything that exists. Though obviously speculative, this inference is based not on wishful thinking but on good empirical evidence.
In other words, even before terrestrial organisms developed sensations of any kind, they were unique singularities within the cosmos and probably unique singularities within the All. The visceral belief of all human children that they're immortal stems in part from their sense of their own uniqueness as physical objects. Vastly more important, though, is their gut feeling they cannot die. So potent is this feeling that most people never outgrow or unlearn it, seduced as they are by magical thinking into seeing something in themselves as immaterial or supernatural. Against overwhelming natural evidence, they refuse to believe in their own mortality.
Their uniqueness as material objects has been transformed into a sense of immortality by the two most powerful instincts imbedded in them by natural selection. The first, of course, is the instinct to survive. Only organisms that adapt well to their environment through genetic mutation do survive, and every such mutation reinforces both their sense of their own indestructibility and their zest for living.
The second is the instinct to reproduce. Superficially, reproduction doesn't seem to be as obviously self-aggrandizing a drive as personal survival. Sexuality, controlled by more specialized biological triggers than the other three primal f's (feeding, fighting, fleeing), doesn't in the same way affect the individual organism's own quotidian survival. Yet, absent reproduction, every species will quickly die out, so in every successful species sexuality is as important as outliving famines, predators, or life-and-death battles.
These two primal instincts, along with countless supporting instincts and sensors, strengthened every organism's sense of individual selfhood to the point of overwhelming its ability to grasp or even intuit the fact of its own death. Many survival mechanisms, such as herd, flock, or school bonding, evolved to preserve and enhance this feeling of personal indestructibility, though many other instincts like self-sacrifice for the hive or colony, muscular paralysis in the jaws or claws of predators, or white-light visions at death point the other way.
I'm oversimplifying, of course. Exactly how each of the countless species that have existed on the earth's surface developed, and how intense their zest for living was, are questions answerable only in a generalized, proof-poor way. But the basic facts of organic evolution are indisputable. First, all terrestrial organisms are locked into the mortal cycle of birth, life, and death. Second, all terrestrial organisms except perhaps certain bacteria sustain themselves by absorbing the nutrients of other organisms, which has made the earth seem to some people a murderous place (others have called it a charnel house or death-kitchen.) Third and most important, all terrestrial organisms instinctively deny they will die.
This instinctive denial shows how deeply engrained our zest for living is, saturating every cell, bone, nerve, and muscle of our being. We love life because we came into existence through a multi-billion-year process of genetic mutation that brought our ancestors from sea to land, to mammalian reproduction, to bi-podal locomotion, and to extraordinary brain size. Thoroughly random, the process endowed each new species with an entirely new kind of cosmic reality and each new creature with a singularity unique in cosmic history.
In my next post, I'll discuss how the emergence of human intelligence both enhanced and challenged our zest for living.
*********
Saturday, October 22, 2011
CONSOLATION TEN: ZEST FOR LIVING (1)
Most non-atheists see atheists as unhappy campers. They think that atheists find no meaning or purpose in human life and nature as a whole. They believe that without a transcendent, supernatural intelligence to validate it, nature offers no basis for human joy. To them, it seems impossible that an atheist who on one hand denies a divine plan for humanity and on the other affirms a random materiality at the core of being can find human life happy or fulfilling. They feel that all atheists must be uniquely prone to pessimism and depression in the face of existential discouragements like those caused by today's hard economic times.
In this and follow-up posts I want to explain to those who feel this way why I and most other atheists do not agree. On the contrary, we feel at least as much zest for living and as much pleasure in having been born as they. Furthermore, we much prefer our explanation of the world to theirs. The world is not the creation of supernatural and immaterial deities, we hold, but instead a boundless web of material substance that during the Big Bang lost its initial symmetries and became the time-space-mass-energy manifold that generated every atom in our cosmos,
Today I'll begin by explaining how I think this human zest for living, joie de vivre, or Lebensfreude originated. As I've said in earlier posts, materialists like me believe that all existence is material and that so-called nothingness and non-existence are human fictions. Everything, including human thought and feeling, consists at bottom of mass-energy. Every particle in our cosmos came from the Big Bang, which released all the matter of our stars and galaxies as well as the space-time they occupy. All the best evidence indicates that the Big Bang was a chance eruption of unknown natural forces.
