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I wrote this a few years ago but haven't published it widely. I think it might be of interest to the less wrong community....
Prelude: Contradiction and its Consequences
We start with nothing, unlike Hegel, who began with being. Though they are the same thing, as pure being is nothing in the sense that nothing in reality is pure being.
If we start purely from nothing, or no-thing, we might ask what is no-thing anyway, and while there are many directions to go here, I will go in the direction of bimodal logic. You will have to forgive me.
In this direction, nothing is more than it appears, as there is less than nothing --- or what we should term falseness. That is, if nothing has any content, it is that all objects that are ‘nothing’ are also ‘false’ --- that is, a no-thing is not present in the world. This falseness seems to be the case whether or not there are existing objects, whether I even exist --- simply because this is something of a tautology. If there is nothing, then that thing which is nothing is false. However, this falseness is also distinct from nothing, is less than nothing, in that things can be merely false without being ‘nothing’ in all its grandeur. If there are 1000 apples in a barrel and I say there are 990, my statement isn’t false because there is no possibility of 1000 apples, but merely due to happenstance. Rather, falseness --- less than nothing --- is acquired when we perform the analytic operation upon nothing --- digesting it down into its constituent component.
But if there is ‘false,’ we come to a conundrum. Because it seems we have both ‘nothing’ and ‘false’ as objects. But if we have access to ‘false,’ then we also have access to ‘true’ ---or to what happens when ‘false’ is applied to itself: that which is falsely false is true. This double negation means we have at least two things other than nothing --- ‘false or true’: we have generalized nothing to a tautology.
And we could continue this generalization operation, but it serves for the moment to notice that in this list we have made --- ‘false or true’ --- that the two moments are not symmetric: the entire statement itself is true because it is a tautology. One side or the other of any tautology must be true in every context. That is, ‘true’ is equivalent to the statement ‘true or false.’ Truth, by itself, seems to overawe tautology. If I claim a barrel contains 1000 apples, and the barrel does contain this amount, my statement is more precise than saying there are either 1000 apples or 990 apples --- true or false. If I wish, I could stop here, prohibit further thought, contemplate only precise truth, and consider myself a man of great discernment and intelligence.
But what if I do not wish to do this? I might find something interesting if I continue, and rather than taking the prohibition as the end of reasoning, I flip it on its head and perform one more negation --- asking what is always the opposite of true, what is guaranteed to be false. This negation would move me into a contradiction --- it is not that I have true or false when I talk about ‘nothing’ but instead ‘true and false.’ Nothing is precisely that which is contradictory, not that which merely does not exist, but rather that which cannot exist. I have come full circle in the following manner:
1. I started with nothing. What is it? I don’t know.
2. However, I do know I can move analytically to falseness
3. I then discovered, through generalization, that there is either truth or falseness
4. But then, I prohibited a move beyond this understanding by resting on the notion that truth, in the list of possibilities, overawes falseness.
5. And then I realized that, in fact, nothing returns with a vengeance in the opposite of my prohibition --- a contradiction that is equivalent to the nothing with which I started.
If I wished to continue from contradiction, I could repeat the move over again but extract even more positions. For example, contradiction --- the impossible --- contains within it the notion of possibility, a little bit extra that can be analyzed or digested out of the ‘impossible.’ That is to say, analytically, we extract the possible from the impossible.
But then we might be tempted to ask, what is the generalization of the possible, the possible applied to itself, the double possible or to repeat a famous formula, the possibility of the possible? Here we cannot simply move back into the realm of ‘true or false.’ Instead, we find a kind of repetition of the false itself in the notion of the fake applied to everything. Everything is fraudulent because there is always some possibility of failure; no statement is certain. This position is somewhat analogous to the eternal trauma of the obsessive-neurotic, for whom even that which appears solid as the ground may melt into the air. Possibility, generalized, presents us with a world full of mere appearances.
However, is there a prohibition here, a fraud which is the most fraudulent, as it were, just as truth overawes tautology in the first prohibition we discovered? Yes, it is the pure symbol, the mere name. This pure symbol is a kind of gesture at something out in the world, a perfect fraud that almost stops being a fraud but instead becomes a mere absence. In this sense, it also becomes a certainty of fraudulence; the symbol is, in some sense, always false since it is stripped of all the logic of implementation required of a real object; a word can be spoken whether or not the thing the word points to exists. When I say ‘there is a dog over there,’ even if there is a dog, it doesn’t adhere to the word ‘dog’ which I spoke. In saying ‘dog,’ I didn’t show you the image of a dog, create a painting of a dog, replay the recording of its barks or even grab a real dog. The pure symbol has nothing of the substance of a real dog. The fraudulence in my statement, the fact that there isn’t a dog as a symbol, and never can be --- that actually existing dogs are not packaged directly with the term dog --- this absence is a pure kind of fraud, and so I can be certain that the word ‘dog’ is always a lie.
However, precisely because it is an absence, this absence allows for the final position, a repetition of contradiction. I can now make this statement: ‘there both is and is not a dog over there.’ Because the actually existing object referred to by the symbology is absent from the symbol itself, I can now pull contradiction out of the space of pure nothing and onto the page as a definite contradiction written out: ‘there is a dog (animal), and there is not a dog (symbol) over there.’ What a trick.
However, this movement can also be tracked once more, now as a materialist movement beyond mere logic.
Here, I am asking the reader to take seriously one of the most contradictory and ridiculous theories, or interpretations, of physicality that physicists have produced throughout the previous century --- the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (MWI).
First, we have the quantum wave function, a wibbly wobbly that waves nothing about to and fro. As a result of the fact that reality is composed of waves in nothing at the lowest level, we obtain the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. However, another way of thinking about uncertainty lies in noticing that it is also a possibility. If the position or momentum of a particle is uncertain, then we can only know about the statistics or possibilities of the particle’s position and momentum.
