In the Midst of Life

November 20th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Looking out of my eyes I know I am alive right now, and sometimes I am very aware of how alive I am, but a lot of the time I’m barely conscious, sometimes I’m not conscious at all, and even when I am conscious I’m not thinking about anything special, just kind of looking at things, touching things etc. So apart from a few moments of strange self-consciousness (when coincidentally I feel the least connected to the world around me) most of my ‘being’ is pretty much indistinguishable from the being of the inanimate stuff around me. In that sense I am already ‘dead’, at least to the extent that all the other ‘being’ stuff is dead. Of course I know that this feeling of personal consciousness, even to the fairly limited extent that I experience it, is temporary. I understand that one day I will go to sleep and not wake up, and from that moment on this ongoing state of inanimate being will be permanent and unrelieved by the occasional flare of ‘me-ness’. In this sense, the transformation that will take place in my being at this ‘point of death’ does not seem to be terribly dramatic. The lifting of the needle from the record.

I also understand that at some point in the future, either through accident or natural process, the biological systems that hold my body in homeostasis will cease operating, causing my body to begin to break down into smaller and simpler components. Presumably some of those components will ultimately find their way into all kinds of other bodies, objects, plants etc. but most will probably lie around in the ground somewhere, percolating into the ground water and passing through the colons of insects (do insects have colons?). Again no abrupt change in the fundamentals of my being will have taken place through this event; all the component parts of my body are in constant exchanges with the environment anyway, and apparently I am entirely composed of the food I have been eating for the last seven years, food which originated in other bodies, other ground. After my death this process will continue unabated.

At funerals they often say ‘In the midst of life we are in death’, and that rings true for me. Death, in my opinion, isn’t some place you go to, (and potentially return from), it is a perfectly normal state of inanimate being, the normal accompaniment to life and wonderful in its own way.

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The Dying of the Light: Hello Darkness

December 11th, 2007 Fred McVittie

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.

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The Dark and Light of Dying

December 16th, 2007 Fred McVittie

Two images dominate our understanding of the death experience. In the first of these we imagine death as an embrace of the darkness. We find this in poetic metaphors of ‘the dying of the light’ against which we should rage, in visual representations of death as associated with blackness, impenetrability, and night, and in images of ‘fading’ consciousness, squeezing out of sparks, and the dimming of brilliance in senility. Conversely, there is the apparently paradoxical metaphor which associates death with entering illumination, a moving toward the light and a merging with the glory of that light.

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The Space Between the Stars

December 26th, 2007 Fred McVittie

There is an interesting tendency within evolutionary psychology to treat the human condition as partly determined by the fact that our embodied self seems to be straddling two distinct phases in history. We have the brains and bodies of pre-industrial, illiterate, stateless, stone-age hunter-gatherers, but these bodies are embedded in an industrial, literate, society with well developed state institutions. The apparent disparity or mismatch between these two phases is held to account for some of the anachronistic feelings and behaviours that we indulge in today including religion, tribalism, and racism. These phenomena are seen as either appropriate survival techniques for pre-industrial social animals, or as early attempts to respond to the uncertainties of existence when life was, as Hobbes described it, ‘nasty, brutish, and short’. This disparity between our stone-age psychobiology and our information-age environment is also used to explain the difficulties we have in accepting newer ideas such as quantum theory, evolution, and relativity. These theories, since they would have served no useful purpose to our pre-industrial ancestors, do not figure in the structure of our consciousness and are therefore not intuitively obvious or ‘graspable’. It is only through the often deeply counter-intuitive tools and procedures of scientific enquiry that such concepts are able to be generated or discovered. It may be that our attempts to explain the complexities of nature using the rough and ready tools of intuitive commonsense has been a contributor to the construction of false beliefs and myths. The universe, as JBS Haldane put it, may be ‘queerer than we can suppose’, and our tendency to operate within the limits of our suppositions causes us to make errors when dealing with phenomena beyond human scale.

Whilst it is undoubtedly correct that such a gap exists between the mechanisms of mind and the phenomena that we try to investigate with those mechanisms, this simple division into two phases, then and now, pre-industrial and post-industrial, may be just too simple. Unless we strongly favour a model of evolution which is punctuated to an extraordinarily high degree, with long periods during which very little change took place, allowing time for a relatively distinct psychobiology to form, then we have to acknowledge that our ancestry contains more than hunter-gatherers. We would have to recognise that our history also contains traces of earlier lifeforms, and that the shadow of these ancestors also falls across today’s world. In addition to a phylogeny associated with tribal hunter-gatherers we also have, in the symphony of our thoughts and actions, echoes of apes which foraged in small family groups, solitary tree-dwelling marsupials, amphibians, aquatic ocean-dwellers, bottom-feeders, nematodes, slime moulds, unicellular bacteria, free-floating chemical soups, clay crystals, chemical compounds, elements, atoms, stardust, and the space between the stars.

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