Overcoming Corona induced Thanatophobia (fear of death)

Several people I know are already grappling with the possibility of dying via the infectious Covid-19. This fear in scientific circles is called Thanatophobia – fear of death! This prompted me to read the Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, Volume 7 Issue 11, Theories of Consciousness and Death. I culled out some quotes that will encourage thinking that we are more than the bodies we inhabit….read on….

 Joseph Crapanzao (2004) has suggested it is not the loss of the self we fear, but the world of others, those others who originally drew my self-concept (ego) forth from embodied experience: [Can we say that] the terror of death is a substitute for the terror of world-ending? Is it less our own dissolution than that of the world — our intimate and perduring connection with it — that terrifies us? The most frightening of nightmares is to be absolutely alone — deprived of all context, human or material. (p. 202)

 However, I can imagine, and often do, that there is a core consciousness, an inner light, a soul if you wish, that has always been with me, that lies as deeply within my being as the farthest star without. Perhaps this inner essence can continue on as light energy or some such thing without my personal identity – but not necessarily without any of my memories.5 With the death of ego, of self, a new unimaginable awakening may occur, as Theodore Roethke expressed it so well in these lines of his poem “In a Dark Time” (1964): Death of the self in a long, tearless night, All natural shapes blazing unnatural light. Paul Ricoeur (1998) in one his last interviews put it as eloquently as anyone could have:

Afterlife is a representation that remains prisoner to empirical time, as an “after” belonging to the same time as life. This intratemporal “after” can concern only the survivors. … Here I come back to...the hope, at the moment of death, of tearing away the veils that conceal the essential buried under historical revelations. I, therefore, project not an after-death but a death that would be an ultimate affirmation of life. My own experience of the end of life is nourished by this deeper wish to make the act of dying an act of life. This wish I extend to mortality itself as a dying that remains immanent to life. (p. 156)  He added significantly: "I consider life, almost eschatologically, as an unveiling in the face of dying" (p. 160).

One survives one’s life by believing in universal awareness, perfection, and the peace that passes all understanding. Perhaps we bring this back with us to the Source from which we began, changing it, enriching it, which may be the implied meaning of T. S. Eliot’s (1944) oftquoted words (which I beg permission to cite just once more):

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Once we have lived – if we don’t choose the eternal silence of oblivion by life denial, vanity, indifference, or simple weariness – the Source learns and we awaken within it. Awareness, consciousness, is universal – it comes with the territory (in fact, it must be the territory, though it could be nothing like the reduced animal-symbolic consciousness as we humans practice it) From: Greg Nixon, Editor, December 17, 2016, Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, Volume 7 Issue 11, Theories of Consciousness and Death

“To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal."

(Jorge Luis Borges, The Immortal, 1943) 

Consciousness is not tied down by the physical body. For the subtle body, things can move faster than the speed of light. There are two kinds of time: physical time and inner time. ... There are infinite universes and infinite time scales. (attributed to H.H. the Dalai Lama)

Isn't atheism the null hypothesis, and theism the positive hypothesis?

Consider the claim that reincarnation is impossible because there are so many more people now than there used to be. This argument is paraphrased and replied to in Carter (2012), but I have encountered it frequently elsewhere. Like Carter, I have several possible replies to this – perhaps more people from other planets are reincarnating on Earth, perhaps more mosquitos are reincarnating as people – which are usually met with derisive demands that I prove these claims. Those demands would be appropriate if I were claiming that these things actually happened, or if my opponents were claiming to have concrete evidence that Earth was the only planet with conscious beings on it.

The claim that reincarnation is factually impossible can be refuted by showing that there are possible scenarios that permit reincarnation and are fully compatible with currently accepted scientific facts. The existence of life on other planets is fully compatible with our current state of knowledge (or ignorance) on this topic.

"What is it like for me to be dead?" We all know what it is like for other people to be dead, if we have ever seen corpses and/or images of them. This is a different question.

You snuff out like a candle, cash in your chips, hand in your dinner pail. If you're there, then death isn't. (Great! That means I'm never going to die!) You wake up one morning and discover you are not there any more. All of the nonmetaphorical formulations are as self-contradictory as "the ultimate metaphysical truth is that all metaphysics is nonsense" or " the purpose of government is to have no purpose".

My knowledge that all Homo sapiens are mortal, and that I am a Homo sapien, gives me good reason to believe that I will eventually die, in the sense that eventually my body will stop moving, then gradually decay. But it tells me nothing about what it will be like for me to die, or what it will be like to be dead.

1) The debate between the mortalist and the immortalist must concern death as experienced

from the first person perspective. Anything else is changing the subject.

2) The first person perspective always provides answers to questions of the form, "What is it

like to be X?"

3) The mortalist answers to the question "what is it like to be dead?" either change the subject

or are self-contradictory. Therefore,

4) the mortalist position on death either changes the subject or is self-contradictory.

There is a consciousness which is distinct from the aggregate of experiences we call the self.

All computer software can endure in principle forever by being replicated in a variety of hardwares. We, however, have the ability to endure even when our software becomes completely unlike our earlier software. It is not just that all of the molecules of the four-year-old boy I once was have now been completely replaced. The formal structures that determined the size, shape and temperament of that boy have now vanished as decisively as have his molecules. And yet here I am, in some strange sense the same person now that I was then.

