#philosophy
Happiness and Afterlife.
“Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value, because they are not everlasting.
I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation.
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own …
We cannot suppose that an individual’s thinking survives bodily death, since death destroys the organization of the brain. All the evidence goes to show that what we regard as our mental life is bound up with brain structure and organized bodily energy. Therefore it is rational to suppose that mental life ceases when bodily life ceases …
Believers in immortality will object to physiological arguments, such as I have been using, on the ground that soul and body are totally disparate, and that the soul is something quite other than its empirical manifestations through our bodily organs. I believe this to be a metaphysical superstition.
Mind and matter alike are for certain purposes convenient terms, but are not ultimate realities. Electrons and protons, like the soul, are logical fictions; each is really a history, a series of events, not a single persistent entity.
In the case of the soul, this is obvious from the facts of growth. Whoever considers conception, gestation, and infancy cannot seriously believe that the soul is an indivisible something, perfect and complete throughout this process. It is evident that it grows like the body, and that it derives both from the spermatozoon and from the ovum, so that it cannot be indivisible. This is not materialism: it is merely the recognition that everything interesting is a matter of organisation, not of primal substance.“
– Bertrand Russell, What I Believe (1925).
About Afterlife,
Russell said in a 1959 interview :
Question:
As you approach the end of life, do you have any fear of some kind of afterlife, or do you feel that that is just …
Answer:
Oh, no, I think that’s nonsense.
Question:
There is no afterlife?
Answer:
NONE WHATEVER.
