Asimov on the small difference

What is life and what is death, and how do we distinguish between them. If you compare a functioning person to a rock, then there is no problem. A human being consists of a certain type of chemical substances, closely related to living things - proteins, nucleic acids, etc. Not so for the rock. From Fantasy 2000

Isaac Asimov

What is life and what is death, and how do we distinguish between them. If you compare a functioning person to a rock, then there is no problem. A human being consists of a certain type of chemical substances, closely related to living things - proteins, nucleic acids, etc. Not so for the rock.

Also, the human performs a series of chemical changes that create 'metabolism', changes in which food and oxygen are converted into energy, new tissues and waste. As a result, man grows and multiplies and turns simple compounds into more complex ones, seemingly breaking the second law of thermodynamics. The rock does not. Finally, man exhibits adaptation - in his efforts to preserve life, avoid danger and seek security, both voluntarily and through unconscious mechanisms of his physiology and biochemistry, while the rock does not.

But the man-rock contrast expresses such a simple distinction between life and death that it is trivial and does not help us. We must examine a more difficult case. Let us compare not a man against a rock, but a living man against a dead man.

Actually, let's make the discussion even more difficult and ask, what is the fundamental difference between a person who is some time before the moment of his death, and the same person a few minutes after death, let's say five minutes before and after death. What are the changes that take effect in those ten minutes?

The molecules are still there, so are all the proteins and nucleic acids. But something has ceased to exist, because the metabolism and the adaptation mechanism that worked (albeit weakly) before death no longer work afterwards. Any spark of life is gone. what is the thing

One of the initial hypotheses on this topic was related to blood. It is easy to assume that there is a special connection between blood and life, a connection that is closer than the connection between other tissues and life. After all, if you lose blood you get weaker and eventually die. So maybe the blood is the essence of life and in fact, life itself?

A hint of this view can be found in the Bible, which in several places identifies life with blood. Thus, after the flood, Noah and his family members, the only survivors of the great holocaust, are guided by God as to what they should eat and what they should not eat. As part of this exercise in diet God says: 'But flesh with its soul, its blood you shall not eat.' (Genesis, 4:23). In another chapter dealing with dietary laws, Moses quotes the word of God saying: 'Only strong is he who does not eat the blood, because the blood is the soul and the soul shall not eat with the flesh.' (Deuteronomy, XNUMX:XNUMX). Similar things are also found in the New Testament.

It turns out that life is a gift from God and you shouldn't eat anything alive - but after removing the blood, all that remains is dead matter and has always been so, and that's why it is allowed to be buried. According to this view, plants, being bloodless, are not really alive. They just grow and are only used for food.

In Genesis 29:30-XNUMX, God says to the man who has just been created: 'Behold, I have given you every seed-bearing herb that is on the face of the earth and every tree in which the fruit of a seed-bearing tree is for you to eat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every creeping thing upon the earth, in which there is a living soul, every green herb to eat, and it shall be so.'

The plant is described as 'sowing seed' but the animal - 'in it is a living soul'.

Plants are also living beings

Today we do not make such a distinction, of course. Plants are alive just like animals and they have fluids that fulfill the functions of blood in animals. But their back regarding the animals alone has no basis for the blood theory. Although a large amount of blood loss causes the loss of life, the opposite is not necessarily true. One can die without losing a single drop of blood; Indeed this happens often.

Since death can occur even when there is no loss of any substance, the spark of life must be found in something more complex than blood.

So what about breathing? All animals, all humans, breathe. If we think about breath, it seems that it deserves to be used as the essence of life more than man.

We breathe in and out constantly. The inability to breathe inevitably causes death. If a person is deprived of the possibility to breathe by putting physical pressure on his trachea, or by immersing him in water - the person will die. The loss of breath is as deadly as the loss of blood and its fatal results are even faster.

Also, while the opposite situation is not true in the case of blood - one can die without losing blood - this is not the case in the case of breathing. You cannot die without stopping breathing. A living person breathes, albeit weakly, even on the brink of death; After his death he does not breathe and this is always true.

Furthermore, breathing itself is a very complex thing. It is invisible and to the ancient man it was seen as immaterial, as something spiritual. The breath of the human nose may have represented the essence of life and the subtle difference between life and death.

And so, in Genesis 7:XNUMX, the creation of the first Adam is described: 'And the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.'

This is how we arrive at the instructive meaning of the words breath-soul-soul-life-soul-nefesh. They all express breath and life. In Latin 'spirra' means to breathe and 'spiritus-spirit'. The Greek word pneoma, which means air for breathing, also means wind. The English word ghost-spirit (in the sense of demons and spirits), derives from an Old English word that means breath. There are many examples of this in different languages.

