David Eagleman in his 2009 Sum: Tales from the Afterlives sketches a variety of possible states of life after death in pithy vignettes. While, as one would expect from forty attempts to describe a post-mortem existence, not all are original scenarios, their implications will linger long after closing the book. Some are amusing, more are moving, most are thought-provoking. Often there is a twist showing a negative aspect of what superficially looks like an attractive afterlife.
Some may feel more plausible than others, depending on prior beliefs, but plausibility is not the right word to characterise any of these afterlives because plausibility entails extrapolating from past experience, and we have no idea what happens after we die despite the data from psychical research and the interpretations of religious texts. Some Eagleman comes up with seem particularly bizarre, but really, as we have no way of knowing. The limits of human imagination may mean that Eagleman has been far too conservative in his suggestions.
The best of these of course have less to say about an afterlife than they do about life here and now. The first, ‘Sum’, imagines an afterlife reliving earthly experiences but where activities of a similar quality are grouped, so the person spends days on end showering, calculating restaurant tips, staring into the fridge, doing the laundry, and so on – all the things we do that are only actually bearable because they are broken into small chunks. Eagleman is saying that much of life is pointless, but we put up with it because each incident is soon over, may not even be noticed, and we move on to the next thing. Perhaps this is gently suggesting we should spend less time on the trivialities and more on those things we would be happy to have chunked together if our existences were structured that way.
Another example: In Heaven we only meet the people we remember in life and find that our existence is limited because on earth we took so much for granted, and those aspects we ignored have vanished. We lead circumscribed lives because we so often lack curiosity and choose homogeneity over heterogeneity.
A problem of the afterlife is what age we will be – will it be as we were at the moment of death? When we were in our prime? In one of Eagleman’s descriptions, there are a number of ‘us’, present at different ages, only we/they have little in common with each other; in other words, there is no ‘I’, but shifting facets of personality. In another, we are measured not against other people or a divine yardstick but against ourselves, different versions co-existing but some having accomplished much more than others. We envy the better ones and disdain the worse. But we associate with the latter, our punishment being that the more we have fallen short of our potential, the more we are forced to deal with these less admirable aspects of ourselves.
In the last story, there is no afterlife, but as the universe contracts, time’s arrow reverses and our lives rewind. So far so obvious, but while we may think that this is an opportunity to really understand our lives the second time round, in practice we tell ourselves stories and create myths to keep our identity consistent. The clash between reality and the way we have remembered it leaves us so bruised that by the time we enter the womb we still do not understand much about ourselves. The implicit lesson: be more honest with ourselves, and we will know ourselves better.
God appears in many of the stories, but the common conception of God as an old man with a big beard is terribly limited. God takes many different forms, might even be a married couple, learning from their creation in the way that human parents learn from their children. He (or She) may not have created us on purpose, in fact may not even be aware of our existence as It is so far more advanced than we are that we have no common means of understanding each other (so much for asking God for favours through prayer). We might just be cells in His body gone cancerous.
Far from being omnipotent, S/He is frequently fallible, often limited in ability, unable to instil happiness in humans, and a helpless bystander to divine plans that have gone awry (which is one answer to the problem of theodicy). God may lack confidence, more to be pitied than feared, a long way from a wrathful jealous deity smiting anybody failing to conform to His prescriptions. There may be many gods, vying for influence as they did in myth. Alternatively the gods may still exist because they have been brought into existence by humans, but be redundant because nobody worships the many different forms they have taken over the millennia, leaving them unpleasant individuals condemned to a meaningless existence while struggling to come to terms with their loss of status.
God can be quite humble – in one afterlife Mary Shelley sits on a throne attended by angels. Frankenstein is His favourite book, because at last someone understands Him: He too has lost control of creation and, like Victor Frankenstein, flees from what He has wrought. Part of the problem, as made explicit in one story, is the old issue of distance lending enchantment to the view. Once you are close to God, you may find respect diminishing. It is in God’s interest to be inscrutable.
We might upload our consciousnesses into computers, tailoring the afterlife to our own specifications. Or we may think we do, because in this particular reality the process does not work because the person’s spirit is taken up to Heaven, God having gone to the trouble of providing an afterlife and not wishing to waste it. Rather than the pumped-up hedonistic version of earth people anticipated, it is fluffy clouds, harps and togas. What a disappointment! Ironically, God chides the disenchanted by asking why they believed the company offering to upload them when there was no evidence it would work, when they are aware he was asking them to believe in Him on precisely the same terms.
The dead might be extras in the dreams of the living – which is actually a creepy thought. Or we exist in the afterlife for as long as we are remembered on earth. That is not a new idea in itself, but those who are remembered, sometimes for trivial reasons, often long to be forgotten so they can disappear because their images in the minds of the living have become distorted over time. Unsurprisingly, those in Heaven who are allowed to watch life back on earth via monitors always choose to follow the trails of their own influence, until that is there is no influence left among the living, at which point they are locked out of the video lounge. They do not realise that has happened and complain, but insulation from their final loss of presence is a blessing.
In some ways Heaven can turn out to be hell. In one scenario, the sinners enjoy an afterlife while the virtuous rot in their graves. Suffering ennui, God envies humans their brief existence, and condemns those He dislikes to the same eternity he has to suffer. What would it be like to live forever? Rather boring it turns out, with motivation gone. Our intelligence is tailored for a short span of life and would cope badly with immortality.
God or no God, Eagleman is sceptical of organised religion. In one story, those who arrive in Heaven with religious convictions are so wedded to their beliefs, developed on the basis of no evidence, that they continue to hold them despite the contrary reality they can now see for themselves. And with 2,000 religions, they cannot all be right. Instead, ‘intellectually nonadventurous’, they prefer the dogma they grew up with, which actually impeded their understanding of the truth, leaving Her dismayed at the attitudes of the ‘unbelieving believers’. In an even worse scenario, when God disappears the various factions engage in religious wars based on their own interpretation of His whereabouts, ‘loyally crusading for your version of God’s nonexistence’ in much the same way arrogant religious believers do on earth.
In a number of scenarios the creators are aliens. Perhaps they devised humans as recording devices in a vast experiment to find existential answers but not appreciating we are too busy looking for our own answers to be able to assist them in probing their mysteries. Perhaps they use the data generated by humans to create simulacra, the richer the source material the more convincing the construct until, with the amount of information available nowadays, the two are seamless. Sometimes, though, the cosmic programmers fail to foresee the growth of the human program just as Eagleman’s God sometimes does, and find emergent properties developing they had not anticipated.
There may be no conscious afterlife at all, but our lives are best understood at the cellular level because God is the size of a bacterium, and that is the image in which life was created: human civilisation is invisible to these creatures and, even to God, our deaths merely a redistribution of our constituents. Or we may be the products of a single quark whizzing about, keeping creation going until unable to maintain the energy levels required. It will eventually have to slow, in the process unwinding its creation to a state of emptiness, until it is finally stationary and able to gain the strength to do it again.
Some of these stories don’t quite work, but at his best Eagleman packs a richness that makes the reader speculate on what occurs after death, and wonder whether extinction might not be the preferable option. Not all these conceptions of the afterlife can be accurate, thank goodness, but we cannot say that any one of them is definitely wrong. We will find out in due course, in the meantime there is no harm in trying to do our best on earth because at least that is an existence we can be sure about, and it may just have consequences in the hereafter. Pascal’s Wager is not worth bothering about, however, because the chances of adopting the correct type of religious observance are so remote we might as well save the effort.
The Joy of Mere Words 