On the spectrum of varying degrees of awareness that I described earlier (as possessed by sunflowers, houseflies and chimps amongst others) these three states - consciousness, mind and soul - are right up there at the top - a very long way indeed from the awareness of our ancestral single-celled organisms in their primordial pond.
The fact that these supreme mental faculties seem to be in some way disembodied has an interesting consequence. As I've just mentioned, it is because of our highly developed brains that we are aware of the existence of death, damn it - but fortuitously the fact that some of the faculties of our brains seem to be non-physical gives us a perfect avenue for side-stepping this seemingly unfortunate fate.
By convincing ourselves that these mental states actually are disembodied we can argue that they can be disengaged from the body and can continue to exist when the flesh dies.
Our mental states do genuinely feel as though they are disembodied: we didn't just convince ourselves of that possibility once we'd noticed that it would be a good way to cheat death. Indeed, I remember thinking in my early teens that a quite reasonable model for the mind was that it was a cloud-like entity floating in a different dimension, linked to the physical body via some sort of trans-dimensional umbilical cord (No doubt I was under the influence of Cartesian dualism, although I wasn't consciously aware of Rene Descartes' ideas at the time. And maybe a bit of science fiction too). As a teenager the concept of the mind intrigued me, but, being a teenager, the issue of death didn't exercise my brain in the slightest - so there was no wishful thinking or convenient rationalisations involved in assuming that my mind was on a different level to my body. It just seemed to be so.
Let's look at these three mental states, consciousness, mind and spirit, one by one, in alphabetical order, (and as it turns out, in order of transcendence).
Why is it that we think of our consciousness as being disembodied? Probably because it patently isn't physical.
But then, if it's not physical, what exactly is it? Consciousness seems to have properties that are probably analogous to it being a projection, or an abstract construction, brought about by the workings of our brains.
Although consciousness seems bizarre and insubstantial, its existence is hardly any stranger or more peculiar than other projections that we create inside our heads - such as for instance the three-dimensional model of the real world that we see through our eyes. As I described in Chapter 1 (The Flaws of Perception), when we use our sense of vision we create a "virtual" model of the world in the brain - something that seems to be external, three-dimensional, coloured, solid and very much "out there", even though the whole effect exists entirely inside the head. In a similar way our experience of consciousness feels as though it's "up there", somehow hovering around the head in a somewhat unspecific place or dimension.
Consciousness is perhaps similar to vision in other ways too, in that it's almost like a sense itself - perhaps one that monitors the brain and its workings (analogous to the way that vision monitors the world and its workings). A sort of sixth sense.
To be able to do this monitoring, consciousness, like vision, is something that had to evolve over time, rather than being an all or nothing phenomenon. It isn't something that suddenly popped fully formed into existence from nowhere, only appearing once the brain reached some critical level of functional sophistication.
Just as our sense of vision has evolved to its current level of intricacy from a few light-sensitive cells that dimly reacted to the presence of light, so our sense of consciousness may have evolved to its present level of awesome complexity from a dim and unfocused awareness of the workings of the brain (or even of the workings of the brainless nervous system in more primitive organisms).
This means that other creatures probably possess a degree of consciousness too, in exactly the same way that different creatures possess a sense of vision (or at least an awareness of light) in varying degrees - meaning that consciousness is not an exclusively human feature.
The complexity of consciousness in different creatures is probably linked to their levels of intelligence. Indeed, consciousness can possibly be described as intelligence looking at itself. As intelligence develops, so consciousness develops too. Consciousness is possibly nothing more than the sensation of the existence of the brain, analogous in some ways to our more down to earth (and thus less meditated upon) sensation of the existence of the body.
Consciousness may be likened to a form of mental projection, or to a model within the brain, but what about that slightly higher and more complex mental phenomenon - mind? Does the fact that consciousness is possibly just a projection within the brain mean that mind is just a projection too? Mind is a tricky beast to put your finger on - even more so than consciousness. It seems to be an interesting amalgam of thought, perception, imagination, memory and emotion that is on some sort of higher level to "mere" consciousness.
While consciousness can possibly be summed up to some extent as being "awareness of being" or "awareness of existence", mind is much closer to the definition of your essential, core self.
Consciousness seems to be a state that is intriguingly aware of bother the "lower" corporeal body and of the "higher" mind: it is a state that can monitor both: a sort of halfway house that mediates between the material and the non-material worlds.
As a result, because consciousness seems to be a strange disembodied thing floating around your head in a different dimension, mind seems to be doubly so.
But then!.
But then!.
Why should mind be any more strange than anything else that's part of the strange creature that possesses it, in this strange universe? On the basis that a simpler explanation is more likely to be correct than a complicated one, I think that the concept of the mind as a projection within the brain beats the common concept of the mind as a free-floating entity in a state of otherness (whatever that means).
That's consciousness and the mind brought down to earth somewhat. But there's another component to our mental make-up that needs consideration too. A third element that's altogether more mysterious than - and downright superior to - the other two: the soul.
