Why Skepticism Is the Right Approach to the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia | Michael Shermer

Well, Heavens on Earth was something of an extension of my previous books. I have not covered the afterlife in any kind of detail from my previous books on the paranormal, the supernatural, religion, God, morality—and so this was sort of a natural extension of “well if you’re skeptical of all these other things, what about the afterlife?” My standard one-liner is: “I’m for it.” But the fact that I’m for it doesn’t make it true. In fact, if anything, the more passionately we want something to be true, the more skeptical we should be of our own beliefs because we know how powerful these cognitive biases are to lead us to want to find evidence for what we already want to be true.

So, I really kind of went in search of just all the standard religious theories of the afterlife and heaven. I go through the big three monotheisms: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Right there, all of them have a history in the sense of all the different versions that there are of the afterlife and heaven, and they’re quite different histories than, say, if you read a history of cosmology, which sort of shows a progression from the ancients through the scientific revolution, through the early modern period, all the way up to today of us getting closer and closer to an understanding of the real nature of the cosmos. But there’s nothing like that in religious histories of the afterlife; they’re all scattershot: this theory, this theory; there’s no sense of progress.

So that alone tells us that these are culturally determined, geographically located. Like reincarnation, the belief that we come back in this world, our souls somehow migrate into other bodies: Why do they seem to hover all those souls in this subcontinent of India? There’s very few other places around the world where the souls seem to go. That’s an indication that these things are not real out there in the real world sense, but real inside people’s heads as determined by their cultures.

But the core of Heavens on Earth really is the scientific search for the afterlife. And so this is what I do: science writing and research in scientific areas. Believe it or not, this is no longer a fringe idea, this idea that we could live forever. There are scientists today who say that the first person to live 1000 years is alive today. Okay, I’m skeptical, but still these aren’t fringe nuts. These are billionaires like Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, the Google guys Larry and Sergey, who have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in this company Calico. Ray Kurzweil is their chief engineer who believes in the singularity.

So this whole idea of radical life extension, cryonics, transhumanism, the singularity, “we’re going to upload our minds into a computer,” these form the core center of my book and why I’m skeptical, why really all of us should be skeptical. Because first, although it’s not impossible that these researchers and scientists are wrong, it’s just very unlikely because the problems of, say, duplicating your soul, whatever that would be—in science that would be your pattern of information—your genome—and then the equivalent of that, your “connectome.” That is the tracings of all your memories, everything that’s you. This is their theory: you copy it and you upload it into a computer.

Let’s say you have it backed up every night. When you die, you just put it into a clone or inside a computer or something like that. That’s the idea. And I think the underestimation of the complexity of the problem is orders of magnitude off. We are not even close to doing anything like this. I mean, Ray Kurzweil projects 2040 is the singularity, and after that, we might be able to live forever. How is that going to happen, and who is the “we”?

So then I have a chapter on “Who are we? Who are you? What does it mean to be you?” And so their idea is that if we just copied your memories, it would be you—Stop right there, which memories? At what age: 20, 30, 50, 60? The memories are not stored in there like videotapes, like you just play it back on the theater of your mind and there it is, what really happened when you were 15 or whatever—no, they’re constantly edited and changed. Those neural networks are reworked constantly, so there’s no real “you” in any snapshot sense of that moment.

“Right there is the time when you’re…” you know, no such thing. And then finally, there’s the “through your eyes perspective,” what’s called a point-of-view self. So the memory self, mem-self, is what I just described, and it is the point-of-view self, which is me looking out of my eyes at you right now and you looking out at me. Now, when I go to sleep tonight, there’s a disruption in my conscious point of view, but it comes back in the morning, and if I go under general anesthesia, it’s gone for a couple of hours, it comes back, a little groggy at first, but poof, then it comes clear.

If I died and then copied my brain and put it in a computer and turned the computer on, am I suddenly inside of the computer looking out the little camera hole? I don’t think so. And here’s why: because if we did this while you were alive, let’s say the current technology would be that after you die, we take your brain out, slice it, scan every single synaptic connection, and then take that big data back and put it into a computer. In the future, maybe in 500 years or something, we could scan your brain while you’re living and scan through sophisticated MRI type technology every single neural connection.

Let’s say we can do that now and get your connectome and put it into a computer while you’re standing right there alive. So we turn it on, who is that in there in the computer when you’re standing right there? You see the problem? You’re not going to be standing there going, “Yep, there I am in the computer.” No, you’re going to be standing there going, “No, I’m me!” No more than a twin would look at their other twin and go, “Yeah, there I go.” No.

I don’t think even if they could accomplish the technology of it, it’s still not you being put into the future in terms of an afterlife. And by the way, I think religions have the same problem. When Christians talk about, “You’re going to wake up with Jesus up in heaven,” “Okay, but I’m actually still down in the ground there.” “No, no, that’s your body, your soul.” “Wait, what’s the soul?” “It’s all your memories, you know, it’s you.” No. Which part of me is going to heaven? What age and so on? Same problem, it’s just a copy going to heaven. I’m still in the ground; I’m still dead; it’s just some copy of me. I’m not waking up in heaven through my point of view.

Okay, so that’s the core of the book, and then the subtitle of the book—The Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality, and Utopia. So, I do approach the problem of creating heavens on earth. Like if we can’t live forever, maybe we can create a perfect world here. No, a heaven? No, you can’t do it. This is why they’ve always failed. Utopias always fail because there is no such place—that’s the very definition of utopia—“nowhere.” No such place that’s perfect because we’re so variable and people differ in their needs and wants and desires, that this, if anything, has been a dystopia; the search for utopia has led to dystopia because we all vary.

So even that doesn’t work. So I conclude then at the end, sort of a discussion of what does it all mean? Where do we find meaning and purpose in life? This is all there is. And if you think about it, even if there is an afterlife, even if there is a heaven, this is the most important thing: now—not the hereafter, but the here and now and the relationships you have and how you engage with the world and other people. That’s what counts, now, so make the most of it.