S-Doubting Death
“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.”
--Wittgenstien
Basic argument: Just as the word “nothing” doesn’t refer to anything we observe, the word “death” also does not refer to anything that we observe. Because of this, it is accurate to say that “death does not exist”. This is the basis of my argument and for clarity’s sake I am attempting to state it here in a simple, easy to read way.
The term “death" considering the way it is commonly used is defined as something like “the absence of consciousness” or “a state in which consciousness doesn’t exist any longer”. This term as well as those definitions displayed above in an attempt to define it do not correspond with anything that we encounter or observe. Accordingly, it is accurate to say that death does not exist or that death does not occur. In this essay I will attempt to argue this point as well as address issues that are related to this basic point.
When a person sees a carcass of an animal, say, along your average afternoon roadside, they may be inclined to then say something like "this carcass is an example of death". It is important to realize in a situation like this that the carcass is itself something that exists and is something which corresponds with visual or kinesthetic data that we immediately experience, the subjective stuff that leads a person to make those sort of assessments in the first place. Adding the term “death” into the claim, then, is putting some extra thing into the mix beyond the elements of the situation that obviously exist. A clearer and more prudent approach to this would be to describe the things that concretely exist and then stop there and reflect before adding any other claim involving the term “death”. When someone says “death has occurred” it seems they will often have the thought that consciousness itself has vanished or been extinguished in some way so that it no longer exists, like a flame that’s put out at its wick. It is often thought by people of a secular persuasion that this state of consciousness being extinguished happens “forever”. One wouldn't put it past the unnecessarily dramatic atheist to say something like, “when I die, that is it. Zero, Zippo, Nada. For all of time.”
The word "death" as defined above seems, under the scrutiny exactitude encourages us towards, to be a meaningless term, which is to say that it is not clear or well-formed semantically to begin with such that that it could qualify as a scientific hypothesis that evidence could then go and possibly support. The word seems to correspond with a garbled idea and a fiction--and an inconvenient one at that!--that might be a concept our mind places upon a totally existent and deathless reality. It seems like for a set of words to be well-formed they have to correspond with things that exist or with images that are able to be clearly conceived. It seems, further, that if the words correspond with a clear image then theoretically you should be able to draw the entity they describe on a piece of paper as you could, say, a dog. An example of a term that is not well-formed and that it seems like you can’t do this with is “round square”: the words do not cash out into a single, obvious, and clear image, no matter how hard you would want to try. It seems like someone simply cannot draw this, considering the restrictions of classic geometry--which means no sassily motivated objects like kleinz bottles are allowed, whose unusual spatial data is implied, vague, or hidden within its own corpulence--or that someone cannot picture this abstractly using the mind’s capability of visual rendering. If this is the case then it means that there was never any entity that existed, to begin with, behind the words “round square”. It seems like it would have always been, from the outset, an empty collection of words, like “green ideas sleep furiously”, a phrase invoked in linguistics discussions to make a similar point. Not all possible combinations of words in English or some other language correspond with a clear image it should be noted. Words are not by no means entitled to having a clear image or depiction about them just because they can be assembled together into a sequence. That would be grade-A cheekiness and presumptuousness on their part, not yours.
Sometimes, it seems, there are images or thoughts behind our words that are kind of murky, aberrant, and cockneyed that seem at first to correspond meaningfully to something that exists but upon a closer look are actually not clear ideas at all or are not something that we could portray obviously, neatly, and concretely on a piece of paper. I suspect that, technically speaking, “death” is one of those things, a would-be entity that dissolves away in its own vapid cotton candy flimsiness upon close scrutiny and inspection. The intuitive idea of image of “death” that surfaces when I try to reflect on the word and its meaning is something like a large black 2-dimensional plane. The other image that comes often to mind is a timeline that lays out in a span from left to right, kind of like one week’s worth of schedule slots in a Franklin Covey scheduler. When I think about it reflectively and deeply--jabbering skull of course in hand--I realize that these things are actually not what I intend to refer to when I use the term “death”. I would refer to, for instance, a black 2-dimensional sheet as, well, “a black 2-dimensional sheet” and nothing more, and wouldn’t mix in the word “death” with that image or anything else. Death as 2-dimensional plane is merely a metaphor, something which we must not be obtuse towards or forget. A black 2-dimensional sheet plane is obviously not one and the same as whatever I am trying to get at with the word “death”. A sheet-like thing seems merely metaphorical and distinctly removed from whatever entity I could be possibly be trying to describe with that word. If I am getting at anything at all semantically with the word “death”, it must be something other than those entities.