If consciousness seems to be floating around outside your head, and your mind seems to be floating above and beyond that, then the soul seems to be floating beyond even that, in a higher dimension altogether. The soul is the most seemingly disembodied and most immaterial of our trio of seemingly disembodied mental essences - indeed it's often though of as being so disembodied that it practically has an independent existence all of its own, in a plane that's far removed from our physical level of existence. It exists in a dimension that's so special that it's often given a special status - the status of the "spiritual".
The concepts of consciousness, mind and soul are necessarily vague things due to the nature of the beasts, and there is a degree of blurring and overlap between the three. They may indeed be different parts of one and the same thing - a sort of trinity - although a lot of people feel that there's some sort of difference between them. For instance, you may possibly be of the opinion that consciousness and mind may be the same thing, or that mind and soul are the same thing, but many people wouldn't say that consciousness and soul are one and the same - they seem to be too far apart. Animals may quite reasonably have consciousness, and some of them may just about have minds - but do they really have souls? (Despite what you may think of your pet cat.) Keeping the three concepts separate for now, the notions of consciousness and mind can be given a certain degree of other-worldly or spiritual status if you're so inclined, but with the soul there's hardly any argument about the matter. Almost by definition it's the unadulterated spiritual self.
Or so we like to believe.
But then...
I think that we really need to ask ourselves what we think our souls are, and why we think that there's a special spiritual dimension that they happen to inhabit.
Before we actually put our souls under the magnifying glass however, we need to have a look at that special spiritual dimension in which they are said to exist.
To look at that special dimension we first need to step back and look again at our mundane, earthly reality. We need to get a bit of perspective.
Not long ago I described how people are never satisfied with things, how we tend to have a high dissatisfaction quotient, how we're always a little bit disappointed with life.
To give a typical mundane and down to earth example, I recently bought a new jacket, which I'm very pleased with except that I've got a nagging uncertainty about the colour of the lining material used in the pockets (which is totally invisible to the general viewer).
This is the dissatisfaction tendency in operation.
In such minor ways as this the whole of life is never quite right. The major ways in which life is never quite right are legion of course, but they don't bear thinking about. However, because we have intelligence and imagination as well as dissatisfaction, we can conceptualise alternatives to life that are better than the life we inhabit - right down to the tiniest, most irrelevant detail such as the colour of jacket pocket lining material.
The sad fact is that we experience the physical world as being imperfect even when it's almost as good as it can possibly get.
Sticking with the jacket, if I were ever by some fluke of chance to find and buy a perfect jacket, with just the right colour of pocket lining, I would undoubtedly only experience the total ecstasy of feeling that the jacket was perfect for a few months at the very most. The jacket would then become too shabby and frayed, due to the inevitable process of entropy, whereby all things move towards a state of disorder.
Even if I arranged things so that the jacket didn't become shabby, perhaps by making it immune to the decaying influence of everyday wear and tear by isolating it in a sealed bag in my wardrobe, it would still gradually attain a state of imperfection due to the inevitable process of becoming unfashionable.
There's also a good chance that I'd just become bored with it.
So it is that the world we find ourselves in is never quite right, never quite good enough. The perfect world is always out of reach and unattainable. Despite this, we have an insatiable desire to strive for a perfect existence in a perfect place. Not simply a better existence in a better place, you understand - a perfect one.
Now, it just happens that the medium through which we analyse our predicament - thought - bears some of the qualities that we seek in our quest for perfection. Obviously our thoughts themselves aren't perfect, but they have at least one redeeming quality - they are not part of the base physical world. They are a strangely immaterial component of our being that seems to float "out there", separate from the body. This is a clue to something, or so it seems. Our thoughts are separate from our base physical world, so they seem to indicate that there are dimensions of existence that are beyond our base physical world. This must be true because that's where our thoughts are.
It seems reasonable to assume that the ultimate thing that our thoughts are considering - the perfect place - is possibly "out there" too, also separate from our base physical world (because that perfect place certainly isn't here on earth).
We can image this "out there" place as being perfect (or what we, perhaps misguidedly, think of as a perfect) because of the fact that it's unshackled by the constraints of physical necessity and it isn't contaminated by the inconvenient messiness of the physical world.
We'll come back to this "out there" place later, but for now let's return to the soul.
When we survey our existence here in the physical world, on the corporeal plane, not only do we see that the world around us is imperfect, with its inclement weather, stingy nettles, reality television, dreadful modern music and so on, but we also judge that something else is imperfect too, something a bit more personal. We notice that our personalities leave a lot to be desired - all of those questionable emotions, dubious urges and suspect cravings that we are prone to certainly take the shine off our opinions of ourselves.
If only we could partition the imperfect parts of our personalities off and disown them in some way.
But lo and behold, we can! Because of the way that our thoughts and our consciousness seem to be separate from the physical part of our being we can quite easily throw a conceptual cordon around different aspects of them and segregate portions off from each other, conferring a different status on the different portions. We can partition off the imperfect thoughts and urges that we have and we can convince ourselves that these emanate from a relatively lowly portion of our personality. To excuse this baseness we tell ourselves that these thoughts are somehow anchored to our bodies, in the imperfect, physical realm. This conveniently means that they are thus separate from the rest of our personality, which we like to think of as floating much more freely in an uncontaminated state.
