Immortality and Life and Non-Life
The 19th century was a turbulent spiritual time in the western world. With the publication of Darwin's "The Origin of The Species" led to Kant's proclaimation, "God is dead!", scientists replaced religious leaders as a new kind of priesthood. Those facts of the spiritual premises could not be explained in the physical sense such as the soul were ridiculed or disregared as unscientific vain speculations. Eventhough religions went bankrupted, people were given an oppotunity to reassert their spiritual beliefs. There were those who chose the scientific view and then there were the mystics.
With the advance of science which left the matter of the soul in the uncertain zone of speculation, death became the biggest taboo in conversations, bigger than even sex. Like Sigmund Freud said, immortality of the spirit or body was, "the oldest, strongest, and most insistent wish of mankind"; yet, he also said, "Our habit is to lay stress on the fortuitous causation of death--accident, disease, infection, advanced age; in this way we betray the effort to reduce death from a necessity to a chance event." Death as a natural truth in life was skirted around and kept out of view.
The reductionism in science explained life as mere chemical reactions. "The brain is the mind. Why trouble to speculate further about an immaterial soul or after-life?"* However, veneratated scientists like the pioneer of quantum mechanics Niels Bohr asserted, "For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory (we must turn) to those kinds of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like the Buddha and Lao Tzu have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence."*
Bacteria do not age. A cell reproduces by dividing into two smaller and genetically identical copies. Immortality is understood as the preservation of individuality: so does the mother cell dies at the dividing into its clones or lives on in its reproduction? Cancer cells and germ-line (eggs and sperms) do not age also. Why do advanced life forms age and die? If everything can be understood as a form of energy, does Physic's Law of Energy Conservation apply to human life as a form of energy and therefore preservable after the death of the material body?
It is generally agreed that for us to realize the concept of death, it necessitates a complex developed brain and a sense of self-awareness. Having a finite life span, yet it is the brain that allows our sense of self and the knowledge of its own mortality. "That was the tragedy in the tale of the fall of Eden: with the birth of the ego, death enters our consciousness."* "When self-awareness did finally arrive it inevitably leads to the quest for the survival of self after death."*
Death, or at least our perception of it, consists of a sense of individuality and the conception of death. This is recently new. Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes proposed that self-awareness apart from communual tribal identification was only partially developed in the second millenium B.C. Language both comes from and a condition that gives rise to self-awareness and therefore the knowledge of death. "Only through language we are able to break the world down into parts, to name objects and their interrelationality. Eventually, as part of this labeling, parsing process, we must have come to see ourselves as separate being with separate, distinct mind...Speech is the communal sharing of information...With writing humans learned also their distinctive separation with others outside of herself. Self-consciousness is a one-man conversation that emphasized because the mind that write has to build consciously an external represention of it own internal working."*
The present Australian Aborigines have neither a strong sense of personal separation nor the perception of death as an end to an individual. They see time and life as cyclinal not linearal. Like vegetative grows in spring, disintegrates in Autumn, dies in Winter but always return in the next Spring, "This is the invariably observed pattern, the wheel of nature turning round and round. Man is an integral part of nature, he too must participate in the recycling process. In the deepest sense, the Aborigine has no fear of death because, as far as s/he is concern, nothing dies."*
Beside Egyptian perception of life after death obviously expressed in their mumification of the body and burial rites and rituals, ancient Greek philosophers began their search for the existence of a soul in a more purely academic and secular point of view; an important break with explaining the world in mythological beliefs involving the supernatural. In the late 6th century, Pythagoras believed that the soul was an intunement of the body as music from the strings. He claimed that an appropiately balanced body will carry a harmonious soul like a finely tuned string will produce harmonious music. Socrates talked of a world of Form objectively existed and the corporeal world was an imperfect imitation after this objective world of Form. As much as tables can have different shapes, sizes, texture, styles, colors, etc, all is an imperfect duplication after their "table-ness": as humans endeavor to ascribe imperfect truths after The Form of an absolute Truth. Aristotle developed the theory that there were three different types of soul, the nutritive and the sensitive died with the body; only the rational remained and went to "a kind of reservoir of rationality, a common world of intellectual consciousness."* In the second century A.D., Greek physician Galen stated that the brain is the site of mental activities and when it dies life ceases. Descartes proclaimed his famous saying, "Cogito, ergosum." ("I think therefore I ạm!") Descartes believed that the mind which is the expression of the soul is separate from visible world will remain after the body disintegrates. That man has a soul and logic can reveal the secrets of the soul. "...he went along with Aristotle that the heart was like a hearth where the blood was heated. This heating produced a vapor (the so-called "animal spirit") that diluted the brain and because of this the brain could receive impression from the senses and the soul. For his organ of interaction, the physical seat of the soul, Descartes chose the pineal gland was idealy located, at the base of the skull, to be able to regulate the flow of vapor to and from the brain."* Thommas Hobbles, a determinist, explaned the body was like a machine and the soul was just a thinking body; when the body disintegrates it is the end of life. Modern scientists aspire that some day soon, mandkind can undertand what we call the mind or soul in purely physical term. The yet unknowable question is are the brain and the mind or soul exist separately or intertwiningly?
"Where did we come from?" "Where will we go after our body expired?" "What led up to this extravagant arangement of stardust, us?"* that can imagine and dream, reminisce and ponder a future; "foresees its own end and even speculates on what may lie beyond the frontier of death?"*
Like the Chinese philosopher Seng Ts'an asked, "If you work on your mind with your mind, how can you avoid an immense confusion?"
Although we categorize existence into "Life" and "non-life", in reality there is no such distiction. As we conventionally defining life, living things must grow, respire, take in food, put out waste, and especially must reproduce. This is only what we have agreed to agree upon. If we put aside our definition of life in term of genes and chromosome, then life can be look at without man-made definition and a more imaginative understanding base upon a totally different physical basis. According to most, "life implies some degree of self-hood, which, in turn, implies consciousness...But doesn't an electron can also 'sense' and 'react' to colliding particles? Then that presently known as the smallest particle in nature can be said to be conscious, and therefore everthing existing is somehow 'aware'."*
Our view of reality will be revolutionalized should we dare to challenge the system of categorization of orthodox science. As Max Planck said: "Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery in nature. And it is because in the last analysis we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve."
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* David Darling's "Soul Search, A Scientific Explores The AfterLife"
