Chapter 22

You Have Already Survived Death — Many Times

Here is something most people have never considered: by the logic of this book, you have already survived multiple "deaths," and you didn't even notice.

The You of Age Five Is Gone

Think back to when you were five years old. Try to remember what it was like. Maybe you can summon a few images: a house, a parent's face, a toy. But the actual experience of being five (the way the world felt, the way your thoughts worked, the way you processed emotions) is almost entirely lost to you. Not just the memories. The way of being conscious.

The five-year-old you had a fundamentally different brain — a brain still under heavy construction, with far more synaptic connections than your adult brain but far less refined wiring (your brain didn't finish developing until your mid-twenties). Different cognitive abilities (you couldn't do algebra, understand irony, or think abstractly), different emotional patterns, and different personality traits. And, of course, different atoms; every single atom in the five-year-old's brain has long since been replaced.

Not in the sense of having the same atoms (they're all gone). Not in the sense of having the same brain structure (it was dramatically different). Not even in the sense of having the same ixperiencitness (the five-year-old's experience of the world was qualitatively different from yours today).

The Continuum of Self

This reveals something important about identity: you have been slowly becoming a different person your entire life.

At every stage (infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, old age) your brain's organization changes. Your ixperiencitness shifts. Not suddenly, not dramatically (usually), but continuously. The you of 20 is different from the you of 40, which is different from the you of 60. Each is recognizably connected to the others, but none is identical.

Your awarepath is not a straight line. It curves, it evolves, it transforms. The person at the beginning of the path shares ixperiencitness with the person at the end — but they are not the same person in the way we colloquially mean "same." They are connected points on a continuum.

What This Means for Death

The point of all this is to dissolve the sharp line between "alive" and "dead," and between "you" and "not-you."

You are not a static thing that either exists or doesn't. You are a process, a continuous, evolving pattern of structure and functioning that changes every moment, sometimes gradually and sometimes dramatically. The process has interruptions (sleep, anesthesia). It has slow transformations (aging, learning, brain plasticity). It has sudden changes (injury, illness, transformative experiences).

Death is the permanent cessation of this process in one particular body. Consciousness ceases because the brain stops functioning in the right way.

And resurrection, the reproduction of your ixperiencitness by another body, is a more extreme version of what happens every morning when you wake up: consciousness resumes because a brain is functioning in the right way.

Read the rest of this chapter

The remaining text (examples, counter-arguments, and longer connective passages) is in the book.

Get the Book All chapters