This possibility, found in the uncertainty principle, is generalized in the principal's universal application to all particles found in reality. Now we no longer deal with possibility in theory but rather the actual impacts of this possibility upon all existing physical objects. Rather than being able to determine precisely, what the movement of an electron or molecule will place it in the future, we are stuck only with statistical dynamics everywhere.
However, there is something we can extract from these statistical dynamics. We can measure some, though not all, facts about the positions and momenta of some particles, or to put it another way, we can find ourselves entangled in a particular timeline. That is, we are not in the reality where Napoleon died at three or Marie Curie was never born. We are in a specific timeline, a single reality that continues to impact us, which we know impacts us because we exist within it. However, this singular reality, the actually existing particles we encounter (or in Hegelian terms: this-sidedness), comes with a caveat. Because we can never know where we are in the quantum wave --- because of the uncertainty principle --- we can never perfectly predict the future motion of the particles with which we are entangled.
However, through many complicated experiments, this entanglement points to the inherently contradictory nature of the quantum wave function. Here, the MWI proposes that the solution to the paradox of Shrodinger’s cat is more straightforward than we might think --- the cat is both alive and dead in separate timelines. These timelines are generated whenever a particle moves in one direction instead of another.
Everything that physically can happen does happen in some timeline. Further, the reason why time appears to ‘move forward’ is because, when we look back, we are looking back at only a small number of possible histories while, In contrast, when we look forward, we are looking at an explosion of possible futures: time moves forward because the future is more unknown than the past. This perspective, however, indicates that the multiple worlds interpretation is a theory of contradiction since a primary reason for excluding contradictions from formal logic is that they make every possible statement in a formal logic ‘true’.
But this is not a problem if we return to the quantum wave function, the underlying wibbly-wobbly, and understand that what is waving is the impossible contradiction excluded from all possible realities. What is false in this reality is the possible content of every other reality. To put it another way, we have yet another way that nothing --- the negative image of rational reality --- is equivalent to contradiction.
Quantum wave function, Heisenberg uncertainty principle, all existing particles, the reality of our current timeline (the past), and the MWI (the future).
But what does all this have to do with death? Or immortality?
Death
“Every man has two lives, and the second starts when he realizes he has just one”
— Confucius
I claim that the logic of dialectics is (at least) this five-fold repetitive logic, dictating the terms of all different levels of being and various domains, including death.
First, we have death as nothing --- this is the death of an animal. Still, specifically, the death of another animal, the death of someone or something else projected as a pure body --- a corpse in space, the terrifying death of the light of consciousness snuffed out in another’s eyes.
However, this version of death is not applied to the self as we cannot be where we are dead, nor for that matter, does this death need to be particularly traumatic. Instead, this death may even serve our ends. After all, a cow’s death serves the hamburger, and the death of a tree serves the fire. In this sense, this is the death that exists underneath and behind everything, automatic death, the contradictory death of the non-subject, or psychotic death.
In the next moment, death enters, traumatically, into the subject. This moment is the possibility of the subject’s death, made imminent and present. Here we have the moment when the car almost crashed into us, the moment before we went into the major surgery to remove the tumor, the moment of vertigo at the top of the mountain where we know one small step and it could all end. But beyond these mere possibilities of death, this is also death as pain. It includes when the car hit us, but we survived, or when we came out of the surgery but obtained a scar that hurts from time to time. It is what happens when, que horrible, we fall off the mountain but are airlifted to a hospital to begin the long road of recovery. Here it is the possibility and falseness that pain speaks to which is important to this form of death --- the reason for pain to exist at all is to warn me of even further pain, that is, even further death. If I break a hand and experience pain while using it, the pain is there to get me to stop using the hand --- that is, I can use the hand despite the pain and injure it further. The pain exists to warn me off such a notion.
This trauma, the presence of death as anxiety and pain, provokes a new form of death --- the perfected fraudulent neurotic-obsessive concern over every possible kind of death, whether it has been encountered or is likely to be encountered. For the neurotic obsessive, the trauma is in the past, it has been overcome in some sense, and they would like to keep it that way. However, because fraudulence is always about the generalization of possibility, it is impossible to maintain this perfect distance from death. Instead, everything must be solved for, calculated, corrected, directed, and controlled. However, as the obsessive pursue their war against death, the necessary hole in the logic of control --- the fact that the entire war exists to deal with the possibility of death and without that possibility, the war is untenable, cannot justify itself, this contradiction becomes more and more glaring. Thus the obsessive becomes a living dead in the precise sense that the possibility of death they seek to repress is also the only embodiment of life they have left, as every other point of control becomes automated. This automation has no use for the very subject that creates it.
As long as this automation remains radically incomplete, the obsessive can exist as an obsessive subject. Still, at some point, the path of the subject splits. On one side, they expend surplus effort correcting ever-slighter possibilities of death. They get caught in symptomatic obsession --- flipping lights, washing dishes, septuple checking documents, etc. However, as a result, they are unable to function, thus producing death from life. The only true path forward is to instead go in the opposite direction and realize that we must accept a slight possibility of death, a possibility of death with which it is not worth bothering. That is to say, now the obsessive has bumped up against the certainty of death in the sense that some out-of-context possibility of dying may always appear. I may eat the right foods, exercise the right way, spend the right amount of time with my friends, avoid the dangerous parts of town, have good (but not too much!) sex, and be financially prudent... and then die of a stroke at thirty because of a previously undiscovered genetic condition.
That is to say, at some point, the possibility of death becomes so small it can’t be bothered with or to put it in the famous formula for perversion --- I know very well I may die from this unlikely cause, but I will live like I cannot die from it. Thus obsessive death, fraudulent death, passes over into cynical and absent death. But this death I nevertheless apply to myself: it is not the same as the death of another animal, a kind of object where I imagine another has the light of consciousness and then nothing. Instead, because the concept is applied ‘to myself,’ I can only ever understand its truth as a perversion. I know I will die of one of these absent possibilities, but I don’t care. In this sense, the cynical pervert is happy.