We infer from the facts of our own cosmos that this eruption was not caused by a human attribute like cognition or emotion but was, like all the natural objects it produced -- stars, galaxies, black holes --, the result of a fundamentally non-rational, non-human randomness at the heart of reality. But how could objects as predictable as the black holes, galaxies, and stars of our world have emerged from such unpredictability?
Almost certainly, I would argue, from the same kind of clash between material order and disorder we see everywhere around us. Electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces obey a rigid lawfulness yet intersect randomly in space-time. Not one black hole, galaxy, or star was planned, predestined, or "necessitated." They all arose from these four fundamental forces blindly driving atomic mass into black holes and stars. Then they just as blindly began recycling the debris from exploding stars and colliding galaxies into subsequent-generation solar systems. Everything in the cosmos emerged from a material order utterly oblivious of itself.
So too our solar system. Its originatiing clouds of dust and gas were pulled by gravity into a rotating disk with just enough mass and motion to cause a nuclear ignition at the centerpoint and just enough debris elsewhere to coalesce into orbiting satellites. Among these satellites, our earth was just close enough, just tilted enough, rotating on its own axis just fast enough, with an orbit just circular enough (and so on) to evolve human sentience. The laws of nature formed our oxygen-wrapped planet and us by chance.
Somehow human sentience emerged from this mystifying blend of order and disorder. I say "mystifying" because from a human point of view the ultimate facts of existence are unknown and quite probably unknowable. So-called supernatural revelations are products of human fraud or delusion and useless except as case examples of crime or craziness. Scientific study is incomparably more useful and valid, but it too is limited by its current inability to verify anything beyond the physics of our cosmos -- or even to understand that physics fully. It hasn't yet ascertained what the "dark energy" making space-time balloon nor what the "dark matter" comprising most of cosmic mass are. It doesn't yet know for sure whether neutrinos travel faster than light. It has no idea how or why the Big Bang happened.
All we can currently do is speculate about where nature's from and headed by extrapolating from what we know about it here to the mysterious unknowns that enfold us. One conclusion I've drawn from this kind of speculative extrapolaton is that infinite reality is as natural and material -- and as interconnected and continuous -- as the finite reality we experience here. The All, as materialists since Epicurus and Lucretius have termed it, is an endless and timeless continuum of some fundamental substance.
Another conclusion I've reached is that the finite particulars of our Big Bang, our cosmos, our solar system, and our species are unique and original within the All. That is, they are finite manifestations of infinite material Being. No matter how closely ours may resemble other Big Bangs, cosmoses, solar systems, planets, or species elsewhere in the All, the particulars of the mesh of pattern and accident that formed us here can never recur. That unique mesh created a circumstance and reality different from any other that ever did or will exist.
We are the only material objects of precisely our shape and substance that could have emerged from the randomly interacting natural laws of our cosmos. The melding, blending, and amalgamation that resulted from the clash of order and disorder here is inimitable. As products of evolutionary chance, we think and feel in a way nothing else ever did or will.
In other words, our sentience is the unique offshoot of random convergences in this unique cosmos. While it may resemble sentience elsewhere here or in the All, it can never be duplicated or even approximated. It stands irreducibly alone, occupying an entirely new and unrepeatable existence within the totality of the All's patterned chaos. It's as worthy and valuable as the All itself simply because it too exists. Material existence in any form never needs any validation or justification. It is as infinitely self-validating and self-justifying as the All itself, which is all material being. Its possibilities for self-realization are limitless, to me an exciting and inspiring thought. Moreover, my sense of my own value and uniqueness in this infinity of material being makes me especially glad that, unlike the inorganic matter I'm made of, I'm somewhat self-aware.
In my next post, I'll extend this notion of value and uniqueness to human evolution and argue that my zest for living is rooted in, but not confined to, that same inorganic matter.
