Shades Of Reality

Chapter Thirteen

In this final chapter we will try to investigate what the fuzzy paradigm can tell us about the final chapter of our life -- namely, death and the hereafter -- and what fuzziness reveals about religious concepts like souls, heaven, and hell.

Just as human life exists in degrees, so too does death. In fact it is just as proper to view the point of conception not only as the start of a person's life, but also as the beginning of that person's eventual death.

In the human body cells are constantly dying and new cells are continually being created to take their places. We are perpetually dying and being reborn, one cell at a time. And even when it appears that the entire body has died (no heartbeat and no respiration), oftentimes the person can still be revived by applying emergency techniques. (Usually after such revivals the victim reports having experienced the common hallucination of seeing a bright light at the end of a tunnel accompanied by feelings of peace and serenity.)

Even the human brain does not die all-or-nothing. Kill a brain cell and the brain is still alive and functioning. (In fact brain cells die naturally all the time.) Kill another brain cell, and another, and another, .... By the time you finish killing the last cell, the brain will have died. But there will be no one cell's death that would be responsible for the complete death of the entire brain. The brain would slowly change from a state of consciousness into a state of unconsciousness. And then what? What happens after you die? I'll return to this question shortly.

Since the start of a person's life can also be viewed as the start of their death, should the killing of any adult be considered equally bad as the killing of any other adult? For example, should the level of crime for killing a healthy twenty-five-year-old be exactly the same as the level of crime for killing a seventy-five-year-old suffering from terminal cancer? Crimes of theft are not all equal. (The theft of $10 is a lower level of crime than is the theft of $20.) Shouldn't the "theft" of a person's life be regarded similarly? The closer a person is to death, the less should be the level of crime for murder. Of course there is generally no way of knowing exactly how long a person would have lived had they not been murdered. But we know what the average life span is. So as a rough approximation we might estimate the number of years of "deprived life" based on the victim's age, just as we currently use a person's age to guess at his/her actual "maturity level" when it comes to issues like voting rights or the purchasing of tobacco products, etc.

In olden times, before the principles of modern chemistry and thermodynamics were known, heat was thought to be a kind of invisible fluid, which flowed from hot regions into colder ones. When a combustable substance such as wood was burned, the invisible substance "phlogiston" was released to produce what was seen as fire.

In olden times, human consciousness was thought to be an invisible entity, which flowed into a person's body at the time of birth and remained with the person until the time of death. This "soul" would then flow out of the person's body and go to its bivalent reward (either heaven or hell), depending on how the person had lived his life.

Today, the phlogiston theory of heat has long been abandoned to a more realistic explanation (the kinetic theory of molecular motion). But the "phlogiston of the brain" (or "soul") notion still lingers on. Many human chauvenists claim that the species homo sapiens is the only life-form on earth (or even in the universe) that has one of these invisible entities. (Boy, aren't we the lucky ones!)

One of the difficulties in discussing concepts such as "souls", "God," "sins", etc., is that almost everyone has their own definitions for such things. However, there seems to be a fairly general agreement (or at least an implication) that the term "soul" refers to some kind of concious entity that is associated with "you." It is this "you" that supposedly goes to heaven or hell when you die. (If your soul were not a concious entity, then it would make little difference to you whether or not your soul went anywhere, since "you" would not be experiencing the "going".)

The exact nature of consciousness is still not completely understood, but one does not have to resort to metaphysical or supernatural explanations. For example, the brain has often been compared to a computer. While such an analogy is admittedly a gross oversimplification, it does provide us with at least a crude understanding of how we might view the concept of consciousness (or souls).

In many respects a computer almost seems to have the ability to think on its own. Even today many computer programs have "user-friendly" interfaces that almost give the users the impression that they are talking to another "live person" inside the machine. One of the primary goals of the area of research known as "artificial intelligence" is to create a machine that actually does emulate human thinking.

In the 1930s Alan Turing proposed what has become known as the "Turing test" for artificial intelligence. Imagine an experimental setup consisting of two separate rooms with closed doors. Inside room A is a computer, and inside room B is a person sitting at a computer terminal. Outside of the two rooms another person (who we'll call "the experimenter") sits in front of two computer terminals, one of which is connected to the computer in room A and the other of which is connected to the terminal in room B (but the experimenter doesn't know which room contains which). The experimenter is allowed to communicate with the "occupant" of each room only via its corresponding terminal. His goal is to try to determine which room has the computer and which room has the human being. If no experimenter can unambiguously make this determination, then the computer will have successfully passed the Turing test for artificial intelligence. (Many experiments have actually been done to illustrate the expertise of computers on this kind of higher level. In one such experiment a computer was programmed to compose music in the style of Bach. When the resulting music was performed along with "human-written" music, most of the listeners in the audience could not discern which compositions were created by the computer and which ones were created by the human.)