We are talking about the 'human spirit'. We could express the same thing, but in a less impressive way with the words 'human breath'. The term Holy Spirit is equivalent to 'the breath of God'.

It can be said that the literal meaning of things does not teach anything, that the most important and hidden ideas must be expressed in simple words and that those words derive their meaning from the idea and not the other way around.

Well, one can accept this view if one believes that human knowledge is derived from supernatural revelation. In my opinion, in any case, knowledge comes from below, from observations, from a simple and unsophisticated thought that establishes a primitive idea that becomes more complex and abstract as knowledge accumulates. Etymology, therefore, is the key to the original thought, which has been covered over time by thousands of years of obscure thought. I think people noticed the connection between their soul and life in a fairly direct way, while all the complicated philosophical and theological ideas about spirit and soul came later.

Is the human soul formless and immaterial like its literal source - the breath? Do the souls of all the dead merge into one homogeneous mixture of the generalized life?

Hard to believe that. After all, each human being differs from another in different ways, more or less complex. Therefore it would be natural to assume that the essence of life must change in one way or another from person to person. That is why each soul preserves this difference and is like a memory of the body in which it once lived and which gave it the property called life and its uniqueness.

And if each soul preserves the seal that imprinted its characteristic features on the body, there is a temptation to assume that the soul treasures within it, in a hidden, spiritual, and inconceivable manner, the shape and pattern of the human body in which it resided.

This belief may be supported by the fact that it is common to dream of the dead as if they were still alive. Dreams were attributed great significance in ancient times, and in fact even nowadays, as a transmission from another world; And they could be seen as evidence that the spirits resembled the corpses they left.

For the sake of modesty, if for no other reason, such spirits are usually described as clothed in a formless white mantle, made of a luminous cloud or halo of light. Hence, of course, all those funny paintings depicting ghosts wearing sheets.

Yes it would be natural to assume that the spirit is immortal. Is it possible that the very pattern of life will die? A physical object may be alive if it contains the essence of life, or dead - if it does not contain it. But the essence of life itself must be in life.

This is analogous to the statement that a sponge may be wet or dry, depending on whether it contains water or not, but the water itself can only be wet; Or in a room there may be darkness or light depending on the sun's rays, whether they penetrate into the room or not, but the sun's rays themselves can only be light.

If there is a selection of spirits and souls that live forever, that enter into a block of matter at birth, give it life and then leave it and allow it to die, then there must be a huge number of spirits, one for every human being that ever lived or lived.

This number may increase further if spirits for other life forms also exist. It may decrease if reincarnation is possible; That is, a soul that leaves a dead body can reappear in a newly born body.

The above two views have appendices; Like for example the belief in reincarnation in the entire animal kingdom. A person who behaved particularly badly may be reborn as a cockroach, and on the other hand, a cockroach may be reborn as a person, provided that he was a particularly good and noble cockroach.

In any case, even if the existence of souls is limited to human beings and does not include the animal kingdom (if reincarnation exists at all), then there must be a huge number of souls for the purposes of reducing life in the body or taking it from it. Where do all these souls reside?

In other words, if we accept the assumption of the existence of the spirit, we must assume the existence of an entire world of spirits. This world of spirits may dwell in the depths of the earth, somewhere in the heights, on another world or in another dimension.

The simplest hypothesis is that the spirits of the dead pile up underground, perhaps because of the ancient practice of burying the dead in the ground.

The simplest subterranean abode of spirits is described as a gray place of doom, like the Greek Hades or the Jewish Sheol. The situation there is described as perpetual hibernation. This is how the underworld is described in the Bible: 'There the wicked cease their anger and there they rest in strength. Together we are prisoners, they did not hear an approaching voice. Small and great there he is and a slave free from his masters.' (Job 17:19-XNUMX). Swennyburn describes Hades in the poem 'The Garden of Prosperine' as a quiet place, shrouded in slumber and dream.

This emptiness seems to many to be insufficient, and the sense of injustice in life that burns within them, tempts them to imagine a place of torture after death. A place where all those who hate them get everything they deserve. The Greek 'tartarus' or the Christian hell.

The principle of symmetry also requires the existence of an abode of supreme happiness, for all the people they love - paradise, the sky, the islands beloved of the gods, the eternal hunting grounds, Valhalla (paradise for warriors according to Scandinavian mythology), etc.

This whole solid structure of belief in the end times is built on the fact that the living breathe and the dead do not, and that the living long to believe that they will not actually die.

Today we know, of course, that breath is no more the essence of life than blood is; And that both the blood and the breath are simply the servants of life. The soul of man's nose is neither incorporeal nor mysterious. The breathing air is as material as the body itself, and is composed of atoms that are no more mysterious than other atoms.

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