Worm at the Core

A few months ago I was in a conversation in which someone asked what happened to the soul when someone went into cryonic suspension.  I remember having a conversation with my Christian father some decades ago that touched on something like this.  He had replied that God knows when you are really dead.

I think this is a good response for those who believe in the supernatural soul.  You could try to tell them that there is no such thing as the supernatural but that would just trigger their defenses against mortal terror.  It is probably best to just get them signed up for cryonics with their current worldview intact and then maybe only later try to persuade them otherwise when they emerge from their baptism in liquid nitrogen.

Recently I finished listening for a second time to an audiobook on the subject of Terror Management Theory entitled The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death.  It explains how our Denial of Death drives many of our defensive behaviors including religion and war.  It makes me wonder how human culture might change for the better when future medical technology makes us effectively immortal.

The Worm at the Core helped me make yet another connection between an Old Testament story and an earlier Sumerian myth.  In the Epic of Gilgamesh, after Gilgamesh acquired a plant that would make old men young, a serpent stole the plant and consumed it.  The serpent then shed its old skin, becoming young again, leaving Gilgamesh to realize the inevitable.

The serpent from the Epic of Gilgamesh reappears in the Garden of Eden to teach Eve the same lesson.  The authors of The Worm at the Core assert that one of the ways we attempt to distinguish ourselves from animals without immortal souls is to clothe and decorate our bodies.  When Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, they became aware that they were naked.

The consequence of their eating from the Tree of Knowledge was not their deaths but rather the knowledge of their deaths.  Before the serpent tempted Eve with the gift of foresight, Adam and Eve could simply gather fruit from the trees of the Garden whenever they were hungry, blissfully ignorant of what would happen when the fruit went out of season.  Afterwards, they became aware of their fate in a way that non-human animals cannot.

The curse laid upon Eve for her transgression was the knowledge that the only existing route to immortality is through the pain of childbirth.  The curse for Adam was the knowledge that only through the pain of his labors to till the soil in the present could they reap a potential harvest to permit them to survive in the future.  The same foresight that pushes us into denial and paralysis can also drive us to labor today to conquer death tomorrow.

Optihumanist Principles 2011

For the 2011 annual revision of my Optihumanist Principles, I added a new section entitled "Work is Life". In writing this, I wanted to communicate that the Idea of Progress implies that work both improves and increases life.

I just finished reading Gilgamesh: A Graphic Novel by Andrew Winegarner. This illustrated book for adults is based on the prebiblical Epic of Gilgamesh. Although the hero Gilgamesh comes tantalizingly close in his quest for physical immortality, the story concludes with his acceptance of a more limited immortality through enduring achievements. We are now at the point in our own Epic of Humanity where our work toward physical immortality could soon vindicate the original hero.

Immortality Links

You can watch the NOVA scienceNow video Can We Live Forever? online.

The same topic is covered with good humor in the Cracked article 5 Ways Science Could Make Us Immortal.

Here is the secret to immortality as described thousands of years ago in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Tortoises can live a long time, as described in the io9 article Turtles could hold the secret to human immortality.

The Wired article Creepy ‘Human Fish’ Can Live 100 Years describes one hundred-year-old blind cave salamanders.

I have pre-ordered The Transcendent Man: The Life and Ideas of Ray Kurzweil on DVD.

I just discovered Terasem Radio.

World Religions

I recently watched the presentation "The Ark Before Noah: A Great Adventure" by Irving Finkel.  When he described the extreme reaction of George Smith upon discovering that the story of Noah's Ark was an adaptation from a much older Babylonian mythology, I recalled how I had also immediately spotted the obvious similarities when I was first introduced to the Epic of Gilgamesh.  Dr. Finkel has a number of other good presentations on related subjects available on YouTube.

As a youth being raised as a Southern Baptist in a city which was said to have had the most churches per capita in the Bible Belt and in which all three of the universities in town represented different shades of Christianity, I was not cognizant of world religions.  The 1980 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) book Deities & Demigods, which included a section on the "Babylonian Mythos", might have been my first introduction to religions beyond Judeo-Christian.  When you are first introduced to the idea that many different peoples in many different places have had many different religions over many millennia, you start to realize that your assignment to the religion that you were taught to believe in as a child is a circumstance of when and where you were born.

I remember that the late Daniel Dennett, my favorite philosopher, proposed teaching world religions in public schools.  The Unitarian Universalists (UUs), which teach their children about different religions in Sunday school, recognized that their children, upon adulthood, often adopt the religion of their spouses rather than continuing on with UU.  The joke about this is that when the children are taught about the different varieties of religion outside of UU, they then think that they are expected to pick one.

It is clear to me that Dennett's proposal to teach world religions in taxpayer-funded schools, if enacted, would upset many parents.  My thinking on this has been influenced by my new understanding of Terror Management Theory from listening to the audiobook The Worm at the Core.  By providing entertaining illustrated books about ancient myths from other cultures, parents can inoculate their children against subjugation by modern myth-based religions.