afterlife

Grief, a rationalist perspective

PNRJ core principles, ethics, personal , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Aug 31 JDN 2460919

This post goes live on the 8th anniversary of my father’s death. Thus it seems an appropriate time to write about grief—indeed, it’s somewhat difficult for me to think about much else.

Far too often, the only perspectives on grief we hear are religious ones. Often, these take the form of consolation: “He’s in a better place now.” “You’ll see him again someday.”

Rationalism doesn’t offer such consolations. Technically one can be an atheist and still believe in an afterlife; but rationalism is stronger than mere atheism. It requires that we believe in scientific facts, and the permanent end of consciousness at death is a scientific fact. We know from direct experiments and observations in neuroscience that a destroyed brain cannot think, feel, see, hear, or remember—when your brain shuts down, whatever you are now will be gone.

It is the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science: There is no soul but the brain.

Moreover, I think, deep down, we all know that death is the end. Even religious people grieve. Their words may say that their loved one is in a better place, but their tears tell a different story.

Maybe it’s an evolutionary instinct, programmed deep into our minds like an ancestral memory, a voice that screams in our minds, insistent on being heard:

“Death is bad!”

If there is one crucial instinct a lifeform needs in order to survive, surely it is something like that one: The preference for life over death. In order to live in a hostile world, you have to want to live.

There are some people who don’t want to live, people who become suicidal. Sometimes even the person we are grieving was someone who chose to take their own life. Generally this is because they believe that their life from then on would be defined only by suffering. Usually, I would say they are wrong about that; but in some cases, maybe they are right, and choosing death is rational. Most of the time, life is worth living, even when we can’t see that.

But aside from such extreme circumstances, most of us feel most of the time that death is one of the worst things that could happen to us or our loved ones. And it makes sense that we feel that way. It is right to feel that way. It is rational to feel that way.

This is why grief hurts so much.

This is why you are not okay.

If the afterlife were real—or even plausible—then grief would not hurt so much. A loved one dying would be like a loved one traveling away to somewhere nice; bittersweet perhaps, maybe even sad—but not devastating the way that grief is. You don’t hold a funeral for someone who just booked a one-way trip to Hawaii, even if you know they aren’t ever coming back.

Religion tries to be consoling, but it typically fails. Because that voice in our heads is still there, repeating endlessly: “Death is bad!” “Death is bad!” “Death is bad!”

But what if religion does give people some comfort in such a difficult time? What if supposing something as nonsensical as Heaven numbs the pain for a little while?

In my view, you’d be better off using drugs. Drugs have side effects and can be addictive, but at least they don’t require you to fundamentally abandon your ontology. Mainstream religion isn’t simply false; it’s absurd. It’s one of the falsest things anyone has ever believed about anything. It’s obviously false. It’s ridiculous. It has never deserved any of the respect and reverence it so often receives.

And in a great many cases, religion is evil. Religion teaches people to be obedient to authoritarians, and to oppress those who are different. Some of the greatest atrocities in history were committed in the name of religion, and some of the worst oppression going on today is done in the name of religion.

Rationalists should give religion no quarter. It is better for someone to find solace in alcohol or cannabis than for them to find solace in religion.

And maybe, in the end, it’s better if they don’t find solace at all.

Grief is good. Grief is healthy. Grief is what we should feel when something as terrible as death happens. That voice screaming “Death is bad!” is right, and we should listen to it.

No, what we need is to not be paralyzed by grief, destroyed by grief. We need to withstand our grief, get through it. We must learn to be strong enough to bear what seems unbearable, not console ourselves with lies.

If you are a responsible adult, then when something terrible happens to you, you don’t pretend it isn’t real. You don’t conjure up a fantasy world in which everything is fine. You face your terrors. You learn to survive them. You make yourself strong enough to carry on. The death of a loved one is a terrible thing; you shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But it doesn’t have to destroy you. You can grow, and heal, and move on.

Moreover, grief has a noble purpose. From our grief we must find motivation to challenge death, to fight death wherever we find it. Those we have already lost are gone; it’s too late for them. But it’s not too late for the rest of us. We can keep fighting.

And through economic development and medical science, we do keep fighting.

In fact, little by little, we are winning the war on death.

Death has already lost its hold upon our children. For most of human history, nearly a third of children died before the age of 5. Now less than 1% do, in rich countries, and even in the poorest countries, it’s typically under 10%. With a little more development—development that is already happening in many places—we can soon bring everyone in the world to the high standard of the First World. We have basically won the war on infant and child mortality.

