Time and death

I recently watched a YouTube speech by Sam Harris - Sam Harris - Death and the Present Moment. Sam says, death, the fear of death, is one of the major components of religion. We are, apparently, incapable imagining a world where we're not a part of it. We cannot imagine life before we were here. And we cannot imaging a world going on once we're gone. Hence the promise by religion that we are not going away for good. That there is a life after this one.


It's an interesting speech. A different perspective from the regular atheist perspective which tends to ask for proof. Clearly religion cannot prove what they claim. It's all inductive reasoning. The type of reasoning that says, "there must be something after death" because "there's no better explanation."

Another dead end.

Another dead end argument.

Sam is an interesting character. A neuroscientist who's very interested in philosophical questions about spirituality. I sometimes tend to think that Sam thinks that it's quantifiable.

He presents death in a very understandable language. He says:

Most of us do our best not to think about death. But there’s always part of our minds that knows this can’t go on forever. Part of us always knows that we’re just a doctor’s visit away, or a phone call away, from being starkly reminded with the fact of our own mortality, or of those closest to us.

And...

But the one thing people tend to realize at moments like this is that they wasted a lot of time, when life was normal. And it’s not just what they did with their time – it’s not just that they spent too much time working or compulsively checking email. It’s that they cared about the wrong things. They regret what they cared about. Their attention was bound up in petty concerns, year after year, when life was normal. This is a paradox of course, because we all know this epiphany is coming. Don’t you know this is coming? Don’t you know that there’s going to come a day when you’ll be sick, or someone close to you will die, and you will look back on the kinds of things that captured your attention, and you’ll think ‘What was I doing?’. You know this, and yet if you’re like most people, you’ll spend most of your time in life tacitly presuming you’ll live forever. Like, watching a bad movie for the fourth time, or bickering with your spouse. These things only make sense in light of eternity. There better be a heaven if we’re going to waste our time like this. 

Finally...

As a matter of conscious experience, the reality of your life is always now. I think this is a liberating truth about the human mind. In fact, I think there is nothing more important to understand about your mind than that if you want to be happy in this world. The past is a memory. It's a thought arising in the present. The future is merely anticipated, it is another thought arising now. What we truly have is this moment. And this. And we spend most of our lives forgetting this truth. Repudiating it. Fleeing it. Overlooking it. And the horror is that we succeed. We manage to never really connect with the present moment and find fulfillment there because we are continually hoping to become happy in the future, and the future never arrives.

The speech is very engaging in its two parts. First, the obsession with death, a future event that is definite. An event that we cannot, in this moment, do anything about. A future event. And secondly, what are we doing in this present moment, the only moment that we live in.

Ultimately, it isn't wrong to contemplate death, or a life after death. It is our human condition to want to understand our environment. Questions like "where did we come from?" and "where are we going?" are philosophical questions that we will continue to ask. The problem comes from drawing conclusions, just because we cannot think of a better answer.

Science proceeds by formulating theories, and then testing them. There's a hope in the scientist, that someone will come along and prove them wrong. Because their theories explain some part of the physical world. Religion is not testable. At least in the scientific sense. However, there are many things not testable that we can rely on and make decisions on. Dinesh D'Souza, who has since proven that he's an intellectual fraud, once gave this example of something we know exists, however cannot prove. For example, love. You may love someone, but cannot scientifically prove that you do. And you make marriage decisions and commitments based on an intuition that you have.

Science cannot prove that the claims made by religion are false.

Science cannot prove that there is no life after death.

However, the burden of proof is on religion to prove that the claims it makes are true.

Bertrand Russell's teapot is a good example of how the burden of proof remains with one who makes the claim.

What did I understand from the speech?

We need to know that we are not the focus of the universe. That we will ultimately go away. That life doesn't care whether we're here or not. Knowing that, we should use the time we have, this present moment, wisely. Caring about things that matter. Not worrying about things that have passed. Or spending it on too much planning about things to come. As Ram Dass says, "Be Here Now."