What happens when you die?
MICHELLE FRANCL-DONNAY will never forget 15 April 1987. Her husband Tom was due to pick her up from an evening meeting, but decided to take a swim first. He had an undiagnosed heart condition, and while in the pool had a catastrophic aneurysm. Michelle rode with him in the ambulance. That was the last time she spoke to him.
鈥淲hen I saw Tom鈥檚 body the next morning, he clearly wasn鈥檛 there anymore,鈥� says , a chemist at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and an adjunct scholar at the Vatican Observatory who writes extensively on both science and spirituality. Over the years, she found herself mulling a question humans have asked for a long time: where had he gone?
Even those of us who rationally reject the idea of an afterlife have trouble letting go of the idea. That might be down to our theory of mind. Because we habitually put ourselves in other people鈥檚 shoes and imagine their thoughts and feelings, it can be hard to believe that those thoughts and feelings can just cease to be when ours still feel so real.
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Yet we have no evidence for anything different. When you die, blood stops flowing, the muscles cool and consciousness, whatever that is, slips away. If your body were simply let be, other organisms would rapidly digest it, from microbes already living inside you to newly arrived blowflies.
Human burial rites just change the timescale or manner of your physical disappearance: if your remains are cremated, for instance, the organic compounds of your body form carbon dioxide and the water inside you boils away, leaving just the mineral compounds of your bones. Sooner or later, some of your atoms will become part of other people 鈥� and perhaps, at some point when Earth has long gone, some will become part of the stars from whence they came.
But is that really the last word on you? An already well-developed, albeit controversial, idea known as integrated information theory suggests that consciousness emerges because of the way particular physical systems organise information. Some researchers think life itself is a similar emergent property embodied in a simple equation: life = matter + information.
It is a cast-iron rule of physics that information cannot be destroyed. So might physics provide a back door for some form of afterlife in which information associated with you can live on?
Francl-Donnay reckons quantum physics provides teasing hints, in the way that the quantum wave functions defining our individual atoms and particles don鈥檛 have a well-defined boundary in space or time. 鈥淎t some long distance, there is still some incredibly tiny chance of finding an electron there,鈥� says Francl-Donnay. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not measurable. But that doesn鈥檛 mean it鈥檚 not important.鈥�
But the suggestion that part of what makes us alive survives death goes way beyond what science can currently tell us. What we know for sure is that we will have an afterlife of a kind 鈥� and now perhaps more than we ever did before 鈥� through the digital records of us entombed in mobile phones and spread across cyberspace (see 鈥淵our extended self鈥�, below). And in the minds of those we leave behind, of course. 鈥淓ven today there鈥檚 a sense in which Tom persists 鈥� in my memory,鈥� says Francl-Donnay. 鈥淎nd I can hear his voice if I shut my eyes.鈥� That truly is the last breath of you.
YOUR EXTENDED SELF
The existence of trillions of microbial cells within us makes the internal boundaries of the self a little fuzzy (see 鈥淲here are your boundaries?鈥�). The same is true of our external limits, too.
We already know that when we use a tool such as a hammer, our brain鈥檚 body map expands to encompass it: the tool temporarily becomes part of an 鈥渆xtended self鈥�. Something similar is true if you are a habitual driver. The vehicle becomes part of you 鈥� or perhaps you become part of the vehicle.
With digital devices now constantly in our hands, the extended self could become permanent. 鈥淥ur identity partly depends on memories,鈥� says philosopher at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Increasingly, we are outsourcing our memories to our smartphones 鈥� not just through notifications of what we should do, but through messages and images that recreate what we have done. The result? 鈥淎 larger part of our narrative self is smeared out over our environment,鈥� says Heersmink. You may extend further than you think. Graham Lawton
驰翱鲍鈥�
don鈥檛 degrade all at the same rate when you die. The brain starts first, within minutes of death; the prostate gland or uterus are the last. We don鈥檛 know why.