However, even when they have controlled external death to ten decimal places, a lurking death still awaits the cynical subject within their house of happiness. Here, we find the final movement of death back into that original position of the death of an animal in the form of suicide, but at a higher level. The cynic has nothing interesting left to do but die. The contradiction lies in how the suicide treats themselves as ‘the other animal’ --- the animal which is just a corpse --- even while simultaneously treating themselves as the ultimate ethical arbiter and subject of their own life. Another way to view this is to say that the suicide finds it impossible to be a subject within their current living situation. Is it not the case that the suicide is saying, ‘I cannot continue under these conditions. Whatever this is, it is not a world I can take part in’?
Death of an animal, death as pain, death as control of death, death as the absence of death, death as the impossibility of being a subject.
Here I do not want to trivialize the suicides of those who kill themselves due to an overwhelming symptom of some kind—those who experience depression or psychosis, or incredible physical pain. Instead, I would point out that hysteria comes precisely after cynicism; the impossibility of being a suicidal subject is always a hysterical reaction to a symptom. But this hysteria has a deeper meaning than we often give it --- hysteria is also the most profound embodiment of human freedom. When a soldier runs into enemy fire and commits a kind of suicide for a cause, I, interpreting Lacan’s dictum on guilt, claim this is due to the soldier’s symptomatic enjoyment of their duty. The difference between the soldier’s potentially positive life-affirming suicide (depending upon their cause) and the symptomatic-depressed life-negating suicide is only that, in the case of the soldier, the political and ethical dimension of their suicide is sufficiently opaque due to social valorization. Their suicide is called heroism. This valorization aids them in avoiding the stigma of being a ‘suicidal subject’ because the cause their symptom is attached to lives beyond them --- be it national or ideological. Whereas in the depressed ‘suicidal subject’ --- the subject seeking suicide out of a symptom not attached to a cause --- this subject does not die for an immortal cause unless others valorize their suicide through the prevention of the creation of suicidal symptoms in the future. This valorization can never bring such a subject back, but it does recognize this basic fact:
Suicide is always a political and theoretical act. It is an act concerning the theory of politics, freedom, and the symptom itself.
It always comes about because of a failure of the relationship between society and the individual, a failure of process, understanding, politics, ethics, recognition, association, and theory-religion.
However, suicide leaves behind the effects of death in the world --- a corpse. As a result of this body and the trace of trauma it creates, we also find, tragically, the beginning (though not the end) of immortality in suicide.
Immortality
There is no peace in the Void.
--- Zizek, less than nothing.
The first form of immortality we encounter is the other side of the contradiction of death by suicide is the immortality of a cause. Let's consider again the soldier who runs into oncoming fire. We see this form of immortality in something like a pure form --- here, we find someone who says I cannot be in any world where this military goal remains unobtained. This goal may be the need to protect their fellows or obtain a specific tactical or strategic objective, but here we have a ‘heroic’ suicide built upon a symptom filled with meaning. However, we should also be careful because this meaning is only as good as its content --- just because the symptom has an understandable glorious phantasmic structure does not mean it should be celebrated or not celebrated. Every suicide for a cause can only be valued by its material effect on the world, not by its sublime nobility an empty 'cause'.
The value of the death of an American soldier rises or falls on the fortunes of the American Revolution. The death of a Nazi soldier rises or falls on the moral value of the Third Reich.
However, within this ‘noble suicide,’ we now encounter the second moment of immortality as a counter-point to the second form of death. The other side of the pain of death, and the attendant trauma of that possibility encountered during daily life --- is the traumatic possibility of surviving a suicide. That is to say, the soldier running into the hail of bullets may successfully avoid imminent kinetic destruction. This possibility is the immortality of the failed suicide and the living, traumatized, hero. This immortality holds the suicidal person in reality against their will, speaking at the prospect of life for a subject who wishes no longer to live.
But we can go further with this: every time such a failed suicide occurs, it opens up the possibility of expanding the world to include more subjects whose meaningfully productive lives extend to longer periods. What do I mean by this? Here we have to step back for a second and consider that medical testing is a form of neurotic obsessive suicidality. No matter how carefully designed and controlled a drug trial or experimental surgery may be, there is always a chance that someone using that drug or undergoing that surgery may die. However, this possibility of death provides the conditions for the generalization of our control over life. Thus is developed a long series of operations and procedures that extend life for all humans --- various drugs, printed organs, blood transfusions, healthy living, and eating practices. This process terminates in the eventually promised immortality found at the end of the California ideology and its neurotic-obsession with the transhumanism that seeks to move human consciousness out of ‘meat space’ and into a computer simulation.
In recent years, there has a partially correct and partially misguided class-based critique of this ideology. Many of this ideology’s advocates do not consider its impact on the working class. For these ideologists, one should be as ruthless as possible to accumulate the wealth necessary for the short-term life extension provided by current technological capacities. The partially misguided critique of this ideology says that because the working class cannot amass such wealth, all such studies into life extension are mere mirages that should be laughed at and ridiculed as impossible. However, this critique fails in two ways. The first is the straightforward neurotic-obsessive retort --- The medical inventions developed for the wealthy, will eventually fall in price and apply to working people too as technology advances. Aging is a terrible disease that we should and can defeat.
However, what is the second retort, which extends into cynical perversion? It is quite a wild one, so strap in.
Here we must buy only two pseudo-contradictory notions simultaneously. The first is that we are creatures of classical physical mechanics. The argument is that we experience the world as if it is classical --- what makes notions like the MWI so difficult for people to accept is the anti-contradictory appearance of the classical physics-based realities with which we are entangled. However, while we are subjects of classical physics (classical subjects), simultaneously, we must only also buy the notion that we are, in fact, in a universe that constantly generates multiple splitting worlds. Thus, the universe produces multiple timelines, one of which we happen to experience, just like a computer program with multiple copies running on multiple classical computers.