Unsurprisingly we convince ourselves that these uncontam-inated parts of our mental selves - our souls - are our "proper" personalities, our authentic, untainted, unadulterated inner essences - our True Selves.
Our souls must, we convince ourselves, be purely virtuous and noble. After all, they exist in the abstract spiritual dimen-sions that we've created, where all is purity and light, so they must be pure too. It goes without saying.
Unfortunately for us, the fact that the soul seems to be separate from the body is an illusion. The soul is probably nothing more than a projection within the brain. Another one. It's no more a separate entity than are consciousness and the mind. In fact, it's perhaps nothing more than the mind with a rather over-inflated opinion of itself.
The corollary of this is that the higher dimensions in which we like to think that our souls are residing don't exist either. They are just wishful thinking..
Our feeling that there exist higher dimensions or higher planes in which our souls reside is nothing more than a desire. It's something that's generated within the emotional, aspir-ational part of our imaginations - something that's created in the part of the imagination that yearns for better things rather than the part that simply thinks about things in a practical, no-nonsense sort of way.
Even if the higher planes of the spiritual world were to exist I think that the following point needs to be taken into account. The spiritual world is given a higher status than "base" reality because it is conceived as being at some level of reality that's physically inexplicable. But let me remind you that the level of reality that we're in at the moment is almost completely inexplicable in itself. We're just used to it and have become extremely blasé about it as a result. We only tend to think that our everyday reality is weird when we contemplate its extremes, such as the core of the atom or the edge of the universe - but in truth the place is weird all the way through.
Some people, perhaps understandably, feel uncomfortable about the idea of consciousness, mind and soul (especially soul) being nothing more than projections within the brain, because it has several unfortunate (or at least seemingly unfortunate) implications.
One is that it scuppers our chances of achieving personal perfection.
How can a soul that is a mere brain projection be perfect, after all? Our bodies aren't perfect, our brains aren't perfect, so it stands to reason that our brains' projections aren't perfect either. The very fact that our souls may actually be nothing more than mere projections make them sound fairly imperfect to begin with.
Being imperfect isn't such a terrible thing though.
Trying to improve on imperfections gives us all something to do with our time, thus creating a worthwhile life project. (This isn't to be confused with the idea that imperfections or "bad" things are there specifically so that people can strive to overcome them - to become more noble and "good" by battling against them - which is a common idea in some religious ways of thinking. It just happens to be the way things are.) What's more, perfection has its drawbacks.
Firstly, perfection is only good in comparison with imperfection. For instance, a "perfect" diamond may be a thing of awe and beauty (if you're impressed by that type of thing), but if all diamonds were equally perfect suddenly the whole concept of perfection and imperfection as applied to diamonds becomes meaningless, or at least diamonds become tiresome.
So, can you imagine floating around at a higher level of existence in a sea of perfect, flawless souls? Where's the fun in that? Where's the point? Where's the gossip? It'd be tedious.
Perfection is boring. In fact it's perfectly boring.
Perfection is boring in a similar way to the way that a pure, perfect, flawless single musical note, as generated by a suitable electronic machine, is boring. The reason that the same note as produced by a violin, a piano or a human voice is wonderful (or awful, depending on taste) is because of the imperfections inherent in the sources, as they can't help but create extraneous notes in the process (which is why a violin doesn't sound like a trumpet which doesn't sound like a guitar). On top of this, and to trump everything else, perfection doesn't actually exist. It's an idea that we've thought up, that sounds reasonable, but that has no existence in reality. It's an abstract concept that we've had to create in order to put a top end to the scale of the "rightness" of things. It's a bit like the concept of infinity. Is infinity out there somewhere? No. The concept exists, but the thing itself doesn't.
Consequently, it's probably best not to get too exercised about the unachievable perfection of things such as the soul.
If the soul is nothing more than a mental projection then people may be forgiven for feeling miffed that it may not be perfectible - but there's another reason why people feel uncomfortable about the idea of the soul being nothing more than a function within the brain: it holds the implication that the soul isn't immortal.
The separating off of the soul from the body, and its placing into a higher, abstract and perfect dimension of being has a useful consequence, as I mentioned earlier. It means that the soul is divorced from the physical world of wear and tear that has to be endured by all things corporeal. Wear and tear is a term that has a certain cosiness to it when applied to such objects as old sofas that have been "worn in", but when applied to people the term takes on an altogether more sinister connotation - that of decay and, ultimately, of death.
Due to the peculiar manner in which the soul seems to be separate from the body we are offered a lifeline. On death this lifeline, in the form of the rather interesting and improbable trans-dimensional umbilical cord that joins the soul to the body, is pressed into action as an evacuation conduit to remove any residual spiritual essences that may have taken up temporary residence in the brain. The cord is then cut (or withers away as the deceased body decays). Our souls are thus untethered from our bodies and drift off in the eternal ocean of otherness - at the same time as our appropriately boat-shaped coffins transport our defunct bodies into the sea of history.
The drifting, untethered soul may connect to another body via a new umbilical cord that it sends down to a newly conceived human, or it may not, depending on taste, but whatever happens it will continue to float forever, immortally and eternally.
