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Brain scientist vs novelist: what use is an afterlife?

Julian Richards, online subeditor

A noticeboard in the foyer informed me that the Pagan Federation would be meeting in the Brockway Room. They seemed appropriate neighbours for the novelist and the neuroscientist I had come to hear last night at Conway Hall, a central London venue for serious music and firmly humanist lectures. Neither is a follower of any organised religion, but both are preoccupied with one of the biggest questions that religion tries to answer: what should we think about death?

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, told us that he had become so absorbed in thinking about the afterlife that over a period of seven years he sketched out more than 70 different versions of it, publishing a collection of the best of them last year as Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives.

Eagleman opened the event with a reading of the title story:


and so on, until you realise that it was the fragmentation of your earthly life that made it so much more blissful:


 Self-Eagleman composite.jpg

David Eagleman and Will Self (Image: Julian Richards)

Eagleman himself has this fictional child's joy of jumping from one possibility to another, so much so that he's elevated it to a guiding principle for life and given it a name: possibilianism. It's in the nature of science, he said.

"What you learn in a life of science is that at the end of the pier of knowledge are uncharted waters; what we know is vastly outstripped by what we don't know." Rather than becoming fixated on knowing things for certain, he said, what we should be doing is "shining a flashlight around the possibility space".

Will Self, the novelist, doesn't buy Eagleman's bright-eyed, confident manner. He wanted to find out where fear lay in the scientist's jumping between imagined afterlives.

Concerned, he said, that the conversation might get boring, he began to cross-examine Eagleman. "Was your epiphany emotional or intellectual?" he asked.

Earlier, Self had described his own epiphany. The experience of nursing his sick mother until her early death had profoundly altered the way he thought about death, and he suggested that all writers were inspired by such epiphanies.

Eagleman answered that his epiphany had been intellectual: after spending several years as a proselytising atheist, he found it was more interesting to think about God in new and different ways than it was not to think about him at all.

Self pursued his comic role as prosecuting counsel. "How old are you?" he asked. Thirty-eight, Eagleman said. Young, Self noted, but Eagleman is precocious - was he in the throes of a precociously early mid-life crisis? One that involved his spending his nights in hotel rooms gripping his mattress in dread of death?

Eagleman laughed and began to reply. "In science -"

"No," Self insisted, "In a hotel room!"

"I'm optimistic about death," Eagleman said. "I'm curious about what happens next."

Self remained unconvinced. He asked if Eagleman had ever watched someone die, saying that that experience would "kick into" Eagleman's happy musings over possible afterlives "very powerfully".

Eagleman stood his ground. "I have had people die in my arms," he said, and it is reassuring to think about how we might, perhaps, slip out of the four dimensions we inhabit into some others, given that physics suggests there may be many dimensions we cannot perceive.

A member of the audience asked the two about their religious backgrounds, and this drew a suggestive true story from Eagleman. He said he was Jewish, and that some people had said that Sum is a very Jewish book.

To explain this, he said that he had grown up in New Mexico, where there were few other Jews, and so he was not exposed to many Jewish beliefs. Wanting to understand what Jews believed about the afterlife, he asked a rabbi, who said simply, "Ask two Jews and you'll get three opinions." Perhaps that was where he got his fascination with multiple possibilities, he said. There, then, are the emotional roots of his possibilianism.

Eagleman's next book of fiction, he revealed, will be about a message from a civilisation that existed in a universe before our own, which was destroyed in a "big crunch" that made our universe's big bang possible. That civilisation was a billion years more advanced than ours when it sent the message, trusting that it would be picked up many billions of years later when life in a new universe had developed the ability to receive it.

"What would the message be?" asked a member of the audience.

"Don't go to dinner parties," said Self. "You've heard it all before."

The event was staged by Intelligence Squared, which organises public events on science and technology, the arts and literature, politics and more.

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This write-up makes me wish I'd gone. And now I want to read Eagleman's book. (Meanwhile, totally agree with Self on the dreaded DP. Apparently, Alain de Botton sells tickets for his DPs: he actually trains you - or educates, he might say - in the ways and means of having an interesting one. Lesson 1: Don't invite Mr de Botton).


Having known a few Spiritualists I have to ask: Why spend your life thinking about the afterlife when you will be finding out soon enough?


you might find comfort in the idea of an afterlife, but then sit and think about it for awhile. what would you do? you meet all your loved ones and give everybody a big hug and then...uh, ok then. everyone sitting around a huge ethereal coffee table wishing someone had a deck of cards?


It's sad when people try to use science to push religious ideology.

