Can we embrace impermanence and life at the same time?

People find amazingly creative ways to resist impermanence.

The Greek historian Herodotus visited Egypt around 450 BC and described how the Egyptians preserved their dead. Apparently, it took 600 pounds of a mixture of four salts, a hundred yards of fine Egyptian linen, resins like frankincense and myrrh, and about 70 days of human effort. Four canopic jars were used to store the liver, stomach, intestines and lungs. The heart was left in; it was believed to contain the person's essence. The brain, on the other hand, was removed through the nose and discarded. The entire mind blowing procedure is a strange mix of specialized knowledge and gross ignorance. Where is your essence without a brain?

The modern equivalent might be cryogenics. This is the inverse of mummification: throw away everything the Egyptians were concerned with, then keep the brain. According to your brain, the answer to the question "what is your most important organ" is "the brain". Self-serving, or simply, the self itself? Consider a brain transplant and ask yourself whether you'd rather be the donor or the recipient. Without a body, is there a self? The distinguished neurologist Antonio Damasio would probably say no; the sense of self depends on the entire living organism and its bodily interactions with the world.

Cryogenics may be superior to mummification, but it has problems. Bad employees might use your frozen head for batting practice, as they did recently with Ted Williams. Even if your frozen head is well maintained, can it ever be defrosted and given a body? Will future people miss you so much they want you back again?

A future fantasy is to upload "yourself" into some nano-tech quadrillion-transistor neural network substrate with terahertz connectivity to a wide array of sensors and social nets. This may enable "you" to make thousands of "friends" per second on some future Facebook, but what picture are you going to use for a head shot? Is that you? And back to Damasio, can you even feel self-aware without a biological body?

Some people want their self to live forever, but what is the self? Are we a heart? Are we a brain? Are we a face? Are we a pattern of information that can be digitized and transferred? The "pattern of information" makes sense, but the pattern is dynamic, not static. If the pattern is frozen and static, it is dead. Is that a clue? Wouldn't it be ironic if our futile resistance against impermanence is actually a resistance against the dynamic life force itself?

Can we embrace impermanence and life at the same time?

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