If the soul is nothing more than a projection within the brain this whole idea is buggered, to put it mildly.
This isn't as bad as it sounds though, as I'll explain now.
We're very dissatisfied about dying. It seems such a waste.
But look at it this way.
If we were to banish death the whole world would, within a few generations, fill up to bursting point as people reproduced. There'd be no room on the planet for more people.
An essential component of the dynamic of life is that a person reproduces (should they feel the urge to do so) and that they then get out of the way by dying.
If people didn't die they'd have to stop reproducing.
If this were to happen it would mean that the people that were alive at the time of the banishment of death would hog existence forever, giving no-one else a look in.
Imagine what would have happened if the secret of eternal life had by some lucky chance been discovered in your parents' day (before they'd become your parents). Soon after the secret became known people would have been barred from having children, as otherwise the world would have been overrun (The human population problem is bad enough as it is, and all we've discovered so far is how to stay alive for a few extra decades, never mind for all of eternity). As a result you wouldn't have been born. How would you have felt about that? In some ways it wouldn't be a problem of course, as you wouldn't exist to care about the fact that you didn't exist, but it still smacks of selfishness on the part of your parents, the "new immortals".
There are other arguments that can be levelled against the banishing of death - ones that go beyond the confines of this me-me-me perspective.
In truth we've needed death from the very dawn of life on earth.
Over the history of life the dynamic of reproducing and then dying - and therefore of "taking one's turn" - wasn't only polite, it was essential.
One of the consequences of the fact that creatures reproduce is that their offspring are slightly different to the parents. They evolve.
If there were no death there'd be no reproduction and thus no evolution. No creatures would have borne offspring that had longer legs, or legs at all, none would have had fully-functioning eyes, or eyes at all. Imagine if this deathless state had existed from the time of the beginning of life, at the time of our earliest, primordial single-celled ancestors. Life would have remained in a state of arrested development at the level of those organisms - organisms that were so simple that they wouldn't even be aware that they were alive, never mind aware of the fact that they were destined to live forever. Immortality would be wasted on them.
So, reverting once again to the argument from the perspective of self-regard, as one inevitably does, if there were no death, there'd be no us.
You may well say "That was then: this is now." We needed death in order to get to where we are today, but we don't need it any more. It's as redundant as the appendix.
In that case, what would be the implications if by some act of biological conjuring we were to manage to banish death tomorrow, making us candidates for immortality? Even ignoring the selfish fact that we'd have to stop new people being born due to space issues the implications would be very unsettling indeed.
At a stroke there would be no need for practically every single quality of mind that it takes to be human. There'd be nothing to motivate you to do anything. It could wait. There'd be no need to eat (if you're immortal you can't starve to death, by definition) and there'd be no need to work. There'd be no need to go to bed at night or get up in the morning. There'd be no need to raise a family (in fact it would be banned). There'd be no need to do anything.
Life would lose all of its shape and become a meaningless blob of mush. Lethargy would rule.
People may end up with only one or two concerns.
One would be the fight against mind-crushing ennui.
Eternity is a brain-numbingly long time. If you've ever had to wait half an hour for a bus and found the experience dispiriting you will still not be prepared to even the slightest degree for the truly mind-mangling monotony that awaits you.
You'd be bored to death. Except that you wouldn't be afforded the luxury of having that way out.
Be careful what you wish for!.
The other concern that the possession of eternal life would bring would be a novel and particular fear.
If there were such a thing as everlasting life there would be no fear of death, it's true, but that fear may be replaced by another, greater dread. Freedom from death doesn't necessarily mean freedom from injury, illness or suffering. If you were to live forever you would almost inevitably fall prey to all possible injuries, illnesses (of a non-fatal variety of course) and misfortunes. You may start by acquiring the occasional cut and bruise as all people do. These would naturally heal, but with time you'd eventually lose the odd finger in an accident. After a while you'd lose all of your limbs, becoming a quadruple amputee. You'd also lose your sight through accident or illness, and your hearing too. And anything else that's not vital to your continued existence. And this is how you would spend eternity.
You may think that you'd be able to get round such horrors by the use of advanced medical techniques, perhaps somehow involving a process of organ regeneration. You'd certainly have the time in which to develop such technologies. Remember though that forever is a very long time indeed, and therefore during that period there'd be bound to be infinite lengths of time when such possibilities wouldn't be available, perhaps due to economic downturns.
You'd spend a huge amount of eternity thinking that you'd rather be dead.
So, a major problem concerning death seems to be that it's both necessary and it's undesirable.
One way to get round this problem is to have your cake and eat it. Believe in reincarnation.
With reincarnation you die, it's true, but with the benefit of having had the opportunity to indulge in all of the life-enhancing urges and activities that make life worth living in the first place. Equally, you don't die, as you come back again (due perhaps to that trans-dimensional umbilical cord reaching down from your immortal soul and linking with another body).
In many versions of the reincarnation theory what you come back as in your next life is determined by how you conduct yourself the previous life. The better you conduct yourself in one life, the better your next one.
