The Dying of the Light: Hello Darkness

December 11th, 2007 Fred McVittie Posted in Brain, Cognition, Consciousness, Darkness, Death, Embodiment, Life, Light |

Development in human medicine may one day delay the onset of senile dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and the routine deterioration of memory and reasoning that accompanies old age. (Recent studies have linked these effects with loss of integrity in the white matter of the brain (1).) We may eventually see a time in which aging of the brain is halted and as one gets older there is no loss of mental function, one stays as sharp and alert as a 20 year old, right up to the point when one dies from some somatic breakdown or other. Is this really a good thing? I am not at all sure I want to go out like that, at the absolute height of my cognitive powers, fully wide-awake and fully aware that, if only my body would keep going, then my brain would continue to carry me forward. I suspect that such ‘improvement’ would only add to the fear of death and the impossibility of imagining it. There would be no gradual decline, no fading away, no seeping of consciousness into the fabric of the world, no emptying of the self until the body is a hollow shell. Instead the ghost would be perfectly trapped within the machine, watching the decay of its vessel with increasing frustration and anxiety. There would be no ‘dying of the light’ to rage against, only the solid black wall of terminal embodiment to which we would hurtle, wide-eyed and with our path toward it brightly lit with anachronistic mind.

Let me dissolve into the gathering dusk piece by piece. Take this part of mind, then this, then this. Let me gently forget my friends and family, my home, the books I’ve read and the television I’ve watched, my wife, my past, my name. Return these things from wherever they came, out there beyond the extent of skin and bone. Take my freedom, my independence, my dignity, my continence, my responsiveness, my mobility, my rights as a human being, my sense of self, and stick them where the light of my sun no longer shines. Here is the dark, and here is the whisperer in darkness.

Andrews-Hanna J.R., Snyder A.Z, Vincent J.L., Lustig C, Head D, Fox M.D., Raichle M.E., and R.L. Buckner. “Evidence for large-scale network disruption in advanced aging.” In Preparation. Reported in Scientific American, December 5th, 2007.