Till Noever — author & polymath

about emortalism...

“All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.”
Simone de Beauvoir (A Very Easy Death)

I think that all available evidence supports—at least for the fearless seeker of the truth abut reality—one and only one conclusion: all religion is fiction; that word this case used in a wider meaning, referring to stories devised by human imagination and, in whatever media were/are available to spread tales about entirely imaginary events and actors, while at the same time denying that these tales are imaginary.

Mind you, there’s wrong with storytelling per se. But there’s no value in going to extremes like Richard Dawkins and label fairy tales as ‘lies’. That’s just as deranged as asserting that the fictions of Bible, Koran, Tora have any relationship to what the world is actually like and how it works. That many of these fictions maybe contain snippets of ’historical accuracy’, means nothing. They’re just means to add verisimilitude to the fiction. I’ve written a whole bunch of novels containing period-historical and current-historical ‘facts’ and even people, without making what I’m writing into anything more than imaginative—and hopefully entertaining and engaging—fiction, with the obligatory disclaimer that the novel ‘is a work of fiction; i.e. literature in the form of prose that describes imaginary events and people.’

Far from being ‘lies’, fictional narratives have a wide range of uses for humans, ranging from helping some indigenous peoples finding their way in a desert to being essential for the mind making sense out of—or infusing a sense/meaning into—life and what happens in it. And, yes, given that this is the case, religious fiction does have a spectrum of functions, as do the associated faiths. But religious fiction being passed off as truth about what is real and what is not… The best one can say about the creators and purveyors of such claims is that they have bought into the delusion of their fictions-as-reality-descriptors. The worst one might suspect is that they are using them as tools to manipulate others for their own benefit. Or maybe they are doing both. Any variant of ‘theology’—i.e. ‘speaking about God’; etymology: (Greek): theos (God) and logos (word)—ultimately is, to quote Robert Heinlein, “searching in a dark cellar at midnight for a black cat that isn't there”. He adds that “Theologians can persuade themselves of anything”. Yep…

I’ve been acutely aware of my personal mortality and the dreadfulness of death and personal extinction since somewhere between the age of 6-7. Not because anyone I knew well and loved and missed because they died—at the time even my grandparents were still alive and kicking, with the first one, a man I was extremely fond of, dying suddenly of an illness only when I was 13—but because I had an inclination to think about things and ask questions that 6-7 year-olds don’t all that often concern themselves with. From that day on the reality of death became a constant companion of my life, which ultimately, as it does for everyone at some stage in their lives, involved the inevitable question, noted by Gore Vidal: “What happens to precious little me when I die?” At that time it possibly was just about me, as those around me showed no signs of dying anytime soon.

Primary school in Germany around the time of me being forced into the legally imposed and enforced ‘educational’ straightjacket included subjection to daily morning prayers , which included a request to ‘God’ to “lay your hand on every child”. The question, the 6-year old asked himself, was how many hands ‘God’ was supposed to have to do the laying? No sense of religious metaphors at this stage in my life. When I counted the number of children in a class photo and my mother asked me why, I told her. It remained a favorite episode in her stories-of-young-Till. It also portended my approach to tackling the big issues of existence, which—despite the continuing insertion of religion into my primary- and high-schooling until the age of 14, when I was allowed to opt out of wasting time on this mumpitz—remained uncontaminated by indoctrination in the monotheist absurdities peddled by the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic trinity fictions. I also remained very happily unbaptized as my parents were apostates from the two dominant Christian faiths, which means that the purveyors of religious indoctrination by both of the competing, Lutheran and Catholic, politely declined to accept me as a malleable pupil, as they had no faith that, based on my parents’ inclinations, I was going to be a suitably receptive vessel.

Their suspicions were justified. I was blessed—pun intended!—with not having the question “What happens to precious little me when I die?” provided with a ready-made answer; leaving me to figure it out for myself, and then do with my conclusions whatever I chose to. Starting with “Death is bad”. Somewhat later, after I knew enough about biology etc, adding “Death may be necessary for evolution and all that, but it’s bad anyway.”

No compromising here. All religious fiction clearly was fiction and never mind if it was disguised as ‘philosophy’—I got into trouble a few times with saying that aloud during compulsory pre-14-years-old religious classes at high school!—and so let’s figure out what is really going on after life. Whatever that means…

Well, it looks like the most likely scenario is that death is the END of a life. What once was a person becomes…NOTHING. All that’s left are the memories of the person in other persons. In due course and after a few generations, those memories will fade because there’s nobody left to have them. NOTHING ending up as DEFINITELY NOTHING.

