Immortality (33 page)

A clue can be found in ants. Those who study these social insects have long known that individual organisms working in extremely close cooperation can produce what seems to be a whole new entity—a superorganism. Colonies of ants can do things far beyond the capacity—and almost certainly the understanding—of any single ant, such as build complex nests with carefully regulated internal temperature and humidity, or farm fungus and herd aphids. In many ways, individual ants make up the greater whole that is a colony in the same way that your cells make up a human being. And contrary to what otherwise seems a universal imperative to survive and reproduce, most ants are quite content to sacrifice themselves for the greater good: as long as the colony lives on, they do not seem at all worried about their individual immortality.

Some thinkers have suggested that human communities are similar. This was a popular idea in the nineteenth century, advocated by writers like the philosopher and scientist Herbert Spencer, coiner of the phrase “survival of the fittest,” and it is now being taken seriously once again. People in modern cities long ago lost the ability to survive independently—we are utterly reliant on a complex higher-level system for clean water, food, clothing, shelter, medicine, security and energy. Like the specialized cells of our bodies, which have given up their independence for the greater strength and security offered by life as part of a macro-organism, we have each given up our independence to be part of strong and secure superorganisms.

Just as a human has abilities that no individual cell has, and an ant colony has abilities that no individual ant has, our societies have
abilities that none of us as individuals has. No one understands every aspect of how a modern city works—which would require knowing everything about hospitals, transport logistics, nuclear energy production and so on. Yet somehow these things
do
work, and with a kind of coordination that regulates and sustains huge communities. The system therefore manifests an intelligence and ability exceeding that of any of its individual members. In the words of the biologist Alison Jolly, “Homo sapiens is slowly evolving into something akin to a superorganism, a highly-structured global society in which the lives of everyone on the planet will become so interdependent that they may grow and develop with a common purpose.”

S
O
both your city and the entire global society can make claims to being real, living entities—wholes of which you are a part and that will (probably) outlive any individual member. But it is an even more macro perspective that is currently receiving the most attention, that of the biggest superorganism of them all: the planet Earth, otherwise known as Gaia.

The Gaia hypothesis is the claim that our entire planet is an integrated system that regulates itself in a way that is conducive to life. This system does not only consist of all living things but includes other aspects of the planet, such as the atmosphere, oceans, rocks and ice caps. First put forward by the English scientist James Lovelock in the 1970s and named after the Greek goddess of the earth, supporters of the Gaia hypothesis argue that this entire system is directly comparable to what we ordinarily consider a single organism, such as you or me.

Lynn Margulis is one such advocate. She writes, “Atmospheric, astronomical, and oceanographic evidence attest that life manifests itself on a planetary scale. The steadiness of mean planetary temperature of the past three thousand million years, the 700-million-year maintenance of earth’s reactive atmosphere between high-oxygen
levels of combustibility and low-oxygen levels of asphyxiation, and the apparently continuous removal of hazardous salts from oceans—all these point to mammal-like purposefulness in the organization of life as a whole … Life on Earth—fauna, flora, and microbiota—is a single, gas-entrenched, ocean-connected planetary system, the largest organic being in the solar system.”

From this super-macro perspective, the human quest for personal immortality looks increasingly like a kind of mix-up. Individual humans are merely temporary forms taken by the single, shifting web of life on earth. To suggest one should live forever is like trying to preserve the shape of a particular dune in the shifting sands of a desert. If humans are not really separate things, then their births and deaths are also not real, but simply one way of seeing the rhythms of life. Margulis thinks so: “Death is illusory in quite a real sense,” she writes. “As sheer persistence of biochemistry, ‘we’ have never died during the passage of three thousand million years. Mountains and seas and even supercontinents have come and gone, but we have persisted.”

M
ANY
find this a reassuring view. It is, in a way, the flip side to the cultural Legacy Narrative that required you to assert your uniqueness, to rise above the masses and prove your specialness. The biological Legacy Narrative, in contrast, dissolves you into a greater whole; it releases you from the struggle to become someone special, emphasizing instead the natural connectedness and continuity of being. Ernest Becker described these two contrary impulses as “the need to expand oneself as an individual heroic personality” versus “the need to surrender oneself in full to the rest of nature, to become a part of it by laying down one’s whole existence to some higher meaning.”

Religions play upon both these impulses. We have seen how the belief in an immortal soul and a personal God encourage an individual’s sense of heroic self-worth. Equally, other traditions—including within the same religions—offer opportunities for submerging oneself in a greater whole. “Islam,” for example, means “submission” and requires the believer to submit to the unimaginable greatness that is Allah. The idea of dissolving the self into a greater whole is also crucial to the Buddhist idea of nirvana and fundamental to some strands of Hinduism and to Taoism. Indeed, recognizing yourself to be part of a deeper reality is for many the first step on the spiritual path. The Taoists say that the only difference between the immortals and the rest of us is that the former have recognized their unity with the underlying eternal reality, whereas we poor mortals still believe in individual death.

But, for all its attractions, this super-macro version of the biological immortality narrative faces two major challenges. The first is the consciousness problem that we met above when looking at our genetic legacy. The second is the end of the world—a prospect that looks set to stop even Gaia’s aspirations to eternity.

W
E
saw above that if biological legacy is to deliver meaningful survival, then it must deliver some kind of continuity of consciousness. But I know that my consciousness does not continue in my children. Can the biosphere step in to help?