Let's imagine now a computer whose software has just passed the Turing test (or which at least has come reasonably close to passing). Could such a computer be said to have achieved some degree of consciousness? How could you ever "know" one way or the other? If you were to pull the plug on the computer, would you be "killing" an intelligent being? If so, where would the conciousness (i.e., the computer software) "go" when the bits in the computer's memory "evaporated"? Would they go to some "bit heaven" in the cyber-hereafter? Would reloading the program from disk represent "cyber-reincarnation"?

While the analogy is not perfect, the concepts of "souls" and "software" are probably quite similar. We can imagine our consciousness as resulting from some elaborate conscious-awareness "program" that's running in our brains. As long as we are alive and awake, we think -- and therefore we are. But when we die and the conscious-awareness software "evaporates" from our brains (just as bits "evaporate" from a computer's memory when power is turned off), we no longer think -- and therefore we no longer are.

It has even been suggested by at least one author (Kosko) that it might someday be possible to "download" these bits that make up "you" and store them in computer chips, thereby giving you immortality in silicon! You would never have to sleep or eat (or have sex!) or die. Your consciousness, all of your memories, all of your mannerisms, all of "you" would just go on forever. If they were to hook up a speech synthesizer, a microphone, etc. to the chip they would be able to talk to "you," and the chip would respond exactly like you did when you were still alive. Of course an interesting question would then present itself -- if they down-loaded your bits into two separate computers, which one would be the real "you"?!

My own personal view on the matter is that neither one would actually be "you." To illustrate, it might someday be possible to print out the entire DNA structure of a strawberry. It would probably take reams and reams of paper, but all of the genetic information for creating a strawberry would exist on those pages. But merely having the information is quite a different matter from having an actual strawberry. (I would very much doubt that eating the sheets of paper would taste the same as eating a real strawberry, even though "all of the information is there" in both cases!) So too with your brain. "You" are more than simply stored information. When your brain "meat" dies, "you" die. (But the silicon version of "you" would sure make one hell of a Turing-test-passer!)

For the benefit of those readers who might still believe in souls, let's consider once again our discussion in Chapter Twelve of the genetic engineering experiment that might someday produce a continuum of "missing links" between a monkey and a human. If only human beings have souls, then at what location on that continuum of creatures would be the cutoff point for being human enough to have a soul? Or is it possible that souls (like the concept of "human"-ness) have degrees of existence? Might a cat or dog, for example, have a certain non-zero amount of soul? After all, they too are probably aware of their own existence. Otherwise they wouldn't experience fear and other instincts for self-defense and survival. Should we therefore stop eating cows, chickens, and fish just because they too might have souls? Or is it OK to eat creatures who have souls? If so, then is it OK for a human being to kill and eat another human being?

Suppose that extra-terrestrial life exists somewhere in the universe, and that there exists a species that is more advanced than we are. Might they claim that only they are advanced enough to have souls, just as we have done? Might they therefore feel that killing and eating us is morally acceptable? Would they even have moral codes?

Moral goodness and badness are not things that exist in the physical universe. They are not tangible things that we can measure and hold in our hands. Instead, good and evil are intangible concepts that we hold in our heads. It is society that defines what is right and wrong, not God. When society declared ecology to be "in fashion," it suddenly became wrong to hunt whales. Fifty years ago almost nobody had even heard of the word, "ecology." Fifty years ago it was not wrong to hunt whales.

Is murder wrong? Most of us would say "yes." But how do we know it's wrong? Maybe it just seems to be wrong, just like the earth at one time seemed to be the center of the universe. What experiment can we perform to test for the wrongness of murder, to show that it either is wrong or isn't wrong?

One of the problems with moral claims is that they are extremely fuzzy. What exactly do we mean by terms like"murder" or "wrong" or "lie" or "fair." Exactly where in the gray area between "murder" and "self-defense" does "wrong" turn into "right"? All acts are right to some degree and wrong to some degree. All things are both fair to some extent and also unfair.

Our perceptions of these matters (right vs.wrong, fair vs.unfair, etc.) depend to some extent on which side of the fence we're on. Often we may judge someone else's actions as being wrong -- until we find ourselves doing those actions. And then we search to justify to ourselves our own rightness. We say, "Oh, but now it's different. In my case I'm only doing ..., but in his case he did ...." We may even lie to ourselves to accomplish the justification.

