What happens when we die? Does everything we are just stop? Is consciousness lost forever? Or does some vital spark inside us, a spirit or a soul, live on? We find it almost impossible to think about not having a mind, of our awareness being snuffed out like a candle. Yet the stark fact is that within a century or so, everyone alive today - all six billion of us - will be dead. Humans are the only creatures on earth that know they are going to die. But that foreknowledge has come fairly recently and it flies in the face of ...
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What happens when we die? Does everything we are just stop? Is consciousness lost forever? Or does some vital spark inside us, a spirit or a soul, live on? We find it almost impossible to think about not having a mind, of our awareness being snuffed out like a candle. Yet the stark fact is that within a century or so, everyone alive today - all six billion of us - will be dead. Humans are the only creatures on earth that know they are going to die. But that foreknowledge has come fairly recently and it flies in the face of four billion years of evolution. Those eons have genetically conditioned us to do all we can to preserve ourselves and our kin. The result is that we are caught in a dilemma. We are programmed to survive by our genes yet made painfully aware of our mortality by our forward-looking brain. If we admit that death is inevitable, then our will to survive may be fatally weakened. On the other hand, if we deny death, we have to turn a blind eye to a patent fact of the real world. Only one avenue of escape is possible - belief in an afterlife. With this we can face the nightmare that death poses to the rational mind.
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