Seriously, if you want to believe in something that you have no way to possibly prove it is anywhere near true; that's cool. I can respect that, just don't claim your an intellectual and your using science to prove it.

Your not, your making a fool of yourself.

And no you can't prove it, but then again that's why you have your blind faith anyway.


When we, or any living thing dies, it returns to the dimension of pure energy from whence we came (call it heaven, the afterlife, the spiritual dimension, or whatever). Take Einstein's theory and rework it until you realize that matter is energy vibrating slower than the speed of light squared. The Big Bang can be seen as pure energy slowing down to create matter with mass. In a Buddhist way, our life forces, or souls have lived many lives, from vegetable to animal, in order to learn how to run the complicated physical systems that are our bodies. Our souls have lived physical lives before, and will again. Afterlife is a misnomer, as it is the continuation of life in a pure (spiritual) energy dimension.


Life's a gift, death is just the end of the party.
open your presents and share!!!


We understand that you are aging and are getting a little cranky. But we don't care and find the patronizing tone boring. I'm sure our children will feel the same way when we get old. Although, I doubt we will be so patronizing to them, and perhaps more importantly, we will be able to see this for ourselves, as opposed to the me generations never ending centrism.

Gah. Just get off the stage and go retire!


Authorities of both theism and atheism suffer from insufferable smugness.
I used to be an atheist,
I got over it.
My God is not the "God of the Gaps."
It is the God of the Yawning Chasms.
The answer lies not "out there".
It lies within.
Never stop looking.


Wil Self looks like the Grim Reaper. Don't play chess with him. Don't read his books either because if you fall asleep...


APR says:

I had an epiphany about the nature of the “afterlife” when I was fairly young after having a tonsillectomy under general anesthesia. What I remember was the doctor’s masked face, fade to black, wake up in the recovery room. There was no sense of time, no dreams, nothing. Supposedly general anesthesia is the closest one gets to death. It is frequently the most dangerous part of an operation. If the brain is turned off or dead, there is nothing to perceive anything. I do not disconnect the self from the organism as religions seem to do. They are one in the same.

When I die something else will wake up for the first time. There is no connection except that the impact that I make in this world affects the life forms that live in the future. If we have a negative impact it contributes to the creation of a “hell” for future beings. If we do the opposite we contribute to the real life “heaven.” I think that is what religions attempt to teach us but we haven’t figured it out, yet.

In this way life is eternal. Think about that.


There is evidence of existence of over 90% matter and energy around us namely DARK MATTER and DARK ENERGY.

Current scope of science can only sense this dimension by the gravitational impact measured so far.

If any of you kids really want to wonder about what is currently around us and what will be ? then dig into this DARK MATTER and DARK ENERGY research. There is plenty of unknowns for every one!


This should be published in a religious blog or website. Anyway in the context of this article calling Eagleman a scientist is misleading.


Solar Saves, what on earth are you talking about? You seem to flit between nominalism and dualism, drawing on vague relations to a physical theory you know nothing about. Please stop.


"...your an intellectual and your using science to prove it.

Your not, your making a fool of yourself."

Um, you sure are Michael :)


I love David Eagleman, possibilianism is a very existential point of view. : )


I genuinely liked browsing your blog content, and I've added in you to my Yahoo reader.


Bret Ware:
No idea what you're talking about, my ideas about spiritual evolution and the spiritual energy dimension came to me in my own epiphanies and relationship with spirits and death.


I found this stimulating and motivating. I will have to read David Eagleman's book; he must have worked diligently to emerge from Texas with such thought provoking views. For those of us who see death as the end of consciousness, it is an encouragement to make the most of every living moment, enriching it for others if you get the opportunity and filling 24 hours with love, laughter, tangential thinking, exercise and happy dreams.

When my organs stop accompanying my song of life, I can imagine the dust that was me being swallowed by a passing open mouthed bat.




Yes, I think the parody on House would be great and I would certainly watch it, provided Doc Hard-Drive was played by Hugh Laurie. :)


Why do people insist on referring the what happens after life as a noun, i.e. the afterlife?


I've always said: anything is possible, but so what? The very fact that anything is theoretically possible makes MOST possibilities meaningless, and thus our challenging task as humans is to quickly and efficiently determine the most interesting possibilities out of an infinitude of bad ideas without wasting unwarranted amounts of time on the thoroughly improbable.

This is why I think being a 'possibilian' or whatever you call yourself is just another damn gimmick. And you know what? I'm really tired of gimmicks. It's tempting to believe that you're just another sell out and that people like Dawkins and Dennett have ten times the sense, honesty, and heart that you do.



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