However, this means that reality is always-already transhumanist: we are always-already a multi-forking simulated program running on a quantum computer.
But this has an interesting implication. It seems that one does not survive just particular death events, but rather that --- since everything that can happen does happen --- one must survive all the suicides, accidents, illnesses, and difficulties of one’s life along the path of some timeline. That is to say, even if nuclear weapons destroy the world, we will --- all of us --- survive the war from our own perspectives. There are always some timelines where the explosion of radiation caused by the war, the percussive wave of the bombs, do not destroy a given person (and this failure of destruction occurs for all of us in our own distinct, unhappy timeline). In those timelines, an incredibly ‘unlikely’ (which is to say low energy) possibility exists where we live through the blast. What is more, when we pair this with the notion that we cannot be in any timeline where we have died --- that our subjectivity cannot ‘jump the rails’ and end up in such a dead timeline --- then it seems reasonable to postulate that, from our perspective, we never experience death itself. We only ever experience dying (and the pain that goes with dying).
This thing I’ve said should be understood, in the first instance, as a kind of horror. It means that the hypothetical person experiencing a total nuclear war is literally experiencing a trip to hell --- they will be forced to live out eternity without any other human being to give them comfort since, after all, while we cannot experience our own deaths, we can experience the deaths of others. Thus when Putin threatens to launch a nuke and ‘send the world to hell,’ his threat can be taken literally --- every person on the globe, in the case of a nuclear war, would go to hell. This is true whether you are rich or poor.
All of this indicates that we should favor California ideology meddling with the forces of life, at least at some basic level because such meddling will ease us into our universally enforced immortality in the future. If you take seriously the idea that you will one day be 200 years old --- because you can never really die from your own perspective --- do you not want it to be the case that at some point, we develop the ability to treat 200-year-olds for aging so that they can have the bodies of 30-year-olds?
However, even this is not the end of the logic of immortality.
Because we must return to suicide and contemplate, finally, the development of this notion in a world where we cannot, ourselves, experience our own deaths. Here we should notice that the horror of death for us lies not in our own destruction but rather in the loss of contact with our friends, family, and associates as we age, in our inability to hold close enough to the other that they continue to remain in our own timeline, rather than splitting off into their own timeline. Here, I will leave us with both a short-term and a long-term idea of what this means. However, I caution that these ideas are open to debate and failure.
The short-term idea involves the difficulties inherent in keeping our friends and family around today, even after death. Or, to put it another way, how could we have resurrection in some sense? One neurotic obsessive answer lies in freezing or vitrifying the dead to bring them back someday. Many reject this notion because the task's technical difficulty seems too high, especially compared to the cost of keeping bodies in the vitrified state. However, when we consider that we are along for the ride with the universe anyway --- that we will not be able to die directly --- the notion of freezing the dead moves from merely a strange fascination with death into a near necessity. Would I rather survive for a thousand years in an exponentially dying, decrepit, and decaying body, or would I rather ‘die,’ be frozen for a thousand years, and then in some small number of timelines that get the formula right, wake up a young man again? What is more, would I rather lose my friends and family forever or live with the chance of their survival?
Universal freezing of the dead frees us of the difficulties we experience with the question of death in our aggressively well-lit secular world. We can use cheap freezing services to open the future up not only to the super-wealthy but also to the poor. Rather than seeking to spend millions of dollars on the final few years of life, we should proceed with the knowledge that immortality is inevitable, and the only question is on what terms it comes to us. Considering that vitrifying someone, even now, only costs a few tens of thousands of dollars, with the real costs lying in the maintenance of the bodies for the long duree, all we need is a solution for long-term freezing.
But what about that cost? Here we encounter the long-term impact of the impossibility of death. However, we may use the MWI to solve the Malthusian problem, of which this freezing question is merely one embodiment. Of course, I should start by cautioning the reader --- under capitalism, and for the next few thousands of years beyond that, there is not and cannot be a ‘real’ Malthusian problem for people who are alive: as long as the solar system remains uncolonized, as long as we have a population that is lower than the trillions that could have dignified lives based on the material resources of our star and its planets and asteroids --- there is no ‘real’ Malthusian problem. But there may eventually be such a problem in hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
In the meantime, the freezing of the dead, perhaps, also presents a temporary bottleneck. And thus, I propose that we can keep the maintenance of the dead at a low cost by using quantum dice. Rather than keeping all the dead vitrified in every timeline, we use the funding provided for all the dead to keep merely a large number frozen, and then split the task of maintenance of the dead across many timelines. We maintain a reasonably high number of cryo pods in each timeline and use a social graph created before we die to decide who we would like to see on the other side. The system does its best to ensure we remain vitrified alongside our loved ones when deciding who should be allowed to unfreeze.
Now this notion that I’ve put forward can be misused --- this is not something you could apply to conscious ‘meatspace’ humans going about their day-to-day lives in our current reality without ripping a hole in society itself --- both because our technology of death, no matter how ‘efficient’ can’t help but create terror, but also because the death of any person has immediate impacts on those living around them that are deeply negative. Here we could only apply it to the dead. However, we cannot avoid the complete development of this notion at some point as long as the MWI remains the most likely correct interpretation of our reality. The best we can hope for is developing an ethic around the concept that represses its misuses. This repression is the final point of immortality: the cause to which we must be bound. This cause allows for the smoothing of death and the strengthening of immortality. We do not have to suffer unnecessarily, but we will experience the contradiction of immortality whether or not we wish it. There is no peace in the void.
“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die.”
I wrote this a few years ago but haven't published it widely. I think it might be of interest to the less wrong community....