Belief in reincarnation is a good way to believe in some sort of salvation without the need of invoking a god to do it for you. People who express a belief in reincarnation have told me that they hold this belief because "it gives life purpose" or because "life would be meaningless if you just died." I don't quite understand this stance, as surely life would be no more meaningful if you just went on and on regenerating as a different person or animal forever. What's the point of that? If only having one life is meaningless, in what way is having an endless string of them meaningful? It just sounds more meaningless to me. Perhaps the whole concept is nothing more than a delaying device in order to avoid confronting the dilemma, a distancing from the subject.
On top of this, reincarnation as a way of dodging death has an unfortunate downside. It's a fine idea if it's assumed that the world into which your future selves are going to be born is one that will be as good as, or even better than, the current world, especially if you yourself are reborn a rung further up the social ladder - but what's the attraction of being born into a world that's past its best and is rapidly declining into an over-populated and under-resourced hell-hole as is about to happen any day now? The whole concept of reincarnation falls into the same trap as that which befalls the concept of eternal life - that whatever bad things may occur in the future, you will certainly experience them.
When confronted by these considerations some people will say "Okay, let's skip the eternal life option: I'll settle for an extended lifespan. Say four times longer than the present expectation." By today's standards in the western world that would be about three hundred and twenty years rather than the expected eighty. That doesn't sound too bad, but put yourself into the shoes of our primitive ancestors, whose lifespan was probably a couple of decades at best, and imagine what they may have thought on this subject. Their reasoning may have gone along very similar lines - "I'll settle for an extended lifespan. Say four times longer than the present expectation." That would be about eighty years rather than the expected twenty. Eighty years - does that figure sound familiar? Your ancestor may have been under the impression that if such a lifespan were to be achieved surely people would have little to complain about. Unfortunately, as we now know, people are never happy with what they've got. They're not supposed to be.
So it seems that the whole idea of eternal life at a purely physical, earth-bound level seems impractical at best and downright unpleasant at worst. And that's only taking into account the aspects of it that I can think of at the moment. Personally I think that we're lucky if we're able to navigate through eighty years or so of life without it all going to pot, never mind wishing for an indefinite extension.
There is however an alternative option to that of never-ending life here on earth: that of a never-ending life in some other, higher sphere. What might that be like?
Let's just imagine, for the sake of argument, that when the body dies the soul somehow survives. Perhaps it remains floating in whatever higher dimension it was imagined to be residing in while it was connected to its earthly body, or perhaps, because it is no longer tethered to this body, it drifts upwards into an even higher dimension altogether. Heaven perhaps. Whichever, it doesn't really matter.
Wherever the soul finds itself to be, what does it do when it's there? Does it remember the experiences that it had when it was linked to a body? Does it have thoughts at all? If it does have thoughts, what does it think about for all of eternity? If it doesn't have thoughts, it won't remember its sojourn on earth, so what was the point of that particular earthly episode? Does it have a concept of time? If it thinks, then it probably does have, because thoughts need a temporal structure to exist within (I think). This presents the soul with a dilemma. It may contemplate the possibility that it's going to be there (wherever "there" is) for all of eternity, and it may therefore worry that it's going to eventually find the going tedious in the extreme. Alternatively, if it thinks that it may not be there for all of eternity it may start wondering just how long it is going to be there for. It may start worrying that it's going to "die" in some sort of higher-order manner. Either way, things are worrying.
One way round the problem of a soul having to deal with the (ironically) soul-destroying tedium of an eternity of existence is for it to conveniently forget things as it goes along - to effectively only be aware of existence in a very narrow time frame. The resulting impoverished zone of awareness, like a car travelling through fog, seems to rather make a mockery of the idea of existing forever, as what's the point of existing forever if you keep forgetting everything? It's as though your past is constantly dying as it fades from awareness. A bit like now.
Another alternative approach to the subject is to speculate that the eternal soul has no concept of time, perhaps because it doesn't "think" (whatever thinking entails at that rarefied level). Perhaps the soul is simply "pure essence". In that case it doesn't really matter whether it's wherever it is for eternity or not, as the concept of eternity has been rendered meaningless, as time has disappeared from the equation. Again, being in eternity and not being aware of the fact seems to defeat the object somewhat. One has to ask, if we yearn for eternal life but don't realise when we've got it, what's the point of it? There's something else that needs to be considered. As with most things that are (assumed to be) desirable, once you've achieved or acquired eternal existence it becomes normal. It's no longer a big deal. Complacency sets in, and you take the thing for granted. Only when there's a threat that the thing may be taken away from you do you sit up and take notice again. Or, in the words of the old blues song: "You don't miss your water till your well runs dry". The thing about eternal life is that by definition once you've achieved it you can't have it taken away (because if it could be it wouldn't be eternal) so the chances are that you wouldn't appreciate it once you'd got it. So again, what's the point? At the risk of going on forever on this subject, here's just one last criticism of the concept of an eternal after-life. You could argue that this talk of the soul thinking or not thinking, of being aware or of not being aware, is all utter nonsense, due to the fact that the state that the departed soul is in is no doubt totally different to any state that we can possibly imagine. It must be a state that's devoid of anything that's remotely related to our earth-bound mental functionings. That would, I assume, mean that it was devoid of our proclivity for seeking point and purpose. If indeed in the sphere in which the soul exists such things as purpose and point are meaningless then I have to say: why are we worrying about the whole thing? If the soul exists as some sort of pure pointless essence, then, well, even if it exists there's no point in wondering about it, because there's no point in it.