And death is losing its hold on the rest of us, too. Life expectancy at adulthood is also increasing, and more and more people are living into their nineties and even their hundreds.

It’s true, there still aren’t many people living to be 120 (and some researchers believe it will be a long time before this changes). But living to be 85 instead of 65 is already an extra 20 years of life—and these can be happy, healthy years too, not years of pain and suffering. They say that 60 is the new 50; physiologically, we are so much healthier than our ancestors that it’s as if we were ten years younger.

My sincere hope is that our grief for those we have lost and fear of losing those we still have will drive us forward to even greater progress in combating death. I believe that one day we will finally be able to slow, halt, perhaps even reverse aging itself, rendering us effectively immortal.

Religion promises us immortality, but it isn’t real.

Science offers us the possibility of immortality that’s real.

It won’t be easy to get there. It won’t happen any time soon. In all likelihood, we won’t live to see it ourselves. But one day, our descendants may achieve the grandest goal of all: Finally conquering death.

And even long before that glorious day, our lives are already being made longer and healthier by science. We are pushing death back, step by step, day by day. We are fighting, and we are winning.

Moreover, we as individuals are not powerless in this fight: you can fight death a little harder yourself, by becoming an organ donor, or by donating to organizations that fight global poverty or advance medical science. Let your grief drive you to help others, so that they don’t have to grieve as you do.

And if you need consolation from your grief, let it come from this truth: Death is rarer now today than it was yesterday, and will be rarer still tomorrow. We can’t bring back who we have lost, but we can keep ourselves from losing more so soon.

The afterlife

PNRJ cognitive science, core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dec 1 JDN 2460646

Super-human beings aren’t that strange a thing to posit, but they are the sort of thing we’d expect to see clear evidence of if they existed. Without them, prayer is a muddled concept that is difficult to distinguish from simply “things that don’t work”. That leaves the afterlife. Could there be an existence for human consciousness after death?

No. There isn’t. Once you’re dead, you’re dead. It’s really that unequivocal. It is customary in most discussions of this matter to hedge and fret and be “agnostic” about what might lie beyond the grave—but in fact the evidence is absolutely overwhelming.

Everything we know about neuroscience—literally everything—would have to be abandoned in order for an afterlife to make sense. The core of neuroscience, the foundation from which the entire field is built, is what I call the Basic Fact of Cognitive Science: you are your brain. It is your brain that feels, your brain that thinks, your brain that dreams, your brain that remembers. We do not yet understand most of these processes in detail—though some we actually do, such as the processing of visual images. But it doesn’t take an expert mechanic to know that removing the engine makes the car stop running. It doesn’t take a brilliant electrical engineer to know that smashing the CPU makes the computer stop working. Saying that your mind continues to work without your brain is like saying that you can continue to digest without having a stomach or intestines.

This fundamental truth underlies everything we know about the science of consciousness. It can even be directly verified in a piecemeal form: There are specific areas of your brain that, when damaged, will cause you to become blind, or unable to understand language, or unable to speak grammatically (those are two distinct areas), or destroy your ability to form new memories or recall old ones, or even eliminate your ability to recognize faces. Most terrifying of all—yet by no means surprising to anyone who really appreciates the Basic Fact—is the fact that damage to certain parts of your brain will even change your personality, often making you impulsive, paranoid or cruel, literally making you a worse person. More surprising and baffling is the fact that cutting your brain down the middle into left and right halves can split you into two people, each of whom operates half of your body (the opposite half, oddly enough), who mostly agree on things and work together but occasionally don’t. All of these are people we can actually interact with in laboratories, and (except for language deficits of course) talk to them about their experiences. It’s true that we can’t ask people what it’s like when their whole brain is dead, but of course not; there’s nobody left to ask.

This means that if you take away all the functions that experiments have shown require certain brain parts to function, whatever “soul” is left that survives brain death cannot do any of the following: See, hear, speak, understand, remember, recognize faces, or make moral decisions. In what sense is that worth calling a “soul”? In what sense is that you? Those are just the ones we know for sure; as our repertoire expands, more and more cognitive functions will be mapped to specific brain regions. And of course there’s no evidence that anything survives whatsoever.

