Enigma Of Immortality

[Aleksander Samarin]

Enigma of Immortality
by Aleksander Samarin

“Man is the only animal that contemplates death, and also the only animal that shows any sign of doubt of its finality”.

William Ernest Hocking (1873 – 1966)

Introduction

“Without wanting to deceive men, it can be said we have as much reason to believe in as to deny immortality of the being that thinks”.

François Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694 – 1778)

In this brief essay I would like to shed some light on the riddle of immortality by examining the consequences of philosophical and scientific concepts attributed to three great minds, those of Philipp Mainlander (1841 – 1876), Ludwig Boltzmann (1844 – 1906) and Eugene Marais (1871 – 1936).
All three made extraordinary contributions to our perception of reality, and all three committed suicide.
It is probably even more remarkable that the astounding notions developed by Philipp Mainlander remain to this day practically unknown in the English-speaking world, and those of Eugene Marais have received very little publicity. And yet ideas of both of these men can supplement in the most unexpected way some of the incredible scientific discoveries of the last century.

The origin of the universe

“The result, therefore, of the physical enquiry is that we find no vestige of the beginning, noprospects at the end”.
James Hutton (1726 – 1797)

A contemporary of Mainlander and a disciple of Arthur Schopenhauer, Eduard K.R. von Hartmann (1842 – 1906) in his Philosophie des Unbewussten (Philosophy of the Unconscious, Berlin, 1869) expressed a view that although humans are incapable of achieving happiness in their earthly existence or in the afterlife, the “animal will to live” – “der thierische Wille” must force us to accept this life with all its sufferings. Hartmann nonetheless believed that when human misery and decay eventually reach their apogee, the intellect, the ability to reason, unfolding to humanity the concept of absolute, as advocated by Georg Friedrich Hegel (1770 – 1831), will ultimately prevail, thus not denying some hope for the future of mankind.

While agreeing with the first part of Hartmann’s belief that humans are incapable of achieving happiness, Mainlander in Die Philosophie der Erlösung (The Philosophy of Redemption, 1876) came to a diametrically opposite viewpoint on the second half of this conception, denying all subsequent earthly sustainability for the human race. However, it is Mainlander’s reasoning, the logic of reaching this conclusion, and not the conclusion per se, which is so striking.

Philipp Mainlander was born into a bourgeois family – his father was a trader in Offenbach am Main, a small German town in Hesse near Frankfurt. Although even in his early years Philipp displayed a strong tendency toward the humanities, he studied (probably to please his father) commerce in Dresden. From 1856 he lived in Italy and upon his return to Germany in 1863 was helping to run his father’s business. Apparently out of patriotic considerations he completed military service. He also dabbled in poetry.

A dramatic change in Mainlander’s perception of reality resulted from his discovery in 1860 of Arthur Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation, Leipzig, 1818), in the year Schopenhauer died.
Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) based his philosophy on a belief in a blind, impelling force, which compelled all humans to live. The world was seen as a constant conflict of individual wills, resulting in frustration, misery and pain. Similarly to the teachings of Buddhism, Schopenhauer advocated abstention from all desires as a means of reducing human suffering. The essence of his philosophy can probably be summarized in the following statements: “We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness. Human existence must be a kind of error: it is bad today and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens”, and also, “In my seventeenth year, without any learned school education, I was gripped by the misery of life as Buddha was in his youth when he saw sickness, old age, pain and death. The truth was that this world could not have been the work of an all-loving Being, but rather of a devil, who had brought creatures into existence in order to delight in the sight of their suffering”.

Fascinated by Schopenhauer’s pessimism, Mainlander immersed himself into philosophical study. Apart from Schopenhauer the main objects of his inquiry were apparently the philosophies of Baruch Spinoza (1632 -1677), who was renamed Benedict after his excommunication from the Sephardic Jewish community and, as already mentioned, of Eduard von Hartmann.

