Whys and wherefores of death, afterlife, and immortality

In its judgement on the Aruna Shanbaug case delivered this week, the Supreme Court took on a task mankind has struggled with for ages: to define death.

Of course, its interest in the matter was restricted to the requirements of the case at hand. But mankind has for long, and obsessively, grappled with the whys and wherefores of death, afterlife, and immortality.

The net has all the answers
Find out your death day
What would you do if you knew how much time you had left to live? Would you make the most of it or just wait for the inevitable? Now you can choose.

All you need to do is go to one of the websites that ‘dare you to find out’, put in the date and time you were born, answer a few questions about your lifestyle, and the website will give you the exact time and date you will die.

They even helpfully put up a countdown so that if you glance at your computer screen, you will see exactly how long you have. Be warned, if you put in the same info again, you may find you will die on a different date.

(www.findyourfate.com, www.death-clock.org, deathdate.info)

How will you die?
If you were wondering whether you’d die peacefully in your sleep — yeah, right — or painfully with a disease, or even violently in an accident, you can find out.

There are a few quizzes that ask you to randomly choose a tarot card or whether you’ve seen ghosts, and even the colour of your eyes (hey, what do you know, it could matter!).

Based on your answers, these websites tell you how you’re going to die.

(www.gotoquiz.com, www.answerbuddy.com, www.quizopolis.com)

What will you be reborn as?
There are also friendly neighbourhood websites that offer to tell you whether you’ll go to heaven or hell, or what animal, bird or insect you will be reincarnated as. They don’t need to know your lifestyle, just the date you were born.

(oracle.deathdate.info/reincarnation, quizfarm.com, www.funquizcards.com)

Supreme Court grapples with death
 It is not every day that the Supreme Court gets down to investigating what is death. But in a remarkable judgement on the Aruna Shanbaug case delivered earlier this week, the learned judges devote considerable time and space (p110-122 of the 141-page verdict) to defining what death is, in the process, grappling with multiple definitions, medical terminology, and juridical precedents from around the world.

For instance, in a section titled, “When can a person is (sic) said to be dead”, the judgement delves into the biology of brain cells and the mysteries of the hippocampus before concluding that “if the brain is dead, a person is said to be dead.”

But then, in another section, titled, ‘Brain Death’, the apex court goes into further detail, differentiating brain stem death from whole-brain death, the question of consciousness, and “the ability to act upon the world.”

What emerges when science, medicine, jurisprudence, ethics and philosophy converge on the question of death is the fascinating but humbling realisation that the quest of mortals to understand, if not master, this known unknown is as old as it is foredoomed to failure.

The quest for eternal life
 The idea of conquering death has obsessed us since prehistoric times. Age-old tales talk about how men — heroes and villians — strove for immortality and failed.

Philosophers have mused over the nature of body and soul. And modern-day scientists continue to explore how the body can grow old without aging. But at the heart of this battle is a question: Is immortality a boon or a curse?

In an essay titled ‘Religion and Respect,’ philosopher Simon Blackburn writes, “things do not gain meaning by going on for a very long time, or even forever. Indeed, they lose it. A piece of music, a conversation, even a glance of adoration or a moment of unity have their allotted time. Too much and they become boring. An infinity and they would be intolerable.”

There are practical reasons to avoid immortality as well. Some believe immortality will lead to a stagnation of civilisation. If humans become immortal, they will stop giving birth since Earth has finite resources.

With the same set of people living on to eternity, there won’t be a cycle of new ideas.

But these arguments, however, haven’t stopped scientists from pursuing immortality. In the medieval age, alchemists worked hard to discover the elixir of life.

Historian Joseph Needham has compiled a list of Chinese emperors who may have died due to elixir poisoning since many elixirs contained toxic substances like mercury.

Scientists today take a different approach where the goal is to stop or reverse aging. Futurist Ray Kurzweil has predicted that immortality may be achievable in the next 20 years.

He makes this prediction based on a host of technologies, including nanotechnology, which can help replace old organs, and also reprogramme our “bodies’ stone-age software” so as to halt or reverse ageing.      

