Posts by Brian Hines

Religious believers have dogmas that comfort when death stares them in the face. Resurrection of the body. Eternal survival of the soul. Some secular "survivalists" hold onto equally unfounded hypotheses: that their body can be kept alive for a really long time through a health/medical breakthrough, or kept frozen and reanimated in some advanced technological future.  (Uploading of one's brain contents to a back-up brain or computerized alternative is another dream of those who desire immortality outside of religion.) In his "Immortality," a book I've blogged about recently here and here, Stephen Cave persuasively demolishes the efficacy of these three…

Like I said in my post "We can never be dead (but we're not immortal," in his book Stephen Cave does an excellent job of describing ways we humans attempt to achieve immortality -- then showing why they aren't up to the job. Staying alive... we can try to make our years on Earth as many as possible, but it's obvious that everybody dies eventually. Resurrection... Jesus supposedly did it, but there's no solid evidence of this, and no proof anyone else has pulled off the trick either. Soul... nice idea, that a conscious non-physical aspect of us continues on…

I've got some bad news and some good news for those who believe they have, or are, a soul. Bad news is, almost certainly the soul doesn't exist.  The good news is, no matter. Because we can never be dead. However, the good news doesn't mean we're immortal, which is the promise of soul. It just means, as Stephen Cave says in his fascinating book, "Immortality," that it is impossible for us humans to imagine our own nonexistence -- because whenever we try to do this, we're still alive. That's what I learned from a quote in the leadoff reader…