Prelude: Contradiction and its Consequences
We start with nothing, unlike Hegel, who began with being. Though they are the same thing, as pure being is nothing in the sense that nothing in reality is pure being.
If we start purely from nothing, or no-thing, we might ask what is no-thing anyway, and while there are many directions to go here, I will go in the direction of bimodal logic. You will have to forgive me.
In this direction, nothing is more than it appears, as there is less than nothing --- or what we should term falseness. That is, if nothing has any content, it is that all objects that are ‘nothing’ are also ‘false’ --- that is, a no-thing is not present in the world. This falseness seems to be the case whether or not there are existing objects, whether I even exist --- simply because this is something of a tautology. If there is nothing, then that thing which is nothing is false. However, this falseness is also distinct from nothing, is less than nothing, in that things can be merely false without being ‘nothing’ in all its grandeur. If there are 1000 apples in a barrel and I say there are 990, my statement isn’t false because there is no possibility of 1000 apples, but merely due to happenstance. Rather, falseness --- less than nothing --- is acquired when we perform the analytic operation upon nothing --- digesting it down into its constituent component.
But if there is ‘false,’ we come to a conundrum. Because it seems we have both ‘nothing’ and ‘false’ as objects. But if we have access to ‘false,’ then we also have access to ‘true’ ---or to what happens when ‘false’ is applied to itself: that which is falsely false is true. This double negation means we have at least two things other than nothing --- ‘false or true’: we have generalized nothing to a tautology.
And we could continue this generalization operation, but it serves for the moment to notice that in this list we have made --- ‘false or true’ --- that the two moments are not symmetric: the entire statement itself is true because it is a tautology. One side or the other of any tautology must be true in every context. That is, ‘true’ is equivalent to the statement ‘true or false.’ Truth, by itself, seems to overawe tautology. If I claim a barrel contains 1000 apples, and the barrel does contain this amount, my statement is more precise than saying there are either 1000 apples or 990 apples --- true or false. If I wish, I could stop here, prohibit further thought, contemplate only precise truth, and consider myself a man of great discernment and intelligence.
But what if I do not wish to do this? I might find something interesting if I continue, and rather than taking the prohibition as the end of reasoning, I flip it on its head and perform one more negation --- asking what is always the opposite of true, what is guaranteed to be false. This negation would move me into a contradiction --- it is not that I have true or false when I talk about ‘nothing’ but instead ‘true and false.’ Nothing is precisely that which is contradictory, not that which merely does not exist, but rather that which cannot exist. I have come full circle in the following manner:
1. I started with nothing. What is it? I don’t know.
2. However, I do know I can move analytically to falseness
3. I then discovered, through generalization, that there is either truth or falseness
4. But then, I prohibited a move beyond this understanding by resting on the notion that truth, in the list of possibilities, overawes falseness.
5. And then I realized that, in fact, nothing returns with a vengeance in the opposite of my prohibition --- a contradiction that is equivalent to the nothing with which I started.
Nothing, Analysis, Generalization, Prohibition, Contradiction.
If I wished to continue from contradiction, I could repeat the move over again but extract even more positions. For example, contradiction --- the impossible --- contains within it the notion of possibility, a little bit extra that can be analyzed or digested out of the ‘impossible.’ That is to say, analytically, we extract the possible from the impossible.
But then we might be tempted to ask, what is the generalization of the possible, the possible applied to itself, the double possible or to repeat a famous formula, the possibility of the possible? Here we cannot simply move back into the realm of ‘true or false.’ Instead, we find a kind of repetition of the false itself in the notion of the fake applied to everything. Everything is fraudulent because there is always some possibility of failure; no statement is certain. This position is somewhat analogous to the eternal trauma of the obsessive-neurotic, for whom even that which appears solid as the ground may melt into the air. Possibility, generalized, presents us with a world full of mere appearances.
However, is there a prohibition here, a fraud which is the most fraudulent, as it were, just as truth overawes tautology in the first prohibition we discovered? Yes, it is the pure symbol, the mere name. This pure symbol is a kind of gesture at something out in the world, a perfect fraud that almost stops being a fraud but instead becomes a mere absence. In this sense, it also becomes a certainty of fraudulence; the symbol is, in some sense, always false since it is stripped of all the logic of implementation required of a real object; a word can be spoken whether or not the thing the word points to exists. When I say ‘there is a dog over there,’ even if there is a dog, it doesn’t adhere to the word ‘dog’ which I spoke. In saying ‘dog,’ I didn’t show you the image of a dog, create a painting of a dog, replay the recording of its barks or even grab a real dog. The pure symbol has nothing of the substance of a real dog. The fraudulence in my statement, the fact that there isn’t a dog as a symbol, and never can be --- that actually existing dogs are not packaged directly with the term dog --- this absence is a pure kind of fraud, and so I can be certain that the word ‘dog’ is always a lie.
However, precisely because it is an absence, this absence allows for the final position, a repetition of contradiction. I can now make this statement: ‘there both is and is not a dog over there.’ Because the actually existing object referred to by the symbology is absent from the symbol itself, I can now pull contradiction out of the space of pure nothing and onto the page as a definite contradiction written out: ‘there is a dog (animal), and there is not a dog (symbol) over there.’ What a trick.
Contradiction-Impossibility, Possibility, Fraud, Absence, Definite Contradiction.
However, this movement can also be tracked once more, now as a materialist movement beyond mere logic.
Here, I am asking the reader to take seriously one of the most contradictory and ridiculous theories, or interpretations, of physicality that physicists have produced throughout the previous century --- the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (MWI).
First, we have the quantum wave function, a wibbly wobbly that waves nothing about to and fro. As a result of the fact that reality is composed of waves in nothing at the lowest level, we obtain the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. However, another way of thinking about uncertainty lies in noticing that it is also a possibility. If the position or momentum of a particle is uncertain, then we can only know about the statistics or possibilities of the particle’s position and momentum.
