Double Death
Double Death
You might think there is nothing more to say about death. You might think death has been done to death. But I am here to report, from the depths of death studies, that death has a new wrinkle—it has a surprise up its sleeve. It turns out that every death is a double death. When a person dies two things die, not one. Both these things have value; we would like both to go on. But the death of one entails the death of the other—not necessarily, but contingently. Death has always been double, but it need not be; the two deaths are in principle detachable. This is good (but not very good).
What (on earth) am I talking about? The thought occurred to me while I was taking a massage, so that I was focused on my body. The two things are the self and the body. The thought I had was that it would be nice if my body went on when I died. We are familiar with the thought that the self could survive the body—say, by transferring the brain to a new body. That would certainly be good; it would take most of the sting out of death, especially if the new body was a splendid specimen. The old body would die, but the old self would live on. But what about the converse? What if the self died but the body lived on? In particular, the skills of the old body were preserved, especially the cool useful skills. Suppose you are a ballet dancer and your brain is in bad shape—it’s not going to make it. But you are told that the surgeons can keep your body alive along with your dancing skills, with a new brain installed in it. It will be up on stage again exercising the skills you have instilled in it. Realistically, this will require keeping alive and well your motor cortex and associated brain structures—but not you (not your frontal cortex etc.). Suppose, indeed, that they can preserve all your motor capacities, though not (alas) the person that is you—musical, athletic, balletic. It took years to acquire those capacities, and it is possible to retain them in your healthy body (pity about the dying self-brain). Wouldn’t this be better than the usual double death? Isn’t it some kind of compensation? We might describe it as the survival of the bodily self, if not the mental self. Instead of two deaths, there is only one. True, you might prefer things the other way round, because your mental self is more precious to you, but it would at least be something if your bodily self survived. Offered the choice, you would opt for the single death over the double death. This might be called half-death.[1]
Can we extend this idea to the mind? Suppose my mental abilities are located in a part of my brain separate from the part that houses my self: could we preserve the former part while losing the latter part? It doesn’t seem impossible. Then we could preserve Beethoven’s musical genius while not preserving him. Surely, that would be better than losing both. It would be possible for Beethoven to lose his musical genius because of brain deterioration while not losing his self, because they are separately located. Equally, it should be possible for the converse to happen; a new self could be conjoined with the old genius. If I were Beethoven, I would prefer this to losing both things. Could the same be done with memories—keep the memories, lose the self? That seems pushing it, because of the close connection between the self and memory; but maybe some kinds of memory could be retained in the absence of the old self, in which case a lot that is valuable could be preserved without survival of the self. This never happens as things are, but in principle it could. Double death leaves open the possibility of partial survival. Survival of the self is not the only thing that matters. Death is more discriminating (in principle) than we thought. Death need not always be total death. Death may come in degrees and types.[2]
[1] I can see a Ridley Scott sci-fi movie: Half-Death.
[2] When do we start dying? Is it when we reach adulthood? We don’t begin to die when we stop growing, do we? We start losing capacities quite early on, whittled away by the years. We are certainly beginning the dying process when we reach sixty normally—the journey to death has already begun. We become less and less young. We gradually start to fade away, sometimes passing through dementia and physical collapse. We don’t suddenly grow old. Maybe we die many deaths before the Big Death.
It won’t surprise you to hear that I like the exploration of the possibility of the case you develop in the second paragraph.
But why not say that it is not merely less bad than ‘double death’, but just as good (potentially) as (some people’s) ordinary survival? Imagine that you have some ability – it could be physical or intellectual: it doesn’t matter – but also a really terrible memory, such that in 2024 you have no recollection of your triumphant tennis victories of the early noughties, nor of your brilliant philosophical books and articles published in the same era. You can’t remember the games, nor writing the philosophy, nor do you have any recall of the thought-processes that underlay these achievements. But – as in your example – the skills might be retained; and you could undoubtedly still read about this person who was their author, and be in no doubt that that person was you. At most, surely, your attitude would be, ‘Gosh, a lot of water has passed under the bridge since then; I have no real recollection of that, or how I did it’. It would not be: ‘Those feats belong to some other person.’
And – to complete or make explicit the point: when one has such a bad memory, one doesn’t feel even a little bit dead, nor anything like dead. Literally no percentage of the sense that one is literally identical with that earlier person vanishes. One may *regret* having so little recall; but it does nothing to make one feel that one has to any degree ceased to exist.
I am not sure that I would survive if all that is left of me are my mental and physical abilities. I might lose my character consistently with that, or my sense of humor and musical tastes.