One could argue that this isn’t true. After all, we have documented histories of dead persons, which should maybe qualify as ‘memories’. Or maybe there are the works they left behind. Or effects they had on human history.

Sure, but even the most impressive and emotionally touching work of art isn’t alive. History is dead. All the works of persons that have lived are lifeless things, which ultimately will end up being swallowed up by time and ultimately only assume significance because persons assign significance or meaning to them. Imagining that they are more than they are: things that have never had life. Never were living persons that arose from the NOTHINGNESS of pre-conception until they die and become NOTHING. Which to some people seems perfectly sensible, and maybe it is. But pre-conception NOTHINGNESS and post-death NOTHING are not the same. NOTHINGNESS is the state of a potential for the creation of a new person. NOTHING is the result of the annihilation of an existing person.

I think the problem with even philosophers apparently unable to get this is a basic failure of imagination, grounded in a fundamental and unalterable cognitive feature: the impossibility of a human mind to grasp, to understand, to create a mental image or working concept of NOTHING. 'NO’ ‘THING’. Negation of THINGness.

Can’t be done! Even a simple question like “What is ‘nothing’?” carries an implicit and unerasable, irremovable underlying cognitive assumption that it is something. All philosophies use the concept of ‘nothing’ in one form or another. Different labels and different ways to explicate the nature of nothing or nothingness, but all of them subject to the same inherent limitation: we can give it a label, but we cannot understand what the label is for, even less than what it could possibly mean. Nothing, or any of its other labels, has no meaning because it cannot. We can’t even say that there is the very possibility of ‘nothing’ without making that assertion nonsensical. By the way, the same goes for a concept like ‘non-existence’, which is just a synonym for ‘nothing’, though philosophers have a field day wondering, and writing endless worthless treatises, about what ‘existence’ can even mean.

Despite the intrinsic incomprehensibility of ‘nothing’, there is at least what you might think of as a path between two points that helps us get an inkling of what lies behind the veil of our limited ability to even begin to understand. It is the path a person walks between NOTHINGNESS and NOTHING; that meaning between multiverse history frames located before those of the person’s multiverse conception histories and those after the person’s death histories. But that’s a different story, to be told in a different context.

Back to growing-up-me… I read everything handy and to my liking, from classic fairy tales to American crime fiction (translated into German), most of Karl May’s novels, science and technology books and inevitably science fiction, including ‘pulps’, which were a lot of fun and came out once a week, cheaply enough for me to get them with my pocket money, despite parental disapproval, as they considered them junk. That applied particularly to the perennial and interestingly influential Perry Rhodan series/franchise. Every weekly issue for over 10 years at one issue/week. You do the math. (Hint: over 520 issues.)

What differentiated the Perry Rhodan stories from other science fiction pulps—which I also read of course—was that a limited range of protagonists obtained, from a benevolent and mysterious alien civilization, devices making them ‘relatively immortal’; meaning they could die, e.g. from injuries, but otherwise they didn’t age and of course didn’t get sick either. This idea was also promoted, in a far more scientific context in 1979 by Alvin Silverstein’s The Conquest of Death—of which I happen to have a personally dedicated first edition—where he coined the term ‘emortality’ to replace the Perry Rhodan universe’s ‘relative immortality’. The term was picked up later by Mack Reynolds, whose novel Eternity—completed posthumously by Dean Ing—is about a group of emortals hiding in a small Mexican town.

So, after all that self-brainwashing, and with death having been my constant philosophical companion since those early days, I guess it’s not difficult to understand why ‘emortality’ or ‘relative immortality’ has not just found a firm place in my novels. After coming across Alan Harrington’s The Immortalist (Subtitled: An Approach to the Engineering of Man's Divinity) in the early 1970s I was hooked.

”Death is an imposition on the human race, and no longer acceptable…"

I would rephrase that to: ‘Death has become an imposition…’, but otherwise I’m d’accord with the idea, despite the vexing issues accompanying the implementation of methods to indefinitely extend human life. I’m only too aware what it would imply for our future, especially if it were implemented in a way that even remotely resembles the very dangerous solution to the death problem used in The Ateleíoto Factor, which was a contemporary view at the problem of ‘Restorers’, which played an important role in Fontaine and Tethys, and also will in Aslam.