Nor are near-death experiences any kind of evidence of an afterlife. Yes, some people who were close to dying or briefly technically dead (“He’s only mostly dead!”) have had very strange experiences during that time. Of course they did! Of course you’d have weird experiences as your brain is shutting down or struggling to keep itself online. Think about a computer that has had a magnet run over its hard drive; all sorts of weird glitches and errors are going to occur. (In fact, powerful magnets can have an effect on humans not all that dissimilar from what weaker magnets can do to computers! Certain sections of the brain can be disrupted or triggered in this way; it’s called transcranial magnetic stimulation and it’s actually a promising therapy for some neurological and psychological disorders.) People also have a tendency to over-interpret these experiences as supporting their particular religion, when in fact it’s usually something no more complicated than “a bright light” or “a long tunnel” (another popular item is “positive feelings”). If you stop and think about all the different ways you might come to see “a bright light” and have “positive feelings”, it should be pretty obvious that this isn’t evidence of St. Paul and the Pearly Gates.

The evidence against an afterlife is totally overwhelming. The fact that when we die, we are gone, is among the most certain facts in science. So why do people cling to this belief? Probably because it’s comforting—or rather because the truth that death is permanent and irrevocable is terrifying. You’re damn right it is; it’s basically the source of all other terror, in fact. But guess what? “Terrifying” does not mean “false”. The idea of an afterlife may be comforting, but it’s still obviously not true.

While I was in the process of writing this book, my father died of a ruptured intracranial aneurysm. The event was sudden and unexpected, and by the time I was able to fly from California to Michigan to see him, he had already lost consciousness—for what would turn out to be forever. This event caused me enormous grief, grief from which I may never fully recover. Nothing would make me happier than knowing that he was not truly gone, that he lives on somewhere watching over me. But alas, I know it is not true. He is gone. Forever.

However, I do have a couple of things to say that might offer some degree of consolation:

First, because human minds are software, pieces of our loved ones do go on—in us. Our memories of those we have lost are tiny shards of their souls. When we tell stories about them to others, we make copies of those shards; or to use a more modern metaphor, we back up their data in the cloud. Were we to somehow reassemble all these shards together, we could not rebuild the whole person—there are always missing pieces. But it is also not true that nothing remains. What we have left is how they touched our lives. And when we die, we will remain in how we touch the lives of others. And so on, and so on, as the ramifications of our deeds in life and the generations after us ripple out through the universe at the speed of light, until the end of time.

Moreover, if there’s no afterlife there can be no Hell, and Hell is literally the worst thing imaginable. To subject even a single person—even the most horrible person who ever lived, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, whomever—to the experience of maximum possible suffering forever is an atrocity of incomparable magnitude. Hitler may have deserved a million years of suffering for what he did—but I’m not so sure about maximum suffering, and forever is an awful lot longer than a million years. Indeed, forever is so much longer than a million years that if your sentence is forever, then after serving a million years you still have as much left to go as when you began. But the Bible doesn’t even just say that the most horrible mass murderers will go to Hell; no, it says everyone will go to Hell by default, and deserve it, and can only be forgiven if we believe. No amount of good works will save us from this fate, only God’s grace.

If you believe this—or even suspect it—religion has caused you deep psychological damage. This is the theology of an abusive father—“You must do exactly as I say, or you are worthless and undeserving of love and I will hurt you and it will be all your fault.” No human being, no matter what they have done or failed to do, could ever possibly deserve a punishment as terrible as maximum possible suffering forever. Even if you’re a serial rapist and murderer—and odds are, you’re not—you still don’t deserve to suffer forever. You have lived upon this planet for only a finite time; you can therefore only have committed finitely many crimes and you can only deserve at most finite suffering. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population is comprised of good, decent people who deserve joy, not suffering.

Indeed, many ethicists would say that nobody deserves suffering, it is simply a necessary evil that we use as a deterrent from greater harms. I’m actually not sure I buy this—if you say that punishment is all about deterrence and not about desert, then you end up with the result that anything which deters someone could count as a fair punishment, even if it’s inflicted upon someone else who did nothing wrong. But no ethicist worthy of the name believes that anybody deserves eternal punishment—yet this is what Jesus says we all deserve in the Bible. And Muhammad says similar things in the Qur’an, about lakes of eternal burning (4:56) and eternal boiling water to drink (47:15) and so on. It’s entirely understandable that such things would motivate you—indeed, they should motivate you completely to do just about anything—if you believed they were true. What I don’t get is why anybody would believe they are true. And I certainly don’t get why anyone would be willing to traumatize their children with these horrific lies.

Then there is Pascal’s Wager: An infinite punishment can motivate you if it has any finite probability, right? Theoretically, yes… but here’s the problem with that line of reasoning: Anybody can just threaten you with infinite punishment to make you do anything. Clearly something is wrong with your decision theory if any psychopath can just make you do whatever he wants because you’re afraid of what might happen just in case what he says might possibly be true. Beware of plausible-seeming theories that lead to such absurd conclusions; it may not be obvious what’s wrong with the argument, but it should be obvious that something is.