Now let’s now take a look a bit at the sophisticated definition of “death” as it is used in the field of medicine. “Death”, medically speaking, is defined as the “irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions or irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem”. People sometimes when using this sophisticated definition may also add that death is not a thing but a “process”. This sort of re-categorization of death as a “process” doesn’t seem particularly helpful for the conversation we are having. It is like someone saying something in the plastic, peppy, pollyannaish manner of a book on positive thinking, “think less of this thing as a what, and more of it as a how”. That sort of thing is mushy and inexact to a mind in want of logic and reason. In the above definition, as you can see, there is a notion of “cessation” that is present. It seems like this definition is removed from the common, everyday definition that we had first looked at, which seems worth noting for the progression of my argument. If these states of circulatory and respiratory functioning and states of brain functioning can be observed that would qualify someone as dead, then those things would technically be things that exist as opposed to “not existing”, whatever that could possibly mean. This is important, and I can even go on and wonder if it is possible for me to stress this enough; it for instance seems like a plausibly good use of time to display this point on a sign and hold it on a median of a busy midight freeway. Also, a process is still thought to be something that exists, or something that pairs the progression of time in some way with singular events in such a way that are able to be separated out and recognized individually. These definitions are not the same thing as the idea of death as we looked at it in commonly occurring contexts, or a term that would mean the same thing as “nothing”. Even though this definition is the one used in medical contexts and it would seem like on the basis the definition we should look at primarily, it is actually more helpful for the purposes of this paper to look at the first definition we have already examined. This is simply because this paper chooses as its qualm, quest, and quittidy the analysis of terms that can function as a synonym for “nothing”. That is the definition that I wish to analyze, and is the definition as many people use it and as have attached to it quite real emotional consequences. This seems like the logical and appropriate thing to do.
People approaching old age whose bodies will eventually not maintain the same pattern of homeostasis do exist, people with fevers on death beds do exist, brains in a state of decay decay do exist, bodies donated to science do exist, but none of those things entail these is this unlovely, garish, intense add-on death also exists. All of those things can be existing entities without there being some "state of nothing" that occurs at the end of life, again, whatever that stuff in quotes would mean. Again, saying that “nothing exists” is an out and out contradiction. The claim easy lends itself to lampooning, which can show it to be the nonsense that it is, by saying something somewhat exaggerated like “death is something that exists. But what is special property of this real, existing thing? Well, it's that it actually does not exist in any way at all.” Instead of making kilometers, tupperwarefuls, sporkfulls of sense, I think this explanation or anything like it resembling it only makes kilometers, tupperwarefuls, and sporkfulls of nonsense. Honestly, this doo-dah way of speaking is thought to make sense largely because it seems familiar and sounds familiar.
