The oblivion of death and the uncaring cosmos

When I started a blog about mortality and meaning there were two secret fears I knew I would face: death and the meaninglessness of existence. Secret fears, because in the atheist community it’s generally a laughable offense to say you’re afraid of death, or to feel disappointed there is no ultimate meaning to life. Some non-believers seem to think that shaking your irrational belief in God should instantly free you from all fallacious thinking and other irrationality (including irrational fears). It doesn’t.

In many ways, this blog has been my way of working through lingering anxieties about death and meaninglessness (rational or not).

I started with the topic of mortality (figured I’d leave the crushing weight of a potentially meaningless existence for after I’d dealt with mortal terror). A year in I asked myself: am I still afraid of death? The answer was, and still is, mostly no. You can see me first start to grapple with the nonsensical aspect of this fear in my review of Stephen Cave’s book “Immortality”:

//I am the wrong person to write this advice (because my brain won’t accept it yet), but here I go anyway. Epicurus was the first to point out that we shouldn’t fear being dead. The pain or emotional distress of dying aside, the fear of death is irrational. Death is not a state you will ever experience, nor is it a transition. Many people (present company included) in not being able to grasp the prospect of non-being describe death as the absence of all that we know in life. Infinite darkness, endless oblivion – a black abyss, an empty void, a bottomless chasm… complete annihilation. You can see how these perfectly describe a state devoid of life, but not a state devoid of you. We cannot grasp the prospect of nothingness, so we project our nightmares of anti-life there instead (and to be honest, these are basically descriptions of space, not death). We must abandon this misplaced description. Cave encourages us to think of it like an ocean wave breaking on the shore. We don’t describe the wave as “dead” or an “ex-wave.” The wave didn’t go anywhere, it’s just gone. “When humans die, they do not enter a new state of death, they cease to be.” Living things can never know anything but life. Death is an ending, “and that, when properly understood, is exactly why we should not be afraid.”

(I’m just going to re-read this paragraph over and over and hope it sticks)//

Four months later I finished my goal of reading 50 books about mortality and started to genuinely absorb this principle – that our fear of being dead was mostly based on fallacious reflections about what nothingness is. Death is not some scary dark oblivion – it’s not a state at all. Repeatedly returning to this concept helped to make it stick. Overcoming the automatic presumption that nothingness is a thing and ceasing to describe it as a frightening anti-life experience continues to be the most important step I took in overcoming my fear of death.

Then I turned to meaning. I was under no illusion that I would uncover any ultimate point to life – meaning with a capital “M” – but I was hoping for something more than the extreme pessimism the Arthur Schopenhauers of the world broil in. I’m only 25 books in, but I’m already having déjà vu. Mostly, the prospect of cosmic meaninglessness is sad (and I think that’s only because religion promised it in the first place, and so losing your faith feels a lot like losing a cosmic importance you thought you had). But sometimes the prospect of cosmic meaninglessness is frightening too, and where we find frightening cosmic meaninglessness we find descriptions of the cosmos like this: uncaring, indifferent, hostile – the universe as apathetic and unfeeling.

Is it possible that our fear of ultimate meaninglessness is tied in part to fallacious renderings of the cosmos? That we project some semblance of agency onto the cosmos, and then recoil from it in the same way we would from a neglectful super-parent? Perhaps this isn’t unexpected. Religion aside, our evolved theory of mind ingrains in us this propensity to search for minds and agency everywhere (read more about theory of mind here). It must be our baseline architecture, because theists and non-theists alike slip into these agent-like descriptions of the universe. But that turns the cosmos into a giant thinking/feeling uber-mind: the universe doesn’t care about you, the universe is apathetic to your existence.

Like describing death as an anti-life experience, describing the cosmos as some unloving agent invokes needless anxiety. The cosmos is just a bunch of rocks and gassy balls. The cosmos is not an emotionless being, it’s not a being at all. I think most secular folks understand this intellectually, but the language we use betrays us. The reality is this: the cosmos isn’t uncaring, indifferent, or hostile… it’s just floaty rocks. If we could stop anthropomorphizing the universe, we might alleviate at least some of the dread the prospect of cosmic meaninglessness inspires (and maybe we could even stop expecting cosmic meaning in the first place if we fully accepted that meaning comes from minds, and the cosmos is not a mind). While adjectives like cold, dead, lifeless, and empty may technically be accurate descriptors of space, they too inspire a pang of fear, but I’d contend that fear has more to do with safety and security than it does with misplaced anthropomorphic, nihilistic dread.

Death as an endless oblivion is the same illogical application as saying the universe is apathetic or unfeeling. Nothingness is not a thing, and the universe is not an agent with feelings or motives or intent. Non-being is not a frightening experience because it’s not an experience at all. The cosmos isn’t unfeeling because the cosmos isn’t a being. When it comes to our fears of mortality and meaninglessness, maybe language matters more than we think, and maybe it can pinpoint fallacious thinking worth escaping.