What is Religion?

PNRJ core principles, ethics, Logic of Kindness, tribal paradigm , , , , , ,

Nov 3 JDN 2460618

In this and following posts I will be extensively criticizing religion and religious accounts of morality. Religious authorities have asserted a monopoly for themselves on moral knowledge; as a result most people seem to agree with statements like Dostoyevsky’s “If God does not exist, then everything is permitted.” The majority of people around the world—including the United States, but not including most other First World countries—believe that it is necessary to believe in God in order to be a moral person. Yet little could be further from the truth.

First, I must deal with the fact that in American culture, it is widely considered taboo to criticize religion. A level of criticism which would be unremarkable in other fields of discourse is viewed as “shrill”, “arrogant”, “strident”, “harsh”, and “offensive”.

For instance, I believe the following:

The Republican Party is overall harmful.

Most of Ayn Rand’s Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal is clearly false.

Did you find that offensive? I presume not! I’m sure many people would disagree with me on these things, but hardly anyone would seriously argue that I am being aggressive or intentionally provocative.

Indeed, if I chose less controversial examples, people would find my words positively charitable:

The Nazi Party is overall harmful.

Most of Mao Tse Tung’s The Little Red Book is clearly false.

Now, compare some other beliefs I have, also about ideologies and books:

Islam is overall harmful.

Most of the Bible is clearly false.

Suddenly, I’m being “strident”; I’m being an “angry atheist”, “intolerant” of religious believers—yet I’m using the same words! I must conclude that the objection of atheist “intolerance” comes not because my criticisms are genuinely harsh, but simply because they are criticisms of religion. We have been taught that criticizing religion is evil, regardless of whether the criticisms are valid. Once beliefs are wrapped in the shield of “religion”, they become invulnerable.

If I’d said that Muslim people are inherently evil, or that people who believe in the Bible are mentally defective, I can see why people would be offended. But I’m not saying that. On the contrary, I think the vast majority of religious people are good, reasonable, well-intentioned people who are honestly mistaken. There are some extremely intelligent theists in the world, and I do not dismiss their intelligence; I merely contend that they are mistaken about this issue. I don’t think religious people are evil or stupid or crazy; I just think they are wrong. I respect religious people as intelligent beings; that’s why I am trying to use reason to persuade them. I wouldn’t try to reason with a rock or even a tiger.

I will in future posts show that religion is false and morally harmful. But of course in order to do that, I must first explain what I mean by religion; while we use the word every day, we are far from consistent about what we mean.

There’s one meaning of “religion” that often is put forth by its defenders, on which “religion” seems to mean only “moral values”, or else “a sense of mystery and awe before the universe”. Einstein often spoke this way, which is why people who quote him out of context often get the impression that he is defending Judaism or Christianity:

I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

But in the original context, a very different picture emerges:

Even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Here, “religion” comes to mean little more than “moral values” or “aspiration toward truth”. In my own lexicon Einstein’s words would become “Fact without value is lame; value without fact is blind.” (I would add: both are the domain of science.)

Einstein did not believe in a personal deity of any kind. He was moved to awe by the mystery and grandeur of the universe, and motivated by moral duties to do good and seek truth. If that’s what you mean by “religion”, then of course I am entirely in favor of it. But that is not what most people mean by “religion”.

A much better meaning of the word “religion” is something like “cultural community of believers”; this is what we mean when we say that Catholicism is a religion or that Shi’a Islam is a religion. This is essentially the definition I will be using. But there is a problem with this meaning, because it doesn’t specify what constitutes a believer.

May any shared belief suffice? Then the Democratic Party is a “religion”, because it is a community of people with shared beliefs. Indeed, the scientific community is a “religion”. This sort of definition is so broad that it loses all usefulness.

So in order for “religion” to be a really meaningful concept, we must specify just what sort of beliefs qualify as religious rather than secular. Here I offer my definition; I have tried to be as charitable to religion as possible while remaining accurate in what I am criticizing.

Religion is a system of beliefs and practices that is based upon one or more of the following concepts:

  • Super-human beings: sentient beings that are much more powerful and long-lived than humans are.
  • Afterlife: a continued existence for human conscious experience that persists after death.
  • Prayer: a system of ritual behaviors that are expected to influence the outcome of phenomena through the mediation of something other than human action or laws of nature.