Now let’s look at the phenomena sleep which is sometimes thought to be similar to death. Many people think when we sleep we cease to be conscious in some way. The poet John Donne calls sleep, along these lines, the cousin of death. It is thought that this state persists and then at some point is interrupted by the act of waking. Recent scientific research, however, indicates that when we get the impression that we are not conscious during sleep we really are just not remembering the fact that we were actually experiencing things such as dreams, at least for some of the stretch of time when we were asleep. It seems from an empirical perspective that memory can be unreliable at least some of the time and that not all our memories about life as we think it has occurred are accurate. From a perspective of Cartesian doubt, the enigmatic, insular, lonely situation we seem to find ourselves in again and again, for some reason only the Lord may know, when we reflect, memory must always be unreliable in the sense that we can’t verify that the memories are accurate or correspond with this thing called the “past”. In the present moment we are never able to directly observing the past itself (which seems to follow by an insistent, whiny, nagging necessity of definition). It seems to me that some of the experience of sleep may be the experience of a black two-dimensional span--which seems to be often what I experience right before I go off to sleep for a minute or a few minutes--the same sort of thing that I said earlier comes to mind when I try to come up with a definition of death. This may just be the bland an uninspiring read that shows up in our mind of our the inside of our eyelids being closed. As a side note, I want to put forward the idea that it is possible that this sheet-like experience of blackness has evolved to resemble night and provide a display screen that allows humans to be alerted quickly if their lazy ocelot slumber party should happen to be interrupted by a lurking danger in the proximity not sympathetic to the need for some leisure and beach-ball-tastic fun.
Now let's take a look at another idea related to the idea of sleep, the dreary phenomena of blacking out. In order to try to make this paper more interesting, I will share that I personally have blacked out once, for some reason I never fully figured out, and when I woke--at first glance, whiff, and blush--I had the impression that I had “not been conscious” for that amount of time. However, at some later point, with a marked sense of surprise that only three zany, jittery question marks do justice to, as mind regained its footing in terms of clarity, composure, and sharpness, a video-like montage of memories popped up of some stuff that had occurred during the blackout, which of course contradicted the impression I initially had had that I had not been conscious during that time. Perhaps there were other ways to explain the emerged data--maybe it came from a part of my mind or brain that makes up data to provide some explanation and smooth things out in terms of things seemingly sensible and sensical during a chaotic event--but at any rate it made the hypothesis of blacking out seem much less likely to me at the time. Again, I think thorough reflection shows that “nothing” or--if you want to go for something more profound, Parisian, and pity-based--“nothingness” does not make sense as an idea. In other words, it is oxymoronic to the point of literal contradiction to say that there is a thing like “experienced nothingness”. I am stating this point many times, in a few different ways, at the risk of being an idempotent good-for-nothing fuddy-duddy.
Next, I would like to share a heuristic I recently came to that is relevant. I had the idea that if something becomes mysticism-inducing when capitalized and written in the singular then it is something I should be critical of in terms of its possible existence and something that I should preempt with thick and mustard-generous helping of doubt. This seems true of when people, like someone who by his baggy, patchy, non-sequitur outfit looks like he should be named Shaman Chris talks about “Great Time” or “Great Space”--“Sure, of course there is the small, profane space. We're already there, Sherlock. But then that only gets me to thinking: what do we have to say in ways of a Great Space?” Sometimes things that lead into a sense of awe and mystery are there as a way of making it so that things remain mysterious-seeming and not well understood, so if it seems mysterious, you can bet that its probably plebeian and easy to understand from some other angle, even by someone philistine and unwashed and unlearned in Virgil’s Georgics. It seems like a weird tell that death is talked about in the singular but is also immanent, enveloping, drippy with its dark scarlet drapery, a thing talked about as if it is a single thing that’s everywhere, like a bizzarro Santa Clause. It seem sufficiently omni- in its presence to be at all the locations of everyone’s death, ready to round up souls with a handbroom and collecting them into a clanky, metal bedpan. If death occurs for many people then isn’t it a complex thing with countable parts? Is it a single, simple thing? Does it progress in time or is it outside of it? Does it have a spatial layout? Does it come with a plush interior? What are its attributes? The seeming unwillingness of death qua nothing to reduce to complex description and intelligible scrutiny makes it seem like a poor fit for reality and our rational belief. Therefore in our eyes it should go from spiffy to iffy . . .