**************
In this and follow-up posts I want to explain to those who feel this way why I and most other atheists do not agree. On the contrary, we feel at least as much zest for living and as much pleasure in having been born as they. Furthermore, we much prefer our explanation of the world to theirs. The world is not the creation of supernatural and immaterial deities, we hold, but instead a boundless web of material substance that during the Big Bang lost its initial symmetries and became the time-space-mass-energy manifold that generated every atom in our cosmos,
Today I'll begin by explaining how I think this human zest for living, joie de vivre, or Lebensfreude originated. As I've said in earlier posts, materialists like me believe that all existence is material and that so-called nothingness and non-existence are human fictions. Everything, including human thought and feeling, consists at bottom of mass-energy. Every particle in our cosmos came from the Big Bang, which released all the matter of our stars and galaxies as well as the space-time they occupy. All the best evidence indicates that the Big Bang was a chance eruption of unknown natural forces.
We infer from the facts of our own cosmos that this eruption was not caused by a human attribute like cognition or emotion but was, like all the natural objects it produced -- stars, galaxies, black holes --, the result of a fundamentally non-rational, non-human randomness at the heart of reality. But how could objects as predictable as the black holes, galaxies, and stars of our world have emerged from such unpredictability?
Almost certainly, I would argue, from the same kind of clash between material order and disorder we see everywhere around us. Electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces obey a rigid lawfulness yet intersect randomly in space-time. Not one black hole, galaxy, or star was planned, predestined, or "necessitated." They all arose from these four fundamental forces blindly driving atomic mass into black holes and stars. Then they just as blindly began recycling the debris from exploding stars and colliding galaxies into subsequent-generation solar systems. Everything in the cosmos emerged from a material order utterly oblivious of itself.
So too our solar system. Its originatiing clouds of dust and gas were pulled by gravity into a rotating disk with just enough mass and motion to cause a nuclear ignition at the centerpoint and just enough debris elsewhere to coalesce into orbiting satellites. Among these satellites, our earth was just close enough, just tilted enough, rotating on its own axis just fast enough, with an orbit just circular enough (and so on) to evolve human sentience. The laws of nature formed our oxygen-wrapped planet and us by chance.
Somehow human sentience emerged from this mystifying blend of order and disorder. I say "mystifying" because from a human point of view the ultimate facts of existence are unknown and quite probably unknowable. So-called supernatural revelations are products of human fraud or delusion and useless except as case examples of crime or craziness. Scientific study is incomparably more useful and valid, but it too is limited by its current inability to verify anything beyond the physics of our cosmos -- or even to understand that physics fully. It hasn't yet ascertained what the "dark energy" making space-time balloon nor what the "dark matter" comprising most of cosmic mass are. It doesn't yet know for sure whether neutrinos travel faster than light. It has no idea how or why the Big Bang happened.
All we can currently do is speculate about where nature's from and headed by extrapolating from what we know about it here to the mysterious unknowns that enfold us. One conclusion I've drawn from this kind of speculative extrapolaton is that infinite reality is as natural and material -- and as interconnected and continuous -- as the finite reality we experience here. The All, as materialists since Epicurus and Lucretius have termed it, is an endless and timeless continuum of some fundamental substance.
Another conclusion I've reached is that the finite particulars of our Big Bang, our cosmos, our solar system, and our species are unique and original within the All. That is, they are finite manifestations of infinite material Being. No matter how closely ours may resemble other Big Bangs, cosmoses, solar systems, planets, or species elsewhere in the All, the particulars of the mesh of pattern and accident that formed us here can never recur. That unique mesh created a circumstance and reality different from any other that ever did or will exist.
We are the only material objects of precisely our shape and substance that could have emerged from the randomly interacting natural laws of our cosmos. The melding, blending, and amalgamation that resulted from the clash of order and disorder here is inimitable. As products of evolutionary chance, we think and feel in a way nothing else ever did or will.