The mind of the living dead
“Aruna Ramachandra Shanbaug can neither see, nor hear anything nor can she express herself or communicate, in any manner whatsoever. Her skin is now like ‘papier mache’ stretched over a skeleton. Her excreta and the urine are discharged on the bed itself. Her body lies on the bed in the KEM Hospital, Mumbai like a dead animal, and this has been the position for the last 36 years.”

— Petition for the passive euthanasia of Aruna Shanbaug as recorded in the supreme court judgement.

What affects us most about the Aruna Shanbaug case is the unmitigated horror of imagining ourselves in her ‘papier mache’ skin.

How would it feel to be in such a state, contained within your body, unable to express any thoughts or feelings, for 37 years? What would we think about in that vast, unending silence? These are the questions that haunt us.

In Aruna Shanbaug’s case, some of these questions are thankfully not applicable. She doesn’t feel. The court has deemed her to be in a persistent vegetative state (PVS).

And considering the situation she’s in, some might consider it a boon.

A coma is a similar yet different state of being alive but in a limited way. In a comatose state, the arousal system that makes Aruna open her eyes, respond to painful stimuli, shuts down.

What is interesting though is that there have been accounts of coma survivors who have been aware, in differing degrees, of their surroundings.

In the words of a coma survivor, “I just woke up again, but still can’t move or let anyone know that I can hear. My body won’t move and my eyes still won’t open. For some reason I cannot stay awake... if this is awake. I am drifting as though on an ocean.”

Even though they’re technically ‘unconscious’, a comatose patient’s awareness, it seems, is definitely more than Aruna’s.

A minimally conscious state, on the other hand, seems to be a more painful existence. It’s a state where patients flit in and out of awareness.

They’re able to gesture, wave and even follow simple commands, though not on a consistent basis. What they feel, in these intermittent moments of awareness, is something that nobody can answer.

But the most terrifying fate, it seems, is that of a patient who’s afflicted with the locked-in syndrome. Imagine that you’re fully conscious, all your mental faculties are in order, except for the fact that you cannot express, except through very minimal bodily gestures, like the blinking of your eyes, any part of what you feel.

Former Elle editor, Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, describes the state in great detail. In the words of Bauby, “Not only was I exiled, paralysed, mute, half deaf, deprived of all pleasures, and reduced to the existence of a jellyfish, but I was also horrible to behold. ”   

Where do you go, finally?
No discussion of death is complete without a discussion of the after-life. We have and always will continue to imagine what happens after death. Where do we go? Is there really a heaven?

Do we get to sit at the feet of a merciful god or are we all destined to end up as worm-food? Tribes and civilizations, poets and prophets, philosophers and scientists through the ages have been pre-occupied with providing a definitive answer to these questions. And many claim to have succeeded.

Yet there remains a galaxy-sized hole in our factual knowledge of the matter that terrifies and seduces us in equal measure. Much of what we learn about afterlife from our religions is an effort to give us a set of tenets to live our lives by.

The equation is simple. The moral and virtuous go on to have a good afterlife and the wicked are damned to torment.

Given the terrible versions of hell that most religions conjure, some religions, mercifully, offer us a few chances to get our act right. In the concept of reincarnation professed by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs, the central idea is that our souls continue to re-appear in a succession of earth-bound life forms till we achieve that perfect state of being which will ensure a life-long pass to heaven.

In Hinduism though, you have to spend some time in heaven or hell, while waiting to be reincarnated. The notion of reincarnation has strong moral implications, as well.

In Hinduism, at least, what you do in one life determines your status in the subsequent one. So essentially if you’re not careful you might come back as a cockroach.  

On the other hand, the string theory, a controversial unified theory of everything that has even the average scientist baffled, proposes that all matter is made of infinitesimally tiny vibrating strings.

And what gives different properties to matter is the various ways in which these strings vibrate. The theory also pre-includes the existence of 11 dimensions. The existence of these extra dimensions allow for the possibility, in theory, of moving from one dimension to the other.

And while there is no hard science to back it up, yet, it has been suggested, in a turn of phrase that sounds more spiritual than scientific, that death is simply a transition from one dimension to the next.