Spinoza believed that human beings can benefit from the rational renunciation of personal desire and also that the main driving force of mankind is self-preservation.
It is at this point that Mainlander has radically deviated from all his predecessors.
“Our world”, writes Mainlander in his Philosophy of Redemption “is the means and the only means of achieving nonexistence”. In his view, immortality, the eternal existence, is unbearable and agonizing even for God. But as God is eternal by nature, the only way to achieve nonexistence for the immortal God, who is beyond space-time and matter, is to transfer Himself into universe, that is to escape from the logically impossible into the logically plausible. “Thus”, continues Mainlander, “everything in the universe is directed towards nonexistence”. Therefore, Mainlander concluded, all mankind must ultimately realize that nonexistence is better than existence. When a person becomes enlightened in this awareness, he or she will end their existence by committing suicide and in this way complete the process of redemption. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Mainlander’s philosophy is that it offered a possible theological explanation for one of the scientific theories of the origin of the universe, considered to be most probable at present.

In 1922 Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Friedmann (1888 – 1925) developed a set of solutions to Einstein’s field equations, providing the currently most accepted cosmological model, known as the Friedmann Universe. His findings were published at the time in the journal Zeitschrift für Physik. Friedmann’s solutions depended directly on the density of matter in the Universe, the factor which should determine its ultimate destiny.

In 1927 Georges Henri Lamaître (1894 – 1966), independently of Friedmann, worked out a solution to the field equations, but his more notable contribution to cosmology was in the development of a concept of the “primeval atom”. Lamaître was a Belgian astrophysicist and cosmologist, born in Charleroi. After completing his engineering degree at the University of Louvain he joined, as a volunteer, the Belgian armed forces in World War I and was decorated for his valour with the Croix de Guerre. In 1920 he was awarded a doctorate in mathematical and physical sciences and three years later was ordained as a Catholic priest. A plump, irritating man he was probably one of the most extraordinary characters to wander onto the stage of revolutionary physics in the 1920s.
He continued his studies at Cambridge, Harvard and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The 1927 paper was a model of an expanding universe and thus it preceded by two years Edwin Powell Hubble’s (1889 – 1953) announcement that the galaxies recede from us with speeds which increase with their distance. To explain this expansion Lamaître put forward the notion of the “primeval atom”, which was unstable and hence destined to explode. At the fifth Solvay conference on physics in Brussels in 1927 he tried to obtain Einstein’s approval of his theory, but the latter dismissed him by pushing aside and saying: “Vos calculus sont corrects, mais votre physique est abominable”. The calculations, of course, were correct and identical to Friedmann’s, and the “abominable” physics received world wide recognition twenty-one years later. In 1948 George Gamow (1904 – 1968) proposed a theory based on the Friedmann Universe in which Lamaître’s primeval atom became the source of a gigantic explosion, during the first few minutes of which various elements comprising the universe were created. Thus the universe was created with time and not in time some 13.7 billion years ago, according to the latest estimates. Prior to that neither space-time nor matter existed.

In 1949 Sir Fred Hoyle (1915 – 2001), who was a proponent of the opposing Steady State theory, during the BBC radio program “The Nature of Things”, derided Gamow’s idea, calling it the “Big Bang”, possibly in a joking reference to Gamow’s work in the development of the atomic bomb.

Mainlander’s concept provides an excellent theological foundation for the Big Bang theory, i.e. the creation of time-space and matter by an eternal being who wanted to die. According to Mainlander, God was unable to die as an eternal whole, and the only logically possible way to fulfill His desire was to convert Himself into the universe, which is constantly progressing in all its components from a transient existence into permanent oblivion and death. There are of course alternative theological explanations for the Big Bang. In 1951 Pope Pius XII accepted this “event of creation” as part of the Roman Catholic doctrine, thus equating it to the book of Genesis in the Bible.

Mainlander’s “Philosophy of Redemption” was published on August 1, 1876.
On August 2, true to his belief, he shot himself..

[Aleksander Samarin]

A beginning suggests an end

“All the labour of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to destruction in the death of the solar system…”
Lord Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872 – 1970).

On the 5th of September 1906 Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the most eminent scientists of his time, whose interests encompassed physics, chemistry, mathematics, aeronautics and philosophy, was holidaying with his wife and daughter at the Bay of Duino near Trieste. While his wife and daughter went swimming, he hanged himself. It was apparently not his first attempt to commit suicide, but this time the outcome was fatal. Unlike Mainlander, whose suicidal motivations were perfectly clear, in Boltzmann’s case the exact reasons for taking his own life remain somewhat obscure. However, there seem to be at least three very important contributing factors: ill health, his philosophical beliefs and the rejection of his theories by several very prominent scientists of the day – the theories, which shortly after Boltzmann’s death were not only proven to be correct, but became a cornerstone of modern physical science.