In other words, our sentience is the unique offshoot of random convergences in this unique cosmos. While it may resemble sentience elsewhere here or in the All, it can never be duplicated or even approximated. It stands irreducibly alone, occupying an entirely new and unrepeatable existence within the totality of the All's patterned chaos. It's as worthy and valuable as the All itself simply because it too exists. Material existence in any form never needs any validation or justification. It is as infinitely self-validating and self-justifying as the All itself, which is all material being. Its possibilities for self-realization are limitless, to me an exciting and inspiring thought. Moreover, my sense of my own value and uniqueness in this infinity of material being makes me especially glad that, unlike the inorganic matter I'm made of, I'm somewhat self-aware.
In my next post, I'll extend this notion of value and uniqueness to human evolution and argue that my zest for living is rooted in, but not confined to, that same inorganic matter.
**************
Monday, September 26, 2011
CONSOLATION NINE: HOW ATHEISM HELPED ME SURVIVE THE GREAT RECESSION
In my last post I suggested that atheism helps people manage money. Knowing how risky investing is, I didn't try to claim that atheism makes investing easy, merely that it fosters realistic, rational, and moderate habits of mind consistent with saving money and avoiding debt, setting modest investment goals and pursuing them sensibly, and resisting financial panics and euphorias. I argued that in many ways atheism is better suited than other worldviews to the hard facts of economic life. In this post, I'd like to explain how this atheistic mindset has helped me not just survive the recent Great Recession but turn it to financial advantage.
Let me start with the worst financial mistake I've made in recent years. Back in the 1970s, before I'd thought my way through to atheism, I felt I could make money easily. One of my ploys was to buy 50 one-ounce American Gold Eagles for about $20,000, or roughly $400 each, at the height of the 1970s gold bubble. Then for the next twenty years, while I was still working, I watched the Eagles tank, kicking myself for having swallowed all the 1970s hype about gold soaring to fabulous heights. Finally, when gold fell to under $200 an ounce, I swore to sell the Eagles as soon as they got anywhere near where I'd bought them and in 2002, seven years after retiring, dumped them for $368 apiece. Today they'd be worth five times that much -- if I still had them.
The cardinal rule I broke when I bought and sold the Eagles was the oldest and best in investing -- buy low, sell high. Pre-atheism, I acknowledged the rule but often ignored it, flitting in and out of stocks, bonds, and REITs like a moth around a light bulb. Post-atheism, I resolved to set my financial house in order. I began by investing only in mutual funds and not in individual stocks or bonds.
This meant switching all my pension, 401k and IRA stock holdings to indexed, broadly-diversified stock mutual funds. It also meant maximizing my annual contributions to these tax-free, deferred-compensation programs. And since I was approaching retirement and lived in Maryland, a high income-tax state with a triple-A bond rating, I started putting the rest of my money in a diversified Maryland municipal bond fund.
When I retired in 1995, I initiated my TIAA-CREF pension not as a defined benefit but as a defined contribution, in which the money I and my employers had contributed to my TIAA-CREF account over the years remained under my and my heirs' control -- except, of course, for the annual minimum distributions required by the IRS.
The tech bubble of 2000, the 9/11/01 attack, and the ensuing market volatility made me aware of a reality that I might well have missed in my pre-atheism days. It was that the stock market doctrine I'd always followed -- buy and hold -- was no longer working. So in 2004 I chose cautious market timing instead. Before, I'd been putting fixed amounts in my TIAA, IRA, and 401k accounts over the years and thus averaging market ups and downs. But since retiring in 1995, I'd only been taking out, not putting in, and I didn't want to expose my nest egg unnecessarily to the volatility of the post-2000 markets.
So I began timing the market in the most risk-averse way I could. In early 2004, having 100% of my deferred-compensation accounts in stock, I got nervous about the equity markets and began shifting my stock funds into money market funds (i.e., cash), which I could do without paying any fees or capital gains tax -- a huge advantage of the deferred-tax system that all investors should try to exploit. By late 2005 I was 100% in cash and, feeling the stock market was stabilizing, once again began moving back into stocks. By late 2006 I was again 100% in stocks, having dragged the transfer process out over months so as to cost-average. Luckily, my stock funds rose some 7% during the next eight months.