Let's pretend for the moment that such things as souls do exist. And let's imagine that when a person dies, his or her soul does go to either heaven or to hell. (You can even include some third possibility such as limbo or purgatory if you wish.) An obvious question then becomes, how good (or bad) does a person have to be in order to just miss going to hell (or heaven, or limbo)? Where in God's mind is the Aristotelian cutoff point between eternal salvation and eternal damnation?

Criminals usually have a modus operandi -- a repeating pattern to the types of crimes they commit. When a crime is committed and there are no suspects, police will often try to find potential suspects by investigating certain peculiarities of the case. If the crime was a bank robbery and if entry into the bank was accomplished by exploding a stick of dynamite at the front door, then the police might check their dossiers to see which previously convicted criminals have a modus operandi of robbing banks by using sticks of dynamite.

As we pointed out in Chapter One, everything in nature happens smoothly. Day gradually becomes night. Winter slowly becomes spring. There are no well-defined boundary lines between caterpillar and butterfly, between tadpole and frog. Nature does not divide God's work into bivalent categories. Only Man does that. The modus operandi of God is therefore "shades of gray".

So then why are heaven and hell such bivalent all-or-nothing concepts? Why would God create a fuzzy universe filled with shades of gray, and then create a purely Aristotelian afterlife? Such a fabrication is totally inconsistent with His modus operandi. Or could it be that God didn't create these concepts? Could it be that we created these ideas about heaven and hell to conform to our own bivalent mentalities?

If there really is a hell, it must be place of degrees. (No, I don't mean that it must be a hot place!) There could not be just one generic "hell" into which everyone who has been "bad" simply gets dumped. There are degrees of badness. For example, there is "telling-a-lie" level of badness, and there is "murder" level of badness. And only somebody with the mentality of an Aristotelian would even suggest that both are equally bad.

Similarly, heaven would also have to have many different levels of reward. Otherwise, my only concern would be that I live my life just "good enough" to barely make it in. (Any "extra" goodness on my part would simply be a wasted effort!) There would have to be an entire continuum of possibilities between total heaven and total hell in order to avoid violating the Prime Directive of Equality (a concept which a truly just God would surely have to acknowledge).

But as much as I'd like to believe in such places, I'm afraid that heaven and hell are merely the creations of overactive wishful thinking -- a kind of "Santa-Claus-is-watching-you" carrot that we've created to dangle in front of potential evil-doers to keep them in line. We tell ourselves that death is simply leaving this world and going someplace else. And so we invented heaven and hell as mythical lands to which our mythical souls can be sent. It's certainly an attractive fantasy and one which anyone could relate to.

But the reality of death is probably not so charming and fathomable. Even though I have not yet died (at least not at the time of this writing!), I strongly suspect that death is nothing more than a brief period of suffering, followed by total oblivion. And oblivion is not something anyone wants to look foreward to, not so much because it's bad -- but simply because it's nothing.

Oblivion is not a place that you go to. Oblivion is simply total nonexistence. It's the complete lack of "you." Oblivion is the "you" that didn't exist one hundred years before you were born. It's being one of your brothers or sisters when you never had any siblings.

If oblivion is everyone's ultimate fate, then the concern for human suffering on earth is a completely meaningless endeaver! Let me explain what I mean.

Imagine that there exists an unusual anesthetic, one which allows a patient to remain conscious during an operation and feel all of the pain. But when the operation is over, the patient has absolutely no memory of any of it. (I am told by members of the medical profession that an anesthetic of this nature actually exists!) After the operation, the patient feels exactly the same as if a traditional anesthetic had been used. The big question now becomes, "Did the patient really suffer the pain of the operation?"

On the one hand, the patient does experience the pain and suffering at the time the operation is being performed. And the perceived pain at that time is very real. But after the operation is over, there is an entirely different perceived reality. The suffering of the past no longer exists. It doesn't even exist as a memory of the past. In fact, it might just as well have taken place in a totally different universe, or perhaps in a fictional story in which somebody else did the suffering. (When Donald Duck accidentally hits his finger with a hammer, does real pain actually exist?)

If suffering occurred, but there is no perception of that suffering after the fact, then no harm has been done. There is no need for anyone to be any more concerned about such suffering than they would be about the mythical sufferings of any fictional character. And if oblivion is each person's destiny, then there will be no memory of any of their earthly suffering either. So concern for such suffering on our part is therefore just as meaningless as in the case of the anesthetized patient.

Of course, all of this is just speculation. Nobody really knows for sure exactly what lies on the other side of that great Curtain of Death. Maybe there is a heaven. Maybe there is eternal life. Or maybe we all just come back as cows. I don't know. But whatever the ultimate truth is, I won't know it until I die. And when that time comes, all I can do is hope that there will still be a "me" left to do the knowing.