This possibility, found in the uncertainty principle, is generalized in the principal's universal application to all particles found in reality. Now we no longer deal with possibility in theory but rather the actual impacts of this possibility upon all existing physical objects. Rather than being able to determine precisely, what the movement of an electron or molecule will place it in the future, we are stuck only with statistical dynamics everywhere.
However, there is something we can extract from these statistical dynamics. We can measure some, though not all, facts about the positions and momenta of some particles, or to put it another way, we can find ourselves entangled in a particular timeline. That is, we are not in the reality where Napoleon died at three or Marie Curie was never born. We are in a specific timeline, a single reality that continues to impact us, which we know impacts us because we exist within it. However, this singular reality, the actually existing particles we encounter (or in Hegelian terms: this-sidedness), comes with a caveat. Because we can never know where we are in the quantum wave --- because of the uncertainty principle --- we can never perfectly predict the future motion of the particles with which we are entangled.
However, through many complicated experiments, this entanglement points to the inherently contradictory nature of the quantum wave function. Here, the MWI proposes that the solution to the paradox of Shrodinger’s cat is more straightforward than we might think --- the cat is both alive and dead in separate timelines. These timelines are generated whenever a particle moves in one direction instead of another.
Everything that physically can happen does happen in some timeline. Further, the reason why time appears to ‘move forward’ is because, when we look back, we are looking back at only a small number of possible histories while, In contrast, when we look forward, we are looking at an explosion of possible futures: time moves forward because the future is more unknown than the past. This perspective, however, indicates that the multiple worlds interpretation is a theory of contradiction since a primary reason for excluding contradictions from formal logic is that they make every possible statement in a formal logic ‘true’.
But this is not a problem if we return to the quantum wave function, the underlying wibbly-wobbly, and understand that what is waving is the impossible contradiction excluded from all possible realities. What is false in this reality is the possible content of every other reality. To put it another way, we have yet another way that nothing --- the negative image of rational reality --- is equivalent to contradiction.
Quantum wave function, Heisenberg uncertainty principle, all existing particles, the reality of our current timeline (the past), and the MWI (the future).
But what does all this have to do with death? Or immortality?
Death
“Every man has two lives, and the second starts when he realizes he has just one”
— Confucius
I claim that the logic of dialectics is (at least) this five-fold repetitive logic, dictating the terms of all different levels of being and various domains, including death.
First, we have death as nothing --- this is the death of an animal. Still, specifically, the death of another animal, the death of someone or something else projected as a pure body --- a corpse in space, the terrifying death of the light of consciousness snuffed out in another’s eyes.
However, this version of death is not applied to the self as we cannot be where we are dead, nor for that matter, does this death need to be particularly traumatic. Instead, this death may even serve our ends. After all, a cow’s death serves the hamburger, and the death of a tree serves the fire. In this sense, this is the death that exists underneath and behind everything, automatic death, the contradictory death of the non-subject, or psychotic death.
In the next moment, death enters, traumatically, into the subject. This moment is the possibility of the subject’s death, made imminent and present. Here we have the moment when the car almost crashed into us, the moment before we went into the major surgery to remove the tumor, the moment of vertigo at the top of the mountain where we know one small step and it could all end. But beyond these mere possibilities of death, this is also death as pain. It includes when the car hit us, but we survived, or when we came out of the surgery but obtained a scar that hurts from time to time. It is what happens when, que horrible, we fall off the mountain but are airlifted to a hospital to begin the long road of recovery. Here it is the possibility and falseness that pain speaks to which is important to this form of death --- the reason for pain to exist at all is to warn me of even further pain, that is, even further death. If I break a hand and experience pain while using it, the pain is there to get me to stop using the hand --- that is, I can use the hand despite the pain and injure it further. The pain exists to warn me off such a notion.
This trauma, the presence of death as anxiety and pain, provokes a new form of death --- the perfected fraudulent neurotic-obsessive concern over every possible kind of death, whether it has been encountered or is likely to be encountered. For the neurotic obsessive, the trauma is in the past, it has been overcome in some sense, and they would like to keep it that way. However, because fraudulence is always about the generalization of possibility, it is impossible to maintain this perfect distance from death. Instead, everything must be solved for, calculated, corrected, directed, and controlled. However, as the obsessive pursue their war against death, the necessary hole in the logic of control --- the fact that the entire war exists to deal with the possibility of death and without that possibility, the war is untenable, cannot justify itself, this contradiction becomes more and more glaring. Thus the obsessive becomes a living dead in the precise sense that the possibility of death they seek to repress is also the only embodiment of life they have left, as every other point of control becomes automated. This automation has no use for the very subject that creates it.
As long as this automation remains radically incomplete, the obsessive can exist as an obsessive subject. Still, at some point, the path of the subject splits. On one side, they expend surplus effort correcting ever-slighter possibilities of death. They get caught in symptomatic obsession --- flipping lights, washing dishes, septuple checking documents, etc. However, as a result, they are unable to function, thus producing death from life. The only true path forward is to instead go in the opposite direction and realize that we must accept a slight possibility of death, a possibility of death with which it is not worth bothering. That is to say, now the obsessive has bumped up against the certainty of death in the sense that some out-of-context possibility of dying may always appear. I may eat the right foods, exercise the right way, spend the right amount of time with my friends, avoid the dangerous parts of town, have good (but not too much!) sex, and be financially prudent... and then die of a stroke at thirty because of a previously undiscovered genetic condition.
That is to say, at some point, the possibility of death becomes so small it can’t be bothered with or to put it in the famous formula for perversion --- I know very well I may die from this unlikely cause, but I will live like I cannot die from it. Thus obsessive death, fraudulent death, passes over into cynical and absent death. But this death I nevertheless apply to myself: it is not the same as the death of another animal, a kind of object where I imagine another has the light of consciousness and then nothing. Instead, because the concept is applied ‘to myself,’ I can only ever understand its truth as a perversion. I know I will die of one of these absent possibilities, but I don’t care. In this sense, the cynical pervert is happy.