My feeling is that this point is usually overstated.
As long as you don't think about it too deeply the concept of everlasting life can certainly be seen as a consolation when it comes to the subject of death, but everlasting life doesn't need a particularly complex religion, with all of its codes and practices, to allow a person to believe in it.
After all, it's perfectly possible to formulate some sort of scientific, or at least pseudo-scientific, theory that postulates the existence of immortal multi-dimensional souls (possibly attached to the body by those trans-dimensional umbilical cords). Just because there is no evidence doesn't mean you can't think up a theory. Proving it is the problem. Here's another theory that people have thought up as a way of getting round the problem of dying. It jettisons the concept of an immortal soul and simply states that our problem is that we tend to look at life in the wrong way.
Here's the argument.
You can consider them as all being separate parts of one single fragmented organism. In other words, when an organism splits in two it doesn't become two organisms - it becomes one organism that's in two places at once. This option doesn't naturally spring to our minds partly because of our (quite reasonable) preoccupation with physical integrity.
Each fragment of the organism is slightly different to all of the other fragments, due to the very slight imprecision of the splitting process, and as each fragment of the organism splits further the fragments inevitably become more and more different and complex. In other words, they evolve, just as described in Chapter 13. Some eventually grow legs, some grow roots, some grow feathers, some grow leaves. But they are all still part of one single fragmented organism.
The upshot of this is that all of life on earth, in all of its diversity, is actually one single being: a meta-organism that now carpets the planet. The original single-celled organism that first divided never died. It simply split into pieces and became more complicated. Individual fragments of the organism die, of course, just as individual cells in your body die, but the organism itself lives on.
We are part of that organism.
Thus, although we each die as individuals, the organism of which we are a part lives on (until the destruction of the earth that is). We (along with all other life-forms) can be likened to leaves on a tree. The individual leaves drop off but the tree keeps going. The whole meta-organism is the tree of life.
Versions of this concept that "all life is one" have been around for a very long time (like most concepts, probably longer than we think), with the most recent manifestation being as part of the Gaia hypothesis of James Lovelock.
The general theory that all life can be thought of as one single meta-organism is very appealing, and, despite my usual reticence to believe in anything that has a pleasing ring to it, this particular idea seems to be something that I can go along with, at least for now.
I'm not quite sure what the concept's implications are though, in terms of its affect on the human psyche and the meaning of life.
If you're looking for any form of personal salvation for instance, it doesn't deliver in that department at all (but then, why should it?). The fact that the meta-organism lives on even though you yourself die sounds good, but when you get down to it, it doesn't give you any form of personal immortality (should you want it), so the whole idea isn't much more of a consolation in that regard than the more mundane consolation of knowing that the human race lives on when you expire.
The idea that all of the diversity of life on earth is in fact a single planet-encompassing meta-organism makes nature sound seductively harmonious, it's true, but that's very much only on the macro-level. Down here at the nitty-gritty micro-level things are different. Try explaining the concept of "all life is one" to a penguin while it's being gnawed in two by a killer whale.
There are some species of creature down here at the grass-roots level that exhibit qualities that make them analogous to mini-versions of the meta-organism. One such species is the ant. Ants can only function when a whole colony works together, with separate ants performing different specialised tasks: any individual ant that's separated from the group can't function and soon dies. It's as though the ants aren't individual creatures at all, but are part of one larger organism, sometimes described as a superorganism. Each individual ant is in some ways more like a cell in a creature than a creature in itself. Ants don't even seem to mind dying individually, which they do unhesitatingly for the good of the colony as a whole.
Ant colonies are sometimes presented as being model societies, with each individual within the society striving selfishlessly for the good of the whole community. Why can't we be more like that? Ants do have a dark side however. It's not uncommon for the mobilised battalions of ants in an individual colony to set forth and attack neighbouring colonies with a ferocity and singularity of purpose that looks very much like warfare.
I think that there's possibly a clue there as to the essential nature of warfare. It's one superorganism attacking another one (with, in the case of human warfare, the individual super-organisms involved being nation states or other culturally, ethnically or otherwise controversially defined groups).
It's an easy assumption to make.
But that's not the case. Firstly, life isn't an accident. It's just not deliberate, which isn't the same thing at all.
On top of that I would argue that life does indeed have meaning - lots of it. But it isn't a meaning that's "out there", wherever that may be.
Life's meaning is generated purely by life's very existence. Its meaning comes from within its own internal dynamics.
Put another way, the purpose of life is something that happens to exist simply because life exists. Just as life itself simply developed for no particular reason other than that it's the sort of thing that happens, so it is with the purpose of that life - it just gradually evolved.
In fact, because the whole issue is all to do with internal dynamics, when it comes to the point of life I prefer to think in terms of the relatively down-to-earth concept of "purpose" rather than the more philosophically loaded idea of "meaning".