There is much about consciousness that we do not yet understand. But as we saw in
chapter 7
, we do know that
your
consciousness as a human being emerges from the massively complex interactions of billions of individual brain cells—even if we don’t know exactly how. Now we have just seen that ant colonies, human societies and even the entire earth function much like organisms. These entities all seem to sense and respond to their environment in ways that transcend the actions of any of their component parts. In humans, such purposeful behavior and consciousness go hand in
hand. The possibility therefore suggests itself that the seemingly purposeful behavior in entities like cities or Gaia is also accompanied by a kind of consciousness, produced by the interaction of the countless humans and other organisms. In other words, Earth, as an interconnected system comparable in complexity to a brain, might literally have a mind of her own.

We don’t know. Worse, we don’t even know how we could know, as no one has yet invented a conscious-o-meter to measure whether cities, anthills or bacterial communities have minds of their own. There is increasing awareness among scientists that the kind of complex interconnectivity that produces consciousness in the brain can be found in other systems, from biospheres even down to microbial communities. This gives some measure of plausibility to ideas of global or cosmic consciousness that have long been popular with philosophers and mystics. The question for the biological immortalist, then, is this: Do we have reason to think that when we die, our consciousness somehow lives on in that of a higher entity, whether society, Gaia or the cosmos?

It does not look promising. Although there is much we do not understand, the idea that your consciousness can survive the death of your body certainly does not sit very well with what we
do
understand—that, as we saw in
chapter 7
, your individual mind seems dependent upon the functioning of your brain.

The argument from neuroscience against the existence of the soul was this: If a soul enables your memory or sight or beliefs or emotions to continue after the destruction of your whole brain and body on death, why does it not enable the continuation of these faculties after the failure of merely
parts
of your brain when you are alive? This argument applies equally well to the claim that your individual consciousness survives at some other level of being: If the various aspects of your consciousness can reside in Gaia after your death, then why before death do we lose aspects of our consciousness—or lose consciousness completely—when just parts of our brain shut
down? Why isn’t the cosmic consciousness kicking in to fill in the gap when our brain is shut down by general anesthetic, for example?

Of course, believers can find answers to these questions, but only with additional ad hoc and unprovable hypotheses. There is nothing about the way consciousness seems to work that would support the idea that it can transfer from one entity to another. In fact, to the extent that consciousness seems to arise as an emergent property from a complex physical system—and therefore to be dependent on that system—it seems difficult to even make sense of the idea that it is a thing that might be transferred. If consciousness is something my brain
does
, then talk of it being transferred makes as much sense as talk of my digestion being transferred or my idiosyncratic gait.

In the believer-versus-skeptic bout, this argument is a strong enough blow to award victory to the skeptic on points. Positive scientific evidence is lacking for other levels of consciousness, and our best understanding of consciousness does not support the idea of its being transferred. But the argument is not a knockout: the believer could reply that there
is
some evidence that people can tap into the consciousness of entities, such as Gaia, of which we are a part. This is the anecdotal report of mystics who, for thousands of years, have claimed to attain new levels of consciousness in which they become one with all other living things, or even with the cosmos itself.

Such claims are ancient and widespread. And they can even respond to the criticism that one’s own individual consciousness could not survive as part of this greater entity: that is the point, they say. Freedom from the petty concerns, troublesome memories and shallow desires of individual life is for many Buddhists, Hindus and Taoists the highest aim. This is the extinguishing of the self—the literal meaning of “nirvana.” If the individual consciousness has been left behind in the process of identifying with the higher consciousness, then the goal of transcendence has been achieved.

And if you are wondering why
you
have not experienced higher-level awareness, the yogi’s answer is straightforward: You haven’t learned how. Years of training are required to master one’s own consciousness, and this is exactly what practices such as Buddhism have spent millennia doing.

The problem with these reports is that we cannot distinguish whether the mystics have really experienced another level of consciousness or whether they simply interpret certain unusual individual states of consciousness that way. Nor can we find an answer through taking all such mystical experiences at face value, as many simply contradict each other (e.g., some people experience the presence of a personal God, some an impersonal cosmos; some the persistence of the individual, some the extinguishing of the self). We could therefore only begin to see these experiences as useful evidence if we had a theoretical framework of consciousness in which they (or some of them) would make sense. Currently, such a framework is lacking, and indeed our best framework points strongly to these states being distinctive
individual
experiences, even if they
feel
pretty cosmic. There might be all sorts of reasons why such states of consciousness are worth striving for, but they are unlikely to be intimations of immortality.

N
ONETHELESS
, it might at the very least be reassuring that
some
consciousness will continue after you and I are gone, or that we are parts of greater wholes who will outlive any individual humans. We all yearn to be part of a greater drama, and life on earth is certainly that. But immortality is supposed to be forever; humanity, Gaia, and even the universe seem, however, to be fleeting things.

In the longevity stakes, the planet Earth is doing well at some 4.5 billion years old, and life has been around for much of that time. There have been at least five major extinctions in which half of
existing species were wiped out, such as the one that finished the dinosaurs, but life has always endured, despite bombardment from asteroids, volcanic eruptions and major changes to earth’s atmosphere and climate. No doubt many more cataclysms will come this planet’s way, some of them perhaps man-made, but life, with or without humans, should pull through.

There are, however, some cosmic shocks that nothing could survive: a close encounter with a black hole, for example, or getting in the way of a massive gamma-ray burst from a nearby exploding star. And even if earth is lucky enough to avoid these, in about five billion years our sun will have grown so large that it will burn away all life—at least as we know it. More worrying still, the sun could suck in and engulf the entire planet. But even if not, after another few billion years, the sun will shrivel and grow cold and it will be lights-out in our solar system for good. Not even Gaia will be around forever.