However, even when they have controlled external death to ten decimal places, a lurking death still awaits the cynical subject within their house of happiness. Here, we find the final movement of death back into that original position of the death of an animal in the form of suicide, but at a higher level. The cynic has nothing interesting left to do but die. The contradiction lies in how the suicide treats themselves as ‘the other animal’ --- the animal which is just a corpse --- even while simultaneously treating themselves as the ultimate ethical arbiter and subject of their own life. Another way to view this is to say that the suicide finds it impossible to be a subject within their current living situation. Is it not the case that the suicide is saying, ‘I cannot continue under these conditions. Whatever this is, it is not a world I can take part in’?
Death of an animal, death as pain, death as control of death, death as the absence of death, death as the impossibility of being a subject.
Here I do not want to trivialize the suicides of those who kill themselves due to an overwhelming symptom of some kind—those who experience depression or psychosis, or incredible physical pain. Instead, I would point out that hysteria comes precisely after cynicism; the impossibility of being a suicidal subject is always a hysterical reaction to a symptom. But this hysteria has a deeper meaning than we often give it --- hysteria is also the most profound embodiment of human freedom. When a soldier runs into enemy fire and commits a kind of suicide for a cause, I, interpreting Lacan’s dictum on guilt, claim this is due to the soldier’s symptomatic enjoyment of their duty. The difference between the soldier’s potentially positive life-affirming suicide (depending upon their cause) and the symptomatic-depressed life-negating suicide is only that, in the case of the soldier, the political and ethical dimension of their suicide is sufficiently opaque due to social valorization. Their suicide is called heroism. This valorization aids them in avoiding the stigma of being a ‘suicidal subject’ because the cause their symptom is attached to lives beyond them --- be it national or ideological. Whereas in the depressed ‘suicidal subject’ --- the subject seeking suicide out of a symptom not attached to a cause --- this subject does not die for an immortal cause unless others valorize their suicide through the prevention of the creation of suicidal symptoms in the future. This valorization can never bring such a subject back, but it does recognize this basic fact:
Suicide is always a political and theoretical act. It is an act concerning the theory of politics, freedom, and the symptom itself.
It always comes about because of a failure of the relationship between society and the individual, a failure of process, understanding, politics, ethics, recognition, association, and theory-religion.
However, suicide leaves behind the effects of death in the world --- a corpse. As a result of this body and the trace of trauma it creates, we also find, tragically, the beginning (though not the end) of immortality in suicide.
Immortality
There is no peace in the Void.
--- Zizek, less than nothing.
The first form of immortality we encounter is the other side of the contradiction of death by suicide is the immortality of a cause. Let's consider again the soldier who runs into oncoming fire. We see this form of immortality in something like a pure form --- here, we find someone who says I cannot be in any world where this military goal remains unobtained. This goal may be the need to protect their fellows or obtain a specific tactical or strategic objective, but here we have a ‘heroic’ suicide built upon a symptom filled with meaning. However, we should also be careful because this meaning is only as good as its content --- just because the symptom has an understandable glorious phantasmic structure does not mean it should be celebrated or not celebrated. Every suicide for a cause can only be valued by its material effect on the world, not by its sublime nobility an empty 'cause'.
The value of the death of an American soldier rises or falls on the fortunes of the American Revolution. The death of a Nazi soldier rises or falls on the moral value of the Third Reich.
However, within this ‘noble suicide,’ we now encounter the second moment of immortality as a counter-point to the second form of death. The other side of the pain of death, and the attendant trauma of that possibility encountered during daily life --- is the traumatic possibility of surviving a suicide. That is to say, the soldier running into the hail of bullets may successfully avoid imminent kinetic destruction. This possibility is the immortality of the failed suicide and the living, traumatized, hero. This immortality holds the suicidal person in reality against their will, speaking at the prospect of life for a subject who wishes no longer to live.
But we can go further with this: every time such a failed suicide occurs, it opens up the possibility of expanding the world to include more subjects whose meaningfully productive lives extend to longer periods. What do I mean by this? Here we have to step back for a second and consider that medical testing is a form of neurotic obsessive suicidality. No matter how carefully designed and controlled a drug trial or experimental surgery may be, there is always a chance that someone using that drug or undergoing that surgery may die. However, this possibility of death provides the conditions for the generalization of our control over life. Thus is developed a long series of operations and procedures that extend life for all humans --- various drugs, printed organs, blood transfusions, healthy living, and eating practices. This process terminates in the eventually promised immortality found at the end of the California ideology and its neurotic-obsession with the transhumanism that seeks to move human consciousness out of ‘meat space’ and into a computer simulation.
In recent years, there has a partially correct and partially misguided class-based critique of this ideology. Many of this ideology’s advocates do not consider its impact on the working class. For these ideologists, one should be as ruthless as possible to accumulate the wealth necessary for the short-term life extension provided by current technological capacities. The partially misguided critique of this ideology says that because the working class cannot amass such wealth, all such studies into life extension are mere mirages that should be laughed at and ridiculed as impossible. However, this critique fails in two ways. The first is the straightforward neurotic-obsessive retort --- The medical inventions developed for the wealthy, will eventually fall in price and apply to working people too as technology advances. Aging is a terrible disease that we should and can defeat.
However, what is the second retort, which extends into cynical perversion? It is quite a wild one, so strap in.
Here we must buy only two pseudo-contradictory notions simultaneously. The first is that we are creatures of classical physical mechanics. The argument is that we experience the world as if it is classical --- what makes notions like the MWI so difficult for people to accept is the anti-contradictory appearance of the classical physics-based realities with which we are entangled. However, while we are subjects of classical physics (classical subjects), simultaneously, we must only also buy the notion that we are, in fact, in a universe that constantly generates multiple splitting worlds. Thus, the universe produces multiple timelines, one of which we happen to experience, just like a computer program with multiple copies running on multiple classical computers.
