From Essays After Montaigne
Of all the follies of the world, the most universall, and of most men received, is the care of reputation and study of glorie, to which we are so wedded that we neglect and cast-off riches, friends, repose, life and health (goods effectuall and substantiall), to follow that vaine image, and idlie-simple voice, which hath neither body nor hold-fast.
And of mens unreasonable humours, it seemeth that the best philosophers doe most slowly and more unwillingly cleare themselves of this than of another: it is the most peevish, the most froward, and the most opinative. 'Because it ceaseth not to tempt even those Mindes that profit best.' There are not many whereof reason doth so evidently condemne the vanitie, but it is so deeply rooted in us, as I wot not whether any man could ever clearely discharge himselfe of it. When you have alleaged all the reasons you can, and beleeved all to disavow and reject her, she produceth, contrarie to your discourses, so intestine inclination, that you have small hold against her.
Would several women compete to marry a reputed millionaire if the proceedings weren't televised? Would people compete to win a million dollars by outdoing each other in strenuous and humiliating undertakings without a large prime time audience? It's my surmise that the dirty secret of reality television (of which perhaps the contestants themselves aren't even consciously aware) is that the prizes offered serve only as an excuse for the contestants to shamelessly pursue the attention that they so transparently desire more than love or money. In other contexts, bad behavior has been seen as being still worse if it's motivated by material gain, but here and now, virtually any act, no matter how dehumanizing, will be defended by someone if it pays enough. Now that shameless pursuit of wealth is indeed no cause for shame, it's being used to disguise all sorts of efforts to gain attention.
But longings for money or attention (or for children or salvation, for that matter) all have a common genesis in our aspiration to transcend our finite nature. We want to exist beyond our limited selves in space and time. Harold Bloom claims that Proust saw sexual jealousy in these terms as well:
Sexual jealousy, Proust suggests, is a mask for the fear of mortality: the jealous lover becomes obsessed with every detail of the space and time of betrayal because he dreads that there will not be enough space and time for himself.
Christopher Alexander sees this same underlying impulse more hopefully in The Timeless Way of Building:
Each one of us wants to be able to bring a building or part of town to life like this.
It is a fundamental human instinct, as much a part of our desire as the desire for children. It is, quite simply, the desire to make a part of nature, to complete a world which is already made of mountains, streams, snowdrops, and stones, with something made by us, as much a part of nature, and a part of our immediate surroundings.
Each one of us has, somewhere in his heart, the dream to make a living world, a universe.
Whether we seek to augment our material selves through our creations, through eternal salvation, through the accumulation of the surrogate self of wealth or children, or through the amplification of attention from others, we all seek some comfort against our circumscription. And I suspect that a great deal can be gleaned about a culture by determining how it views each of those methods of augmentation and how it ranks them in terms of acceptability. Is creative effort seen as self-indulgent or inspiring? Is piety seen as deluded or profound? Is acquisitiveness seen as crass or pragmatic? Is seeking posterity seen as honorable or pointless? Is seeking attention seen as obnoxious or charming? The culture of thinkers through history has tended to advocate immortality via the abstract means of glory, honor, or whatever you'd prefer to call it. Though it's a fine thing to be well regarded (especially if that regard is legitimately earned), Montaigne rightly suggests that being so won't overcome mortality any more effectively than being rich or having children.
In the epilogue to The End of Time, Julian Barbour writes of immortality:
The desire for an afterlife is very understandable, but we may be looking for immortality in the wrong place. I mentioned Schrödinger's curious failure to recognize in his own physics the philosophy of ancient India (especially the Upanishads) he so admired. There is a beautiful passage at the end of of his epilogue to What Is Life? that nevertheless strikes me as wishful thinking. He poses the question, 'What is this "I"?' Here is part of his answer:
If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by 'I' is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones... Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death.
Thus, he argues that our personal 'ground-stuff' is imperishable, holding us together through all the changes of life. He ends with this affirmation of faith: 'In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.' But earlier he had praised the great Upanishads for their recognition that ATHMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self). He seems to want to have his cake and eat it, to be dissolved in the all-comprehending eternal self yet still retain a personal identity. He is not finding a canvas, he is clutching for a straw.
I disagree with Barbour's conclusion--I believe that Schrödinger did find a canvas or mirror. Our consciousness, which even Barbour recognizes is "the ultimate mystery," is unlikely to ever be understood in the reductive terms that seem to effectively describe the rest of our mental and physical workings. However, the undeniable existence of that ineffable reflective surface (the "I" that thinks and therefore exists) doesn't demonstrate its imperishability. The tidal pool's surface of my consciousness doesn't seem to have recorded any experiences or memories prior to 1967, and I see no reason why it couldn't cease to record further experiences or memories past a certain date. But despite the apparent error in his conclusion, I think that Barbour is right to frame the question of immortality as a choice between dissolution into something greater (whether it's God, nature, or something as yet unimagined) and permanent personal existence. Being carried back and dispersed into a great ocean seems more likely to me than any personal permanence, and an eternal existence in this same pool sounds unimaginably lonely.
7:53:24 AM 
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