Personally I think that the essential factors that give life purpose (or meaning) are the pursuit of the simple desire for greater understanding and the desire for things to be better - those old yearning that we've had since the dawn of humanity.
Progress I suppose.
However, I wouldn't want to give the impression that I think that the ultimate purpose of humanity is progress with any specific end - such as the end of evolving into a race of perfect, supreme beings or even (rather ludicrously) post-physical "cosmic" consciousnesses (as is a feature of some non-theological philosophies and of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey). That simply imposes a set of secular goals on us rather than very similar religious ones.
No. I personally think that the main purpose of trying to achieve progress is that it's simply worthwhile in its own right to try to understand things and to make things better. Nothing more complicated than that. It's wired into our brains anyway, so we don't seem to have any choice in the matter.
As I've mentioned several times elsewhere in this book, progress cannot be referred to without the qualification that it has the unfortunate potential of kicking back like a badly handled chainsaw (I was going to say that it was like a double-edged sword, but I can't for the life of me see in what way such an instrument is dangerous in a manner than a single-edged sword isn't). We've been so amazingly successful at progressing recently that the resulting over-achievement, over-population and over-consumption that have come in its wake mean that we're now in serious danger of bringing the whole edifice of our achievement crashing down around our ears. Progress, eh - who needs it? You may not agree with my personal choice of a meaning of life. You may think that from the array of possible meanings that are available I've chosen the wrong one. You may well be right. My choice was just a stab in the dark in what I feel is the right sort of direction.
Is there a meaning of life that's greater than this - a true meaning of life? I don't know for sure, as I have no inside knowledge, although I suspect that there isn't.
However, for the sake of argument, let's just imagine for a moment that there actually is such a thing. A true meaning of life. I think that there's a problem with the whole process of trying to decide what it is.
Imagine that all of the possible concepts for this higher meaning of life are gathered together and laid out as a display on a tabletop so that the correct meaning can be picked out after a considered comparison of the assembled options (You have to suspend your disbelief for a moment and assume that we're actually capable of making an unbiased judgement on the matter). There are a few secular options on the table, and more than a few religious ones. And somewhere amongst them is the real one. After carefully scrutinising all of the options you make a choice. What you don't realise though, is that no matter which one of the displayed possibilities you pick, you always go for the wrong one. You don't choose the right one for the simple reason that you don't even notice that it's there in the display in front of you. It's similar to the situation involving the choosing of the moth in Figure 54, where you had to decide which one of a number of differently coloured moths resting on a tree was the least likely to be eaten by a predator (and where you couldn't choose the correct moth because you couldn't see it). How can you be expected to make a choice when you're blind to the existence of the correct option, but where there are other options being presented that delude you into thinking that you are weighing up all of the options? With both the moth and the meaning of life you couldn't see the correct choice because your senses and your brain are simply not equipped to detect them.
I'm imagining here that there is indeed a higher meaning of life, and that you couldn't see it because it happens to be inevitably and permanently invisible to us. Alternatively, maybe you couldn't see it because it actually isn't there. Who knows. In either case, most people choose one of the alternatives on offer, because it's wired into our brains to make a choice.
This is quite appealing, as no further truths need to be confronted. The act of leaving the meaning of life essentially unanalysed is quite comforting because if the meaning were by scientific investigation (or even by some kind of divine revelation) to be somehow actually revealed there's no knowing what the effect would be on the human psyche.
The revelation of any true meaning of life may have devastating effects if it turns out to be bad news, such as that we are nothing more than a food supply for parasitic worms that tap into our brains from a different dimension and eat our thoughts (which is why we keep forgetting things), and that for technical reasons this is a state that it is impossible for us to extricate ourselves from.
If the meaning were to turn out to be really good the effects may be somewhat unfortunate too. Our smugness, compla-cency and insufferable sense of entitlement may spiral out of control like some gross mutation of the spoilt child syndrome.
Alternatively, if the ultimate meaning of life turned out to be interesting but not all that special, people may be either pleased or disappointed, possibly profoundly so one way or the other (depending on what they were expecting in the first place). Then after a while we'd quite possibly become surprisingly indifferent.
We may simply think, "So that's it." We rapidly become blasé about our goals once they've been realised.
According to this scenario, our feelings towards actually finding the meaning of life may follow a similar trajectory to that followed by our feelings towards another great goal that the human race set itself - the goal of venturing into space and setting foot on an alien world. Anyone living before the mid twentieth century who pondered on the subject would possibly have decided that to achieve such a goal must surely be well-nigh impossible. If, however, you happened to be alive during the 1960s you may remember the total wonder of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space missions, and the incredible awe at the Apollo 11 landing on the lunar surface, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to make a giant leap onto another world. The whole enterprise was literally out of this world.
But as soon as the Apollo 11 mission was over public interest in the entire subject of space exploration plunged. Who can remember the name of the third person to walk on the Moon?.
You may even be thinking at this very moment "The Moon - that hardly counts as an alien world, does it? It's just a stone's throw away after all. One small step away. Mars maybe." How quickly contempt sets in.