However, this means that reality is always-already transhumanist: we are always-already a multi-forking simulated program running on a quantum computer.
But this has an interesting implication. It seems that one does not survive just particular death events, but rather that --- since everything that can happen does happen --- one must survive all the suicides, accidents, illnesses, and difficulties of one’s life along the path of some timeline. That is to say, even if nuclear weapons destroy the world, we will --- all of us --- survive the war from our own perspectives. There are always some timelines where the explosion of radiation caused by the war, the percussive wave of the bombs, do not destroy a given person (and this failure of destruction occurs for all of us in our own distinct, unhappy timeline). In those timelines, an incredibly ‘unlikely’ (which is to say low energy) possibility exists where we live through the blast. What is more, when we pair this with the notion that we cannot be in any timeline where we have died --- that our subjectivity cannot ‘jump the rails’ and end up in such a dead timeline --- then it seems reasonable to postulate that, from our perspective, we never experience death itself. We only ever experience dying (and the pain that goes with dying).
This thing I’ve said should be understood, in the first instance, as a kind of horror. It means that the hypothetical person experiencing a total nuclear war is literally experiencing a trip to hell --- they will be forced to live out eternity without any other human being to give them comfort since, after all, while we cannot experience our own deaths, we can experience the deaths of others. Thus when Putin threatens to launch a nuke and ‘send the world to hell,’ his threat can be taken literally --- every person on the globe, in the case of a nuclear war, would go to hell. This is true whether you are rich or poor.
All of this indicates that we should favor California ideology meddling with the forces of life, at least at some basic level because such meddling will ease us into our universally enforced immortality in the future. If you take seriously the idea that you will one day be 200 years old --- because you can never really die from your own perspective --- do you not want it to be the case that at some point, we develop the ability to treat 200-year-olds for aging so that they can have the bodies of 30-year-olds?
However, even this is not the end of the logic of immortality.
Because we must return to suicide and contemplate, finally, the development of this notion in a world where we cannot, ourselves, experience our own deaths. Here we should notice that the horror of death for us lies not in our own destruction but rather in the loss of contact with our friends, family, and associates as we age, in our inability to hold close enough to the other that they continue to remain in our own timeline, rather than splitting off into their own timeline. Here, I will leave us with both a short-term and a long-term idea of what this means. However, I caution that these ideas are open to debate and failure.
The short-term idea involves the difficulties inherent in keeping our friends and family around today, even after death. Or, to put it another way, how could we have resurrection in some sense? One neurotic obsessive answer lies in freezing or vitrifying the dead to bring them back someday. Many reject this notion because the task's technical difficulty seems too high, especially compared to the cost of keeping bodies in the vitrified state. However, when we consider that we are along for the ride with the universe anyway --- that we will not be able to die directly --- the notion of freezing the dead moves from merely a strange fascination with death into a near necessity. Would I rather survive for a thousand years in an exponentially dying, decrepit, and decaying body, or would I rather ‘die,’ be frozen for a thousand years, and then in some small number of timelines that get the formula right, wake up a young man again? What is more, would I rather lose my friends and family forever or live with the chance of their survival?
Universal freezing of the dead frees us of the difficulties we experience with the question of death in our aggressively well-lit secular world. We can use cheap freezing services to open the future up not only to the super-wealthy but also to the poor. Rather than seeking to spend millions of dollars on the final few years of life, we should proceed with the knowledge that immortality is inevitable, and the only question is on what terms it comes to us. Considering that vitrifying someone, even now, only costs a few tens of thousands of dollars, with the real costs lying in the maintenance of the bodies for the long duree, all we need is a solution for long-term freezing.
But what about that cost? Here we encounter the long-term impact of the impossibility of death. However, we may use the MWI to solve the Malthusian problem, of which this freezing question is merely one embodiment. Of course, I should start by cautioning the reader --- under capitalism, and for the next few thousands of years beyond that, there is not and cannot be a ‘real’ Malthusian problem for people who are alive: as long as the solar system remains uncolonized, as long as we have a population that is lower than the trillions that could have dignified lives based on the material resources of our star and its planets and asteroids --- there is no ‘real’ Malthusian problem. But there may eventually be such a problem in hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
In the meantime, the freezing of the dead, perhaps, also presents a temporary bottleneck. And thus, I propose that we can keep the maintenance of the dead at a low cost by using quantum dice. Rather than keeping all the dead vitrified in every timeline, we use the funding provided for all the dead to keep merely a large number frozen, and then split the task of maintenance of the dead across many timelines. We maintain a reasonably high number of cryo pods in each timeline and use a social graph created before we die to decide who we would like to see on the other side. The system does its best to ensure we remain vitrified alongside our loved ones when deciding who should be allowed to unfreeze.
Now this notion that I’ve put forward can be misused --- this is not something you could apply to conscious ‘meatspace’ humans going about their day-to-day lives in our current reality without ripping a hole in society itself --- both because our technology of death, no matter how ‘efficient’ can’t help but create terror, but also because the death of any person has immediate impacts on those living around them that are deeply negative. Here we could only apply it to the dead. However, we cannot avoid the complete development of this notion at some point as long as the MWI remains the most likely correct interpretation of our reality. The best we can hope for is developing an ethic around the concept that represses its misuses. This repression is the final point of immortality: the cause to which we must be bound. This cause allows for the smoothing of death and the strengthening of immortality. We do not have to suffer unnecessarily, but we will experience the contradiction of immortality whether or not we wish it. There is no peace in the void.
“That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons, even death may die.”
-- H.P. Lovecraft, the Eternal City