Sir Patrick

According to The Week, the nation's favourite stereotype of a scientist, dear old Patrick Moore, is in a bad way. His health is failing and he sees himself as being near the end of life. I'm sad about that. I treasure a photograph of him standing next to me chatting in a friendly way, taken at an Astronomy event we both attended 7 or 8 years ago. He is, of course, an unbeliever as far as religion is concerned, so I was surprised to read that he expects death to lead to another life. And not merely that, but a life which can influence events in this one. According to the report I read he has left instructions for a gathering after his death at which he will blow out a candle!

Somehow I am almost more sad about this than his approaching demise. But it is not atypical. When my dog, dear old Laddie, died, dog-walking friends tried to comfort me by saying that he was probably playing in an otherworldly field with their deceased dog. People I meet who have zero religious beliefs expect to be reunited with deceased spouses and parents. Of course I never challenge beliefs like that. I might, in a formal debate for example, but people are entitled to what comforts they can find in the face of death. The idea of non-existence is terrifying to some, and incomprehensible to many. I am lucky in that not existing after this life frightens me no more than not existing before I was born does. That luck does not give me the right to trample on the compensations for death and loss that others entertain.

But here, no-one has to read on who doesn't want to, and no-one who doesn't want to read what I really think need read another word. Please take that as fair warning about what is to come.

Sir Patrick is a highly educated man, and I doubt he is unaware of all the work in neuroscience and related disciplines that demonstrates how totally dependent we are on our brain chemistry and physiology. A minute change in the chemical reactions in our brain can render us so different a person that we would not recognise ourselves. An injury to the brain can cause dramatic changes in both personality and physical capacity. There is experimental evidence that seems to show that the actions we think we undertake as the result of a decision are in fact initiated deep in the brain long before we become consciously involved.

None of this proves anything, and it certainly does not prove that there is no life after death. But it does lend credence to the idea that who we are is dependent on our brains, both physically and chemically, and that therefore we ourselves are so dependent, and that when our brains stop, we stop.  Sir Patrick must be aware of that, even though it is not his specialised area of scientific work. But the existence of this line of empirical work does nothing to change his belief and his expectation of an afterlife. In that he has a lot in common with most people. I think it is sad that someone of his knowledge and critical judgement doesn't give it more weight. But the fact is that our emotions are more important than our rationality in determining what we believe.

There is nothing in either neuroscience or medicine that gives any reason to think anything other than that we are totally dependent on these frail human bodies for our existence, and in particular dependent on our brains. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it does look very suspicious. It seems to me to be like the general anaesthetic I had when I underwent heart surgery. The drugs they gave me stopped certain parts of my brain from working and I was completely unaware even of being unconscious. Everything that was me stopped until the effect of the drugs was reversed and I regained consciousness, with no idea how much time had passed and so on. Effectively the real me ceased to exist although my body lived on. The wonder of modern anaesthesia is that it is reversible, and once the brain chemistry began to flow again, my self returned. When I die all that brain chemistry will stop and the physical circuitry will become unusable very quickly. I fail to see how I can in any sense exist when this has happened.

If Sir Patrick can show me any reason at all to think that this line of thought might be wrong, I will be delighted to examine it, test it, and take it seriously. Sadly the prospect is remote since no such reason has ever been shown to exist. I prefer to go to my death aware of the realities and with no expectation of their being overturned.  If that's wrong I hope the surprise will be pleasant, but I am reasonably confident that any such non-physical existence in another world will be totally unable to blow out any existent physical candles in this one. All that influences matter is material in origin, including the four great forces of nature, the weakest of which is gravity.