Note that I have specifically excluded from the definition claims that the super-human beings are “supernatural” or “magical”. Though many people, even religious people, would include these concepts, I do not, because I don’t think that the words supernatural and magical carry any well-defined meaning. Is “supernatural” what doesn’t follow the laws of nature? Well, do we mean the laws as we know them, or the laws as they are? It makes a big difference: The laws of nature as we know them have changed as science advances. 100 years ago, atoms were beyond our understanding; 200 years ago, electricity was beyond our understanding; 500 years ago, ballistics was beyond our understanding as well. The laws of nature as they are, on the other hand, are by definition the laws that everything in the universe must follow—hence, “supernatural” would be a funny way of saying “non-existent”.

I think ultimately “supernatural” and “magical” are just weird ways of saying “what I don’t understand”; but if that’s all they are, they clearly aren’t helpful. Today’s magic is tomorrow’s science. If Clarke’s Third Law is right that any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, then what’s the point of being magic? It’s just technology we don’t understand! In fact I prefer the reformulation of Clarke’s Law by Mark Stanley: Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don’t understand it. To an ape, a spear is magical; to a hunter-gatherer, a rifle is magical; and to us today, creating planets from dust and living a million years are magical. But that could very well change someday.

Similarly, I have excluded the hyperboles “omnipotent” and “omniscient”, because they are widely considered by philosophers to be outright incoherent, and in no cases are they actually believed. If you believed that God knows everything, then you would have to believe that God knows how to prove the statement “This statement is unprovable” (Gödel’s incompleteness theorems), and that God knows everything he doesn’t know. If you believed that God could do anything, you would have to believe that God can put four sides on a triangle, that God can heal the sick while leaving them sick, and that God can make a rock so big he can’t lift it. Even if you restrict God’s powers to what is logically coherent, you are still left trying to explain why he didn’t create a world of perfect happiness and peace to begin with, or how he can know the future if there is any randomness in the world at all. Furthermore, my definition is meant to include beings like Zeus and Thor, which were sincerely believed to be divine by millions of people for hundreds of years. Zeus is clearly neither omnipotent nor omniscient, but he is a lot more powerful and long-lived than we are; he’s not very benevolent, but nonetheless people called him God. (In fact, the Latin word for God, deus and the proper name Zeus are linguistically cognate. Zeus was thought to define or epitomize what it means to be God.) My definition is also meant to include non-divine super-humans like spirits and leprechauns, which similarly have been believed by many people for many centuries. The definition I have used is about as broad as I could make it without including things that obviously and uncontroversially exist, like “sentient beings other than humans” (animals?) or “forces beyond human power and comprehension” (gravity?) or “energy that animates life and permeates all things” (electricity?).

I have also excluded from my definition of “religion” anything that is obviously false or bad, like “believing things with no evidence”, “denying scientific facts”, “assenting to logical contradictions”, “hating those who disagree with them”, or “blaming natural disasters on people’s moral failings”. In fact, these are characteristic features of nearly all religions, and most religious people do them often; recall that 40% of Americans think that human beings were created by God less than 10,000 years ago, and note also that while the number has fallen over the decades, still 40% would not elect an atheist President, despite the fact that 93% of the National Academy of Science is atheist or agnostic. In the US, 32% of people believe in ghosts and 21% believe in witches. Views like “When people die they become ghosts”, “evolution is a lie” and “Earthquakes are caused by sexual immorality” are really quite mainstream in modern society. But criticism of religion is always countered by claims that we “New Atheists” (we are certainly not new, for Seneca and Epicurus would have qualified) lack philosophical sophistication, or focus too much on the obviously bad or ridiculous ideas.

Furthermore, note that I have formulated the definition of religion as a disjunction, not a conjunction; you must have at least one of these features, but need not have all of them. This is so that I can include in my criticism beliefs like Buddhism, which often does not involve prayer or super-human beings, but except in its most rarefied forms (which really aren’t recognizably religious!) invariably involves concepts of afterlife, and also New Age beliefs, which often do not involve afterlife or super-human beings but fit my definition of prayer—wearing a rabbit’s foot is a prayer, as is using a Ouiji board. It is incumbent upon me to show that all three are false, not merely that one of them is false. Of course, if you believe all three, then even if I only succeed in discrediting any of them, that is enough to show you are mistaken.

Finally, note that what I have just defined is a philosophy that, at least in principle, could be true. We can imagine a world in which there are super-human beings who control our fates; we can imagine a world in which consciousness persists after death; we can imagine a world where entreating to such super-human beings is a good way to get things done. On this definition, religion isn’t incoherent, it’s just incorrect. My point is not that these things are impossible—it is that they are not true.

And that is precisely what I intend to show in upcoming posts.