Finitude is unbearable

Suppose for the while that there is no immortality of the soul.

Now try to imagine dying.

If you think you succeeded, you probably committed a few mistakes. First, you may have explicitly, or subconsciously, relied on memories of when you had been sleeping. Second, you may have imagined a blank, a complete darkness and silence. If there is no immortality, these conceptions are wrong.

There is no good reason to imagine death is like sleep, but there are a couple bad ones that happen to be persuasive. First, the dead are like the sleeping in appearance. Which is no reason to infer that they are alike in experience as well – we have the best reasons to suppose that they are very different in their experience. We instinctively draw some relation from the fact that they both sit motionless. We even, in funerals, array the dead as though they were sleeping.

Second, the first thing we do when trying to imagine death is try to imagine being unconscious, which we figure is the primary feature of a corpse, along with the lack of the potential to return to consciousness. Since we think we have memories of sleep, which is always called unconscious, we rely on those.

The problem is that, of course, insofar as we were capable of forming memories, we were not actually unconscious. We were dreaming, or almost waking up, or awake with our eyes closed and trying to sleep. Maybe we had a quite uneventful and ‘blank’ dream, and so we thought we were not dreaming but only sleeping. Either way, logically we can have no memories of being unconscious to rely on. The only way those half-conscious states resemble death is in their paucity of sense experience.

Realizing this, we may eschew the idea of sleep entirely and try to construct an experience of being unconscious. This is oxymoronic, but we do it anyway. We try to imagine darkness, silence – we imagine being in some way deprived of all sense experience. We try to imagine thinking nothing at all in this state, as we sometimes seem to do, especially when tired. Being satisfied, we think we have done it – that’s all that death is like, without immortality. We may then go on to use this to reason about whether immortality is desirable or not.

The problem is, of course, that this is still an experience. As you imagined this, there was still an “I” in your imagination. It was still you that was experiencing nothing, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. Death should cut away at that very self. Now try to imagine not being at all.

You can’t. And there’s the rub. It is impossible to imagine not existing. We think we can, but we can’t.

Since this ‘blank imagination’ is not really a proper imagination of non-existence, it is just as illogical to think death, without immortality, is like it, as to imagine that what follows is heaven, or hell, or Jello World. It is no more than a pleasant imagination that we use to stand in for a proper concept – pleasant, yes, because sleep is pleasant.

This is where reasoning about death, without immortality, should begin. From the utter unimaginability of death, not from the illusory conception. You have to be very aware that any imagination you have is wrong, that you are dealing with an absolute unknown.

Trying to do this, I find death to be absolutely terrifying. It is rational to fear the unknown. This world is ‘known’ and ‘given’ by comparison, and any chaos should be feared. If losing any important part of our world is a scary thought, it should be scariest to think of losing all of them, precisely because the unimaginability is greater. To cease to exist is an unbearable prospect, and it fills me with dread when it crosses my mind.

So, if I did not believe in immortality, and since I do not believe that I could “upload myself” into a computer and live on in it, as some people think they could – I would cling onto this life as tightly as I could. I would worry greatly about my health. I would look widely for the best ways to expand longevity, for death must be kept away. Either this, or I would try my hardest not to think about death – I could not, in good conscience, revert to the illusory conception.

But since I do believe in immortality, and I think I have good reasons to do so, that is not really my current problem as it stands. Non-existence is not only unimaginable, but actually impossible as a future prospect.

This is just my answer to the common atheist idea that, on their version of death, there is nothing to fear. Their version of death is the scariest possible. I would prefer hell – hell is suffering, and I can imagine suffering. I can even cherish the prospect, conditionally on my deserving it, as a reflection of the beauty of divine justice. But while I can fear it, it is finite fear, of something very conceivable – in comparison with nothingness, anyway.

This is also the reason why I despise annihilationists, who think non-existence is somehow a more bearable thought than hell.