Needless to say, the mission to discover the ultimate meaning of life isn't exactly the same as the mission to land on the Moon, because finding the meaning of life is the ultimate mission. Once it's been achieved we can't just divert our attention and move on to the next project as we do in most other areas of human endeavour.
So, let's stop here and take a look at were we've got to so far.
It would seem that, while there's a possibility that we may be surprisingly unaffected by the discovery of the ultimate meaning of life (should we find that it's not as interesting as we'd hoped it would be), the balance of probabilities is that the revelation would have a negative impact, making us either deeply uneasy (if the meaning turned out to be bad) or deeply unbearable (if it was good). Taking things all round, the chances of an incontrovertibly positive outcome would be slight. It sounds as though it may be best not to know.
In fact, I suspect that deep down we don't really want to know anyway. After all, if understanding the meaning of life is truly important why then don't we pursue it even more diligently and with greater vigour than we do? True, you're reading this book because you're interested in the subject to a fair degree, but after you've put it down you may do something totally unrelated, such as watching a bit of sport on the television or going for a walk. If the purpose behind our lives is so significant and pressing why do we waste such a ludicrously large amount of our time on pursuits that are inarguably less than meaningful? Yesterday, for example, I spent at least half an hour doing sudokus. Here I am, with my precious quota of time on earth tick-ticking away at the unreasonably rapid rate of one year per annum, yet I fritter non-returnable time away in doing worthless puzzles rather than in seeking the answer to the ultimate puzzle of all: that of existence itself. Where's the point in that? Surely my brain should be compelling me to do something purposeful with my every living breath? Of course there are indeed many people who do spend almost their every waking moment doing purposeful things in pursuit of what they see as life's deeper meaning, for better or for worse, but the fact that a very significant proportion of the population don't do so makes me think that the pursuit is far from being an absolute human necessity. The pursuit is possibly an intellectual and emotional urge similar to the urge to go to the Moon. Most of us are intrigued by the project, but we don't commit much effort to it in practice, simply being content to follow the developments in the media.
Despite the fact that the meaning of life should theoretically be a thing of overwhelming significance I'm surprised by the fact that people who assume that they know vaguely what it is aren't affected more than they are by the knowledge that they think they are privy to, and that as a result they don't act wildly differently. (Obviously, some people, such as religious fundamentalists, act in significantly unconventional ways as a result of their insights, however the fact that not everyone else does suggests that this is more a result of personality or of social, political or similar circumstances than anything to do with any innate effect of the supposed knowledge.) For instance, if today you were to pop down to the local shops and you came across Richard Dawkins and the Archbishop of Canterbury buying their groceries - that's one person whose philosophy states that life is a stochastic phenomenon that will end in personal oblivion in maybe twenty or thirty years time if he's lucky, and one who believes that we were created by God and that we are destined to spend eternity by his side - you may be hard pressed to tell them apart unless the archbishop happened to be wearing his work clothes. Such different expectations of the future - yet such little difference in manner. You may, needless to say, see other people buying groceries who most definitely stand out because of their beliefs, for instance because they have a certain dress code or because they steer clear of certain foodstuffs, but there's no inevitable link between belief and such behaviour, especially when the complicating factors of cultural and group identity are factored out. Bear in mind that such things as prescriptive dress codes aren't purely the preserve of religious groups. For instance, if you're a man, when did you last go outside wearing a dress? And if you're a woman, when did you last wear a bowler hat? Dietary prescriptions aren't exclusively theologically-based either - my atheistically-inclined partner, for example, dis-allows me from eating meat in the house for a whole raft of secular political and ideological reasons, much to my frustration. Of course neither the Archbishop of Canterbury nor Richard Dawkins, nor anyone else for that matter, actually knows what the ultimate meaning of life is, so they are acting purely on the basis of what they feel is right rather than what they know is right, which isn't the same thing at all. There's a comfortable nebulously swirling around the topic that means that it never has to be pinned down and confronted too precisely.
The idea of keeping the meaning of life at arms length is useful for all of us. It means that it remains mysterious and allows us to steer clear of the trap of "knowing too much".
Personally I don't want to know too much, because I enjoy the mystery of not knowing what on earth's going on. If I knew everything I'd be at a loss to know what to do with my time, and I'd have nothing to think about.
The problem of knowing too much may not only apply to the subject of the meaning of life in general, but for believers in a god it may also apply to the issue of "knowing" God too. If God were to become truly knowable, rather than remaining the present, rather convenient unknowable - if he were to become effable rather than ineffable - God would lose his mystery and would become in some ways normal, just as everything else in our experience is normal. Believers may lose their awe in him just as, at a more mundane level, people lost their awe (surprisingly quickly) in our ability to walk on the Moon.
When it comes to knowing God, it may be wise to follow the old adage that you should never meet your heroes, for they inevitably disappoint.
At the very least, familiarity breeds contempt.
If God were to be truly "known", God would become normal. But bear in mind that whether God exists or God doesn't exist, ultimately everything is "normal" in the end. Because normal is just how things are - that's its definition after all.
But also bear in mind that "normal" is something that's mind-bogglingly more bizarre than we can ever imagine. From the core of the atom to the edge of the universe, including every-thing between.
And that's good enough for me.