In the western Abrahamic traditions, immortalism usually is bundled with the claim that there is a separate place or places where the conscious self continues to have experiences after the destruction of the body (Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, etc.). The Abrahamic immortalist does not have to deal with hard questions about the nature of the self that survives. At least in the popular versions, I remain essentially the same person in life and death, with a few moral purifications to bring out my best qualities more vividly.

There are some tales in those traditions about people who reincarnate repeatedly in interlocking relationships, sometimes reversing roles such as master and servant, or pet and owner, or parent and child.

Although the mind-as-software theory is a great improvement over the mind-as two-pounds-of-meat-between-the-ears theory, it still has some serious problems. Hofstadter recognizes that he must take this metaphor of "Beethoven lives on in his music" as a literal truth because it is necessarily implied by his mind-as-software theory. In I am a Strange Loop (2007) he bites the bullet on this issue with heroic consistency and embraces a variety of counterintuitive conclusions.  

Consequently, if I am nothing but my thoughts and behavior patterns, and my thoughts and behavior patterns survive my biological death, then I survive my biological death.

Because we have gone through this particular extinction process several times since childhood, it doesn’t appear that death has the sting we originally attributed to it 

Reference: Teed Rockwell, The Tilde Fallacy and Reincarnation: Variations on a "Skeptical" Argument, Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, Volume 7 Issue 11, Theories of Consciousness and Death.

 For an example of the materialist perspective on consciousness, we discover how David Chalmers (1995) frames his examination of the ontology of consciousness in terms of what he calls the easy and the hard problems of consciousness. The comparatively easy problems concerning consciousness, he says, are those that represent some ability of consciousness, like its performance of some function or behavior. They include, among other things, “the ability to discriminate, categorize, or react to environmental stimuli, the integration of information by a cognitive system, the ability of this system to access its internal states and to focus its attention, etc.” (p. 200). While it is obvious even from the materialist point of view that some organisms (like human beings for example) are subjects of experience and not mere objects, the question of how they come to be this way remains unresolved. If experience arises from a physical basis, why and how should physical processing give rise to such a rich inner life at all? “The really hard problem of consciousness, then,” says Chalmers, “is the problem of experience” (p. 201). But how can we get from “the whir of information processing” (p. 201) to the actuality of rich, subjective, conscious experience? Chalmers’s way of framing the ontology of human consciousness, then, presents an explanatory gap, similar to Levine’s (1983) use of the term to refer to the separation between materialism and qualia. Thus, if we begin with the materialist assumption that what is primary is the empirically measurable external world of scientific investigation, then the existence of the internal world of conscious awareness becomes problematic.

AI research could lead to the possibility of mind uploading, in which the transference of brain states from a human brain to another medium would occur, providing immortality to the computational processing of the original brain. Such is the belief of the futurist Ray Kurzweil (2005), who names the singularity as the moment in the future when artificial brains reach full consciousness.

For humans to be able to survive death completely its three main causes – namely aging, disease, and physical trauma – would all have to be resolved. Even then, the environment would have to continue to provide nourishment, for without this we would still die.

The human body is characterized as a kind of sophisticated living machine whose symptoms can be traced back to biophysical causes that in turn can be repaired with replaceable parts, surgery, or biochemical procedures. This is the materialist view of the human body and human disease that dominates the medical establishment today, especially but not exclusively in the developed world.

The physical model of the world cannot provide a direct description of lived experience. Positivist philosophers have put forth a rigorous physicalist point of view, which, as a form of materialist monism, views the mind as a mere side effect (see, e.g., Neurath, 1931; Carnap, 1933).

Existentialism was made famous through Jean-Paul Sartre’s (e.g., 1956) use of the term to mean that, in the case of human experience, “Existence precedes essence.”

Our situatedness, which exists in consequence of our having been rooted in a past and placed into a present that faces a future, comes to the center of our being. We discover this feeling of connectedness when we are led to confront the necessity of our own death, a state of mind that Heidegger calls “being-unto-death.”

Socrates refused to dabble in speculation about life after death but still kept the question open. Through such learned, ironic ignorance — Socrates claimed ignorance of many things, but because he knew this about himself he was widely known as the wisest of all Athenians — Socrates philosophized in the direction of truth. In so doing, he turned away from the values sanctioned by the State, which claimed to guarantee happiness in this life if only one acted obediently and in accordance with the demands of civic morality. Socrates, though, by making his individualist subjectivity a universal starting point for philosophy, freed himself from the demands of such civic dictates (see Kierkegaard, 1992, p. 49).

Death and consciousness are radically incompatible. This is so because knowledge is possible only when the subject clearly knows the object of cognition.

Death in the first person remains a paradoxical object of thought whose sense is completely impossible to find, since I am and always will be completely ignorant about it. Nothing can be said about my death, since my death points to the unspeakable silence of the complete nothing, the total lack of any relations.

Your(someone other than me) death is my first real experience of death. I realize that what happened to you also can happen to me, even if my death is destined to remain an undetermined state for me. Your death remains the only limited possibility I can have to come to grips with my death. Your death therefore lies at the foundation concerning how I approach my own death. (Jankélévitch as referenced in Cestari, 2016, pp. 20-21).

From: Bindeman, S., Death, Consciousness, and Phenomenology Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research, Volume 7 Issue 11, Theories of Consciousness and Death.

Congratulations if you made through PhD level stuff so far.

Lord Krishna says in Bhagavad Gita that we are not the body but the soul and a sober person is not bewildered by such a change. So, be sober, do not worry about death as death is a gateway to a new beginning a new life in a new body.

Questions/Comments: ryerrams2003@gmail.com