We can make contact with the dead by going into the works of
Directions: Read the following passage carefully to answer the given question. Some words/phrases are printed in bold to help you locate them while answer the question.
My father died twice. The first time was in an ambulance as he rushed to the hospital after suffering a heart attack. His heart had stopped beating for several minutes before the paramedics were able to revive him. Afterwards, he described a vision he had as he lay without a pulse in the speeding ambulance. He saw his brother Joe, who had passed away some years earlier, dressed in flowing white robes sitting on a kind of throne at the top of hill. As my father approached, Joe was laughing uproariously and waving his hand, urging him to turn around and go back. The second time my father died was about three years later. Again it was his heart that failed him. This time, though his brother Joe wasn¢t there to wave him back to this world.
What my father encountered in the back of that ambulance was a classic example of a near death experience (NDE). According to statistics compiled by the International Association for Near-Death studies some 35-40% of people who have had a close brush with death later report a NDE. They commonly tell of a feeling that the self has left the body a sensation of moving through a dark space or tunnel a vision of golden or white light and the receipt in some form of the message "your time has not yet come."
Are NDEs evidence for life after death or are they just the last, desperate projections of the dying brain? While modem science can explain why we age, it tells us very little about why we die, much less about what happens if anything after death. "In death, science is pitted against an impenetrable information barrier", says David Darling, an astronomer and physicist who has written several books on death and dying. "When we die, each of us makes a solo flight across that barrier and gives up all possibility of sending back news of what we find."
Many people don't require hard evidence about what's on the other side. They are satisfied with the explanations provided for millennia by the world's religions. But for those not blessed with religious faith, science may never be able to prove whether the NDE is a news flash from the hereafter or just one of the mind's grandest illusions. Darling suggests there are two events that approximate death: the near death experiences itself and the memory loss suffered by victims of Alzheimer's disease and traumatic brain injury. "Losing your memory is perhaps as close as we can come to death without actually dying", he says. "The person is dead because the memories are gone. And memories are the only things that give meaning and identity to our lives."
If the difference between life and death is a question of memory, could death's sting be parried by replacing the fragile human memory with an infallible computerized one? In his book Design for Dying completed earlier this year before he died from prostate cancer, psychologist and LSD guru Timothy Leary explored various strategies for achieving immortality. One of the most promising tactics, he suggested is to transfer an individual's consciousness into a supercomputer before death. This could be done by using multimedia technologies (video, audio, CDs) to record all your thoughts, feelings and experience onto a computer equipped with artificial intelligence. The result: a real life ghost in the machine. Endowed with all your memories, the new computerized you would be able to chat and interact with people just as you would-except it would be doing so long after you had died.
The idea is not as far-out as it seems. According to Chris Winter, Peter Cochrane and Ian Pearson, futurologists at British Telecom's Advanced Research Department, computers (or “soulcatchers") with storage and processing capacities equivalent to the human brain will be developed within the next 20 years. "We will be able to transfer human minds into some machine form", says Pearson. Perhaps our only chance of making full use of such technology is to become part of the technology itself.
But are these intimations of immortality real? The silicon soul described by Leary is actually not a captured consciousness at all, but an elaborate interactive home video of history. As useful and entertaining as that might be, it’s a far cry from life after death. And how big an improvement is it over say the good old-fashioned book? We can already make contact with some of the world's great lost simply by dipping into the novels of James Joyce or the poems of John Donne.
In his book, ‘Dancing on the Grave’, British anthropologist Nigel Barely describes a trip to Africa during which a group of tribal elders explain their idea of reincarnation by visiting a local brewery. “You could see returned bottles through a plate glass window", Barely writes “entering via one door, whirling from machine to machine being endlessly refilled with squirting beer relabelled and pushed out through another door.... life, death, spirit and body”. Now you have seen (the elders) said. Though it comes from Africa, this little episode is a fitting metaphor for Western attitudes towards death: the body is a machine and death is a spanner in the works. But you don't have to postulate the existence of an eternal soul to acknowledge that there may be some things in the universe, like death, that we just can't fix. Let's not be too proud that our technological prowess may one day bring immortality. “Never send to know for whom the computer crashes, it crashes for thee”.