So, the Big Bang, the very beginning, in the past. What about the future? What about our death, the most certain event in life, which is coming for all of us?
What does analytic idealism tell us about death, particularly the first-person perspective of death? What do we experience as we die? Now there's good and bad news.
I'll start with the bad news. One of the main social psychological reasons why materialism has taken such a fundamental hold in our culture since the late 19th century, it's because it did away with the greatest fear of humankind throughout almost the entirety of our history, which was the fear of what we will experience after we die. In Christian language, are we going to go to hell?
This singular fear, the biggest fear in human history, has been used by governments and power structures worldwide to control civilizations, to control societies. It's the single most dominant fear in the history of humankind. And materialism did away with it, because you will not experience anything after you die.
There is no hell, there is no heaven either, but there is no hell, there is no reason to be anxious about that great scary unknown, because there will be no subject there. Someone said once, where death is, I am not. Where I am, death is not. And that's a materialist axiom, or a materialist theorem, if you will. Unfortunately, under analytic idealism, Your core subjectivity remains as you go through the process of death and even after.
Because your core subjectivity is the core subjectivity of nature. It's what exists. Where is it going to go? Life and death happen to it, within it.
Life and death are events in core subjectivity, not the beginning and end of core subjectivity. So the core subjectivity in you, that thing that remains when you are in an ideal sensory deprivation chamber, completely amnesic, that thing that remains, remains through the re-association process that we call death. So there will be someone there, there will be something there to experience. And the greatest fear of humankind is back.
That's the bad news. Now the good news. The good news is... We go through a re-associative process every single day. When we are asleep and dreaming, we are dissociated internally.
We identify with our dream avatar, not with the cars and buildings and streets and trees and other people in our dream. We think those things are other than us, because we are the dream avatar. When we wake up from a dream, we realize...
that actually it was us doing the whole thing. We were doing everything. Not only the dream avatar, we were the whole thing. And the moment we wake up, our dream avatar dies.
He's toast. He's dead. He's gone. But nobody goes around mourning the death of their dream avatar every morning because you realized that you were it, but it was not you. In other words, you were the superset.
Your dream avatar was something you were doing. not what you are. And the same applies, hierarchically speaking, we can transpose that one level up in the hierarchy of nature and say it's the same thing regarding life and death. We are alters or dissociated dream avatars and I think we don't have any reason to think that when we die our reaction will be any different. than it is when we wake up in the morning and our dream avatar is dead.
In other words, I don't think we will go around mourning the death of our individual selves in this great play of life. Beyond that, I don't know. Only the dead know.
And they haven't come back to tell me. So it's a great mystery. And we have to live with it. And it's scary.
But there is one thing that we got back together. with the great fear. And that is meaning. Because although materialism got rid of the greatest fear of humankind, it also got rid of the meaning of life. Because if subjectivity is an epiphenomenon of material arrangements, and eventually all of your thoughts, all of your emotions, all of your insights, all of your wisdom, that you've accumulated at great cost, with great suffering through life, eventually they will all be gone and they will mean exactly nothing.
That's materialism. So we get rid of the fear of death, but we get rid of meaning. Under analytic idealism, on the other hand, the contents of your dissociative process, all the insights, all the maturity you've acquired at the cost of unspeakable suffering through life, because suffering is an intrinsic element of life.
All of those gains are not lost, they are released in a broader cognitive context. They are made available to the mind of nature, to mind at large. And ultimately all of your suffering is not for nothing. There is a meaning to that.
There is something, not something, there is... All of it is... remains present in the fabric of nature.
And not only that, it remains much more broadly accessible in the fabric of nature. You can see this metaphorically as remembering your dreams when you wake up. You are no longer your dream avatar, but the mental contents of your dream avatar survive in you. You remember the dream.
You remember thinking that you were your dream avatar. And dreams... are incredibly informative.
You can learn so much about yourself. You can get so much insight about who you really are, what you really fear, what your hopes and dreams are, what your anxieties are, what your traumas are, how to reintegrate them. You can learn all that from your dreams, even or particularly after you wake up. As a matter of fact, you can't do that during the dream.
But after you wake up, you can reintegrate. the memories of a lifetime of dreams, and be a more mature, a wiser, better, more integrated, more individuated person. Could that be happening at the level of the universe?
I would submit to you that this is a very reasonable, coherent hypothesis, and it flows very naturally from the premises of analytic idealism. So fear is back, but meaning is also back. That's the good news.
So what is the meaning of life, ultimately? It's experience, and it's what you learn from experience. Because we are metacognitive, we are able to ask the deeper questions. A non-metacognitive animal just glides through life, always in the moment, always reacting to the environment, but not asking...
The big questions like what is going on, which is the ultimate, the deepest question is what is going on, which sounds so banal but is so incredibly deep, so profound. Or what is the self? What am I?
