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<DIV><B><FONT face=Georgia size=6><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 21.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia">Eternity for Atheists
<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></B></DIV>
<DIV class=Section1>
<P class=MsoNormal><B><FONT face=Georgia size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-SIZE: 10pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia">By <A
title="More Articles by Jim Holt"
href="http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=byll&v1=jim%20holt&fdq=19960101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=jim%20holt&inline=nyt-per">JIM
HOLT</A><o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></B></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><SPAN class=bold><FONT face=Georgia color=black
size=4><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia">If God is
dead</SPAN></FONT></SPAN><FONT face=Georgia><SPAN style="FONT-FAMILY: Georgia">,
does that mean we cannot survive our own deaths? Recent best-selling books
against religion agree that immortality is a myth we ought to outgrow. But there
are a few thinkers with unimpeachable scientific credentials who have been
waving their arms and shouting: not so fast. Even without God, they say, we have
reason to hope for — or possibly fear — an
afterlife.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia"><![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]> <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia">Curiously, the doctrine of
immortality is more a pagan legacy than a religious one. The notion that each of
us is essentially an immortal soul goes back to Plato. Whereas the body is a
compound thing that eventually falls apart, Plato argued, the soul is simple and
therefore imperishable. Contrast this view with that of the Bible. In the Old
Testament there is little mention of an afterlife; the rewards and punishments
invoked by Moses were to take place in this world, not the next one. Only near
the beginning of the Christian era did one Jewish sect, the Pharisees, take the
afterlife seriously, in the form of the resurrection of the body. The idea that
“the dead shall be raised” was then brought into Christianity by St.
Paul.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia"><![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]> <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia">The Judeo-Christian version of
immortality doesn’t work very well without God: who but a divine agent could
miraculously reconstitute each of us after our death as a “spiritual body”?
Plato’s version has no such need; since our platonic souls are simple and thus
enduring, we are immortal by nature.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia"><![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]> <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia">The Platonic picture may be
pleasing, but it is hard to square with what we have learned from neuroscience.
Everything that gives each of us our personal identities — consciousness,
character, memories and so on — seems rooted in the electrochemical processes of
our brains. As Bertrand Russell observed, “A virtuous person may be rendered
vicious by encephalitis lethargica, and . . . a clever child can be turned into
an idiot by a lack of iodine.” The dependence is most cruelly apparent in cases
of Alzheimer’s disease, where the dissolution of the self proceeds in direct
proportion to the physical deterioration of the
brain.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia"><![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]> <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia">Where does this leave those who,
while secular in outlook, still pine after immortality? A little more than a
century ago, the American philosopher William James proposed an interesting way
of keeping open the door to an afterlife. We know that the mind depends on the
physical brain, James said. But that doesn’t mean that our brain processes
actually produce our mental life, as opposed to merely transmitting it. Perhaps,
he conjectured, our brains allow our minds to filter through to this world from
some transcendent “mother sea” of consciousness. Had James given his lecture a
few decades later, he might have used the radio as a metaphor. When a radio is
damaged, the music becomes distorted. When it is smashed, the music stops
altogether. All the while, however, the signal is still out there,
uncorrupted.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia"><![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]> <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia">James’s idea of immortality may
sound far-fetched, but for him and other scientifically minded thinkers of his
time it had one great virtue. It explained the existence of what were thought to
be psychic phenomena: ghostly apparitions, communications from the dead at
séances and seeming cases of reincarnation. Alas, little of this supposed
evidence for an afterlife has held up under the scrutiny of rigorous
investigation.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia"><![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]> <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia">In the 1970s, a new hope for
survivalists emerged: the near-death experience. In the best-selling book “Life
After Life,” a doctor and parapsychologist named Raymond A. Moody Jr. presented
a number of cases in which patients who had flat-lined and then been revived
told of entering a long tunnel and emerging into a dazzling pool of light, where
they communed with departed loved ones. In 1988, the atheist philosopher A. J.
Ayer had such an adventure when he choked on a piece of smoked salmon and his
heart stopped for a few minutes. Soon afterward, Ayer reported that his
near-death experience, in which he saw a red light that seemed to govern the
universe, “slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death . . . will be
the end of me.” But he later dismissed it as a hallucination caused by a
temporary lack of oxygen in his brain.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia"><![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]> <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia">The most interesting
possibilities for an afterlife proposed in recent years are based on hard
science with a dash of speculation. In his 1994 book, “The Physics of
Immortality,” Frank J. Tipler, a specialist in relativity theory at <A
title="More articles about Tulane University"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/t/tulane_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org">Tulane
University</A>, showed how future beings might, in their drive for total
knowledge, “resurrect” us in the form of computer simulations. (If this seems
implausible to you, think how close we are right now to “resurrecting” extinct
species through knowledge of their genomes.) John Leslie, a Canadian who ranks
as one of the world’s leading philosophers of cosmology, draws on quantum
physics in his painstakingly argued new book, “Immortality Defended.” Each of
us, Leslie submits, is immortal because our life patterns are but an aspect of
an “existentially unified” cosmos that will persist after our death. Both Tipler
and Leslie are, in different ways, heirs to the view of William James. The mind
or “soul,” as they see it, consists of information, not matter. And one of the
deepest principles of quantum theory, called “unitarity,” forbids the
disappearance of information. (Stephen Hawking used to think you could destroy
your information by heaving yourself into a black hole, but a few years ago he
changed his mind.)<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia"><![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]> <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia">If death is not extinction, what
might it be like? That’s a question the Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, who
died five years ago, enjoyed pondering. One of the more rococo possibilities he
considered was that the dying person’s organized energy might bubble into a new
universe created in that person’s image. Although his reflections were
inconclusive, Nozick hit on a seductive maxim: first, imagine what form of
immortality would be best; then live your life right now as though it were true.
And, who knows, it may be true. “Life is a great surprise,” <A
title="More articles about Vladimir Nabokov"
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/n/vladimir_nabokov/index.html?inline=nyt-per">Vladimir
Nabokov</A> once observed. “I do not see why death should not be an even greater
one.”<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><I><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-STYLE: italic; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia"><![if !supportEmptyParas]><![endif]> <o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></I></P>
<P style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"><I><FONT face=Georgia color=black size=4><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 13.5pt; FONT-STYLE: italic; FONT-FAMILY: Georgia">Jim Holt is
a contributing writer for the magazine.<o:p></o:p></SPAN></FONT></I></P>
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