Then I really started getting nervous. For years I'd been watching the real estate market with disbelief, as shacky dumps and McMansions soared in price. Investment banks leveraged 30 to 1 were buying and selling the no-money-down mortgages of these shacky dumps and McMansions as exotic financial derivatives that no one seemed to understand. I certainly didn't, and when in early 2007 I started seeing reports that banks didn't even have these derivatives on their balance sheets, I concluded the bubble was ready to burst. So on May 18, 2007, I switched the 100% I had in stock 100% back into cash.
It was the best financial move of my life. Though it involved a lot of my own hard-earned bucks, it struck me then and now as all but risk-free. On one hand, everything pointed to a looming debacle in the housing and stock markets. On the other, my money-market funds were paying 5% interest -- a no-brainer of a choice. Sure enough, by March 2009 the markets had plunged by half, and I'd already begun inching back into stocks, a switch completed in late 2009. For a year, I watched the stock funds rise more than 10%, at which point I reversed again and began switching back into cash. Currently, I'm once more 100% in cash, where I'll stay till the current roller-coaster market settles down, hopefully to where I can again buy low.
In short, this old atheist dog did learn new tricks, not from atheist handbooks on how to invest, which don't exist, but from atheism's realistic, rational, and moderate turn of mind, which does. Behind all my financial moves in recent years has been an atheistic skepticism towards every kind of religious or economic panacea. I pay no more attention to the prophets of a new economic heaven or hell than to the old religious prophets. Above all, atheism's given me a flexible, broad-minded view of macro-economic reality I didn't used to have. Basing financial decisions more on national and international facts than on ups and downs in the markets, I now do my best to anticipate these ups and downs. And I always move slowly to smooth out market fluctuation. Though recently market-timing has worked far better than buy-and-hold, I'm open to changing the strategy at any time. The key, as all atheists know, is first to recognize and then to deal rationally with proveable realities.
Maybe I give atheism too much credit. Maybe sooner or later I'd have changed from buy and hold to market timing anyway. Yet I do feel that atheism's realism, rationality, and moderation helped me here. They made me a more disciplined and cautious investor and sharpened my sense both of the world's overall riskiness and of the vulnerability of my own life savings. They've made me better understand how careless and accident-prone many of my earlier maneuvers were and how careful money-wise I must now be.
In any case, since I began timing the markets in 2004, my deferred-compensation accounts have increased in value by 27%, despite extreme market volatility and the worst economic recession since the 1930s. My Maryland muni fund, which I 've steadily added savings to, has grown by 33%. All the while, I've been siphoning off a comfortable retirement income from both. In other words, I feel I've taken great economic comfort and consolation from atheism in these hard and dangerous times.
************
Let me start with the worst financial mistake I've made in recent years. Back in the 1970s, before I'd thought my way through to atheism, I felt I could make money easily. One of my ploys was to buy 50 one-ounce American Gold Eagles for about $20,000, or roughly $400 each, at the height of the 1970s gold bubble. Then for the next twenty years, while I was still working, I watched the Eagles tank, kicking myself for having swallowed all the 1970s hype about gold soaring to fabulous heights. Finally, when gold fell to under $200 an ounce, I swore to sell the Eagles as soon as they got anywhere near where I'd bought them and in 2002, seven years after retiring, dumped them for $368 apiece. Today they'd be worth five times that much -- if I still had them.
The cardinal rule I broke when I bought and sold the Eagles was the oldest and best in investing -- buy low, sell high. Pre-atheism, I acknowledged the rule but often ignored it, flitting in and out of stocks, bonds, and REITs like a moth around a light bulb. Post-atheism, I resolved to set my financial house in order. I began by investing only in mutual funds and not in individual stocks or bonds.
This meant switching all my pension, 401k and IRA stock holdings to indexed, broadly-diversified stock mutual funds. It also meant maximizing my annual contributions to these tax-free, deferred-compensation programs. And since I was approaching retirement and lived in Maryland, a high income-tax state with a triple-A bond rating, I started putting the rest of my money in a diversified Maryland municipal bond fund.