What am I doing here? What is this for? What is the meaning of this dance?
What a strange condition life is to maintain an organism outside of thermodynamic equilibrium for a few decades. It's incredibly weird. What is this?
What's going on? Is there a reason? Is there a telos, a goal to all of this?
And what's the relationship between me and the rest of nature? These are the big questions, and we ask the big questions as metacognitive individuals. And this metacognition, we have every reason to believe, exists only in life. Only through life does the universe metacognize, because metacognition is something that arose.
from the evolution of life in a planetary ecosystem. It's a higher level mental function that was engineered by the evolution of life. Without it, no metacognition.
Without life, no metacognition. So this puts us in a unique position in the dance of existence. Only through our eyes can the mind of nature take account of itself in an explicit manner and ask the larger, the bigger questions. and get the answers when we are no longer dissociated.
It may sound cruel to say what I'm about to say, so I have to be very careful. The intuition of the world's cultures and civilizations almost always has a seed of truth, even when it's distorted into morally despicable acts. I'll mention one morally despicable act. animal sacrifice or even human sacrifice, both of which have been practiced by cultures the world over through most of history.
Do I think that's okay? No, I don't think that's okay. We are all gonna die eventually anyway.
There is absolutely no need to speed up the process. And to speed up the process is actually to spit on the face of nature. It's nature that should decide when it's time. Not us, not the ego to take the reins from nature and cut a life short.
Having said that, there is a seed of truth to the intuition. Death is the end of the dissociation. So when you die, whatever insights you've accumulated about the bigger questions are released into a broader cognitive context, into the very fabric of nature.
So there is a sense in which sacrifice is an offering to the divinity, which is no endorsement of sacrifice. But I'm just trying to highlight that people's intuitions don't come out of nothing. They are not... gratuitous, they are not arbitrary.
Usually there is a foundation, a core of truth in that intuition. Another example of the same intuition is how we depict the figure of the reaper of death, which is usually a black cloth creature with a hood carrying, guess what? A harvesting instrument. A harvesting instrument. You plant the seed of life.
And you harvest it. And what is harvest? Harvest is when you bank the gains and you use it for the benefit of the tribe.
There are cores of truth to all this. These things don't pop out arbitrarily for no reason in the world's cultures. And they do hint at the meaning of life. They do hint at why we are here. And the moral responsibility we carry as, as far as we know, the only truly metacognizant eyes of nature.
It is a tremendous responsibility to carry, particularly given the uniqueness of our position. We haven't found anything like us on this planet and not anything even remotely akin to life in other planets yet. There may be more life in the universe, there probably is, but it's definitely not abundant.
Otherwise we wouldn't have... the Fermi paradox staring us in the face. And this is sobering, morally and otherwise.
I do personally fear death, yes. When I was a young adult working at CERN in Switzerland, I didn't. Not only because it was very remote for me back then, but because I always had this adage in my mind, where I am, death is not. Where death is, I am not. So there's nothing to fear, literally.
But as my understanding of the world and reality evolved, and I'm today as convinced as a human being can reasonably be, that my core subjectivity will survive and witness that I am afraid of death. The best models of death we have today are high-dose psychedelic trips, and they are the best because When done in the correct settings, with correct supervision, they are absolutely safe. And they emulate death so well experientially and physiologically.
Psychedelics only reduce brain activity. They don't increase brain activity anywhere. A high-dose psychedelic trip, in that sense, is pretty much like a significant reduction in brain metabolism. In other words, it's the process of dying.
And from an experiential perspective, anybody who has had A high-dose psychedelic trip entailing ego dissolution knows that it can be very difficult. Ego death is something that you witness it happening to you, and you experience it. You experience your ego just being torn apart, and it's a frightful experience.
After that, it's no longer frightful. I cannot speak of what comes after that. But the experience is disconcerting, it's very frightful.
Even when you know, as we do during a psychedelic trance, that it is temporary and reversible, and will be reversed, even then it's very frightful. But when you're undergoing that, also knowing that it's not reversible, it's probably more frightful. So yes, I'm afraid of death, but it's a price I pay.
with a smile on my face because what I get with it is my life is meaningful, intrinsically meaningful. It doesn't matter what happens, it's intrinsically meaningful. I no longer...
struggle with the meaning of existence. I no longer struggle with the fact that I suffer. I do suffer, but I'm not saying, oh, all this suffering is for nothing. Why am I going through this? No, that's gone.
I no longer have meta suffering. I suffer, like everybody, a lot, but no meta suffering, no self-imposed suffering associated with questions of meaning and sense. All of that, all of those doubts, it's gone for me. I live in a world that is rich and envelops me in the warm hug of meaning and sense. And I'd rather live like this with the fear of death than live an unexamined life of platitudes without fear of death.