(chris’s) blog

Recall a favorite memory of your childhood. You can see yourself there, you remember what it looked like, perhaps what it smelled like. How is it you can do that? How do you call yourself back to that moment which is no longer? ” I was there!” You might say, ” I remember it!” But the truth is you weren’t really there; not a single atom which comprises your body now was there. What, exactly has survived which is now remembering? What exactly, are you?

Religious individuals might call it your spirit, and atheists uneducated in these matters may have no answer at all. But if it is not the matter which composes us that defines us, why then are we so afraid of death? What would the atheist assume occurs after you die?

It depends on whether or not you believe you were born. I mean this quite seriously: if you define your life to have had a specific point of beginning, then you likely fear it will have a specific point of ending. I have not lost my senses when I tell you that this simply isn’t true; the concept of birth is a signifier, nothing more. It is a marker on a line upon which you can attest to having started the process of becoming a Homo sapien, but it would be very misguided to label it the start of your life.

When the atom was first discovered, it should have upset the romanticized views of religious continuity, but it did not. The atomist fully realizes that he or she is made up entirely of atoms, which are constantly being gained, expelled, and manipulated. The continuity of which I’m speaking, which we otherwise simply call ourselves, is one composed entirely of energy patterns: our cells, with their blueprints of us, are busy constantly with the act of replicating themselves, of us replicating us within ourselves to continue ourselves.

Where were you before you were born? In your mother’s womb? Were you a fertilized egg? And where were you before that? It gets a bit silly with our false notions of us, the individuals separate from the environment, but in that view we were in two places, the egg in our mothers and the spermatozoa in our fathers. And where were you before that?

The notion of the individual falls apart against this reasoning and, symmetrically, so too does the notion of death.

I’m not going to lie to you and assert that this should calm your individualist nerves as they cower at the thought of your death, but in these truths we do find some saving grace: if shown a photograph of the universe, or the cosmos or whatever, and asked to explain what you see, it is entirely correct to reply, ” That is a photograph of me.”

Tagged as alan watts, atomist, birth, continuity of life, death, Philosophy, stephen fry + Categorized as Life, Philosophy