cellini's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Death is Horrifying and I Don't Understand It With each passing week I am becoming more and more horrified at the entire concept of death. Something must be done about it. Periodically I hear about breakthroughs in nanotechnology with medical applications and there are now serious people saying that in 20 or 30 years we may have nanotechnology that allows something approaching immortality. Microscopic machines that constantly repair diseased or aging tissue in our bodies. Sweet fuck do I ever hope that this happens. If I could choose immortality, I would. At the very least, I would like to be able to extend my life to a few hundred years in a body as healthy and sound as the one I presently possess. I figure that in after a few hundred years, at least one is more likely to feel ready for death. I do not ever wish to be separated from Trish or my children by death. Perhaps the threat of it would not be so awful if we had any sort of assurances about what happens after death. Is there a soul, does that soul have consciousness, is it able to meet up with other souls in a deliberate way and have some sort of satisfying existence? Personally, I would like to see my tax dollars be spent researching this particular avenue of scientific inquiry. I mean, it is certainly a subject relevant to every human being that ever lived. Do you have any idea how horrifying it is to look at the leg of a human being and have that image in your head? For it can't be much different with a human than it is with a deer. And worse still is the intimate knowledge of what it all does not visibly add up to. I mean, I take the deer apart. And there are the component pieces before me. A hide here, a neatly stacked pile of quarters there, backstraps and tenderloins in zip lock bags and then a legless ribcage with a head attached. None of this explains the deer. That animal had a personality of some kind, even if I didn't know it. Deer can clearly form memories, personal preferences, unique relationships with other deer in the area. Where is that part when I am done? Is it in the brain? In that case, the deer's ego literally just rots. Putrifies into nothing as the maggots work their way through the grey mass. What a horrifying thought. What an abject waste of consciousness. And it begs the question of whether I and everyone that I know and love is doomed to the same awful fate. Or is the deer somewhere else? These pieces of flesh and bone seem so very empty as I dismantle them. It does not feel as though the deer is in them. I understand neurology at least as a particularly well-informed layman. Even that provides me with precious little certainty. Localization of function has never been exactly proven. We speak of certain areas of the brain as being associated with particular cognitive functions but exceptions can always be found. Science is still yet to identify a physical unit of memory within the brain. The brain could just as easily be more similar to a television than a computer. I mean this in the sense that a computer has a hard drive where memories are stored. A processor that allows it to 'think' about those memories. Etc. Wheras a television set is merely a receiver. When you watch a television show, the show isn't exactly in the TV. It's invisibly coming from somewhere else. If there are things wrong with the TV set then the picture or the sound will come through wrong, like when someone has a brain injury and their speech is slurred. But even if the television set is smashed to pieces with a sledgehammer, the program that was being shown on it still exists. Which is it? Computer or television? I have no idea. And every deer that I kill and dissect gets me no closer to the answer, except in the sense that these regular, personal confrontations with the details of mortality prevent me from politely ignoring the whole problem in the manner than most other Americans are able to do. Among the many things I must now consider is how the question of a soul impacts the ethics of killing for meat. If animals do not have souls, then does that make it better or worse that we kill them? I think it's worse if the loss is eternal. I always proceed under the assumption that the animal does have a soul, otherwise what would be the point of giving thanks to it and apologizing for any suffering afterwards? For I do this every time I kill a deer. And yet for some reason I find myself unable to easily proceed with the same assumption about myself and my family. Why the contradiction? 10:17 a.m. - 2008-12-15 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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