Death, nothingness, and subjectivity

Humanist, Nov-Dec, 1994 by Thomas W. Clark

But, of course, the difficulty here is that it seems arbitrary, or simply false, to say that TC/rad's experience instantly follows TC's last experience if there is no connection of memory or personality but only of some bodily continuity. (And if we wish, we can imagine that drastic changes in body as well are engineered during the unconscious period, so that TC/rad looks nothing like his predecessor.) The objective facts are that TC has a last experience, then sometime later TC/rad has a first experience. But despite the lack of personal subjective continuity, despite the fact that we may decide at some point on the continuum of change (in memory, personality, and body) that TC no longer exists to have experiences, experience doesn't end for him--that is, there is no onset of nothingness. What we have instead is a transformation of the subject itself, a transformation of the context of awareness, while experience chugs along, oblivious to the unconscious interval during which the transformation took place. It's not that TC/rad's experience follows TC's in the sense of being connected to it by virtue of memory or personality, but that there is no subjective interval or gap between them experienced by either person. This is expressed in the fact that TC/rad, like TC, feels like he's always been present. However radical the change in context, and however long the unconscious interval, it seems that awareness--for itself, in its generic aspect of "always having been present"-is immune to interruption.

Death and Birth

Let us call TC's fate in becoming TC/rad "death by transformation." My claim is that awareness is subjectively continuous, in this generic sense, across such a transformation. Considered from "its" point of view, experience never stops even though objectively speaking (from the "outside") one context for it ends and later--as much later as you care to imagine--another context picks up. The next step in my argument is to apply this conclusion to ordinary death and birth. Instead of being transformed into some sort of successor, imagine that TC is allowed by a careless technician to lapse from unconsciousness into irreversible brain death. Somewhere, sometime later, a fresh consciousness comes into being, either naturally or by artifice. Except that the physical incarnations of TC and this other consciousness have no causal connection, this situation is the same as death by transformation. That is, one context of awareness has lapsed and another one begins. During the objective interval there has been no subjective hiatus in awareness; only the context of experience has changed.

This thesis implies that, even if all centers of awareness were extinguished and the next conscious creature appeared millions of years hence (perhaps in a galaxy far, far away), there would still be no subjective interregnum. Subjectivity would jump that (objective) gap just as easily as it jumps the gap from our last experience before sleep to the first upon awakening. All the boring eons that pass without the existence of a subject will be irrelevant for the subject that comes into being. Nor will they count as "nothingness" for all the conscious entities which ceased to exist. Subjectivity, awareness, consciousness, experience--whatever we call it--never stops arising as far as it is concerned.