When I retired in 1995, I initiated my TIAA-CREF pension not as a defined benefit but as a defined contribution, in which the money I and my employers had contributed to my TIAA-CREF account over the years remained under my and my heirs' control -- except, of course, for the annual minimum distributions required by the IRS.
The tech bubble of 2000, the 9/11/01 attack, and the ensuing market volatility made me aware of a reality that I might well have missed in my pre-atheism days. It was that the stock market doctrine I'd always followed -- buy and hold -- was no longer working. So in 2004 I chose cautious market timing instead. Before, I'd been putting fixed amounts in my TIAA, IRA, and 401k accounts over the years and thus averaging market ups and downs. But since retiring in 1995, I'd only been taking out, not putting in, and I didn't want to expose my nest egg unnecessarily to the volatility of the post-2000 markets.
So I began timing the market in the most risk-averse way I could. In early 2004, having 100% of my deferred-compensation accounts in stock, I got nervous about the equity markets and began shifting my stock funds into money market funds (i.e., cash), which I could do without paying any fees or capital gains tax -- a huge advantage of the deferred-tax system that all investors should try to exploit. By late 2005 I was 100% in cash and, feeling the stock market was stabilizing, once again began moving back into stocks. By late 2006 I was again 100% in stocks, having dragged the transfer process out over months so as to cost-average. Luckily, my stock funds rose some 7% during the next eight months.
Then I really started getting nervous. For years I'd been watching the real estate market with disbelief, as shacky dumps and McMansions soared in price. Investment banks leveraged 30 to 1 were buying and selling the no-money-down mortgages of these shacky dumps and McMansions as exotic financial derivatives that no one seemed to understand. I certainly didn't, and when in early 2007 I started seeing reports that banks didn't even have these derivatives on their balance sheets, I concluded the bubble was ready to burst. So on May 18, 2007, I switched the 100% I had in stock 100% back into cash.
It was the best financial move of my life. Though it involved a lot of my own hard-earned bucks, it struck me then and now as all but risk-free. On one hand, everything pointed to a looming debacle in the housing and stock markets. On the other, my money-market funds were paying 5% interest -- a no-brainer of a choice. Sure enough, by March 2009 the markets had plunged by half, and I'd already begun inching back into stocks, a switch completed in late 2009. For a year, I watched the stock funds rise more than 10%, at which point I reversed again and began switching back into cash. Currently, I'm once more 100% in cash, where I'll stay till the current roller-coaster market settles down, hopefully to where I can again buy low.
In short, this old atheist dog did learn new tricks, not from atheist handbooks on how to invest, which don't exist, but from atheism's realistic, rational, and moderate turn of mind, which does. Behind all my financial moves in recent years has been an atheistic skepticism towards every kind of religious or economic panacea. I pay no more attention to the prophets of a new economic heaven or hell than to the old religious prophets. Above all, atheism's given me a flexible, broad-minded view of macro-economic reality I didn't used to have. Basing financial decisions more on national and international facts than on ups and downs in the markets, I now do my best to anticipate these ups and downs. And I always move slowly to smooth out market fluctuation. Though recently market-timing has worked far better than buy-and-hold, I'm open to changing the strategy at any time. The key, as all atheists know, is first to recognize and then to deal rationally with proveable realities.
Maybe I give atheism too much credit. Maybe sooner or later I'd have changed from buy and hold to market timing anyway. Yet I do feel that atheism's realism, rationality, and moderation helped me here. They made me a more disciplined and cautious investor and sharpened my sense both of the world's overall riskiness and of the vulnerability of my own life savings. They've made me better understand how careless and accident-prone many of my earlier maneuvers were and how careful money-wise I must now be.
In any case, since I began timing the markets in 2004, my deferred-compensation accounts have increased in value by 27%, despite extreme market volatility and the worst economic recession since the 1930s. My Maryland muni fund, which I 've steadily added savings to, has grown by 33%. All the while, I've been siphoning off a comfortable retirement income from both. In other words, I feel I've taken great economic comfort and consolation from atheism in these hard and dangerous times.
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