Boltzmann’s philosophical outlook on life was rather pessimistic, as he himself once stated: “To go straight to the deepest depth, I went for Hegel; what unclear thoughtless flow of words I was to find there! My unlucky star led me from Hegel to Schopenhauer”.
Thus Boltzmann was also influenced by the gloom and desperation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which previously had guided Philipp Mainlander on his destructive, doomsday path.

Although recognized for his significant contributions in many diverse fields of science, Boltzmann’s most outstanding, and also originally the most controversial, achievement was his work on the statistical interpretation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
By applying probabilistic concepts of statistical mechanics to describe the number of possible microscopic states of matter (W), he developed a simple relationship which determines the value of entropy (S), or the degree of disorder of a system. The formula describing this relationship, S = k log W, is engraved on Boltzmann’s tombstone at the Zentralfriedhof cemetery in Vienna. In this equation k is the Boltzmann Constant.

Boltzmann concluded that in a closed system (and arguably also in an open system) the value of entropy, that is the degree of disorder, must almost always increase. The probability of the decrease in entropy is negligibly small, but not impossible. It has been observed in quantum physics, in the interpretation of quantum electro-dynamical interactions described in Faynman diagrams, where it is associated with “time reversal”, a rather unfortunate term, as more correctly it is a description of the reversal of direction of a process in time, as time is an integral part of the time-space continuum. This concept is dealt with in some detail in the paper: “Quantum Mechanics, Consciousness, Reality and Time”, accessible on the website: www.atse.org.au under Publications, Occasional Paper No.8.

The inevitable increase of entropy in the universe should ultimately result in a state of thermal equilibrium, or as it is known, in the heat death of the universe. The universe will then consist entirely of sub-atomic particles, all drifting at random and dispersing, thus becoming more and more distant from each other.

Boltzmann’s ideas were strongly opposed by several of his contemporaries who were widely acknowledged as the most distinguished scientists. This must have been particularly distressing to Boltzmann, and undoubtedly contributed to his state of depression. Two of his most virulent critics were Wilhelm Ostwald (1853 – 1932) and Ernst Mach (1836 – 1916).

It must be emphasized, however, that despite the success of the kinetic theory of gases, the notion of the atomic structure of matter was not firmly recognized at the time. One of the first steps towards this concept was made by the discovery of the electron in 1897, a finding which resulted from a study of the deflection of cathode rays by Sir Joseph John Thomson (1856 – 1940). These ideas were often seen as fanciful by the traditional scientific hierarchy of the day. After one of his lectures on the discovery of the electron, Thomson himself recalls: “I was told long afterwards by a distinguished physicist who had been present at my lecture that he thought I had been pulling their leg”.

Both Wilhelm Ostwald and Ernst Mach were “energists”, that is they held a view that there is no need to introduce the perception of atomic structure in explaining the laws of thermodynamics. Ostwald is considered one of the founders of physical chemistry. Ostwald’s dilution law of electrolytic conductivity is one of the many achievements for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909. Despite their disagreements in the perception of the nature of thermodynamics, Boltzmann and Ostwald apparently were on cordial, if not friendly, personal terms. However, Boltzmann developed strong antipathy towards Mach, and the feeling was mutual.

In 1867, after holding the Chair of Mathematics at Graz since 1864, Mach became Professor of Experimental Physics at Charles University in Prague, where he remained for 28 years. One year after Boltzmann moved to Vienna in 1894, Ernst Mach was appointed to the Chair of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Vienna.
This prompted Boltzmann to move to Leipzig, hence avoiding personal contact with Mach. However, two years later Mach suffered a stroke and as a result retired from active scientific research. In 1901 he was elected to the Austrian parliament. With Mach out of his way, Boltzmann returned to Vienna in 1902 where he was appointed to the Chair of Theoretical Physics and was also given Mach’s philosophy course to teach.

Mach is probably best known for his explorations in the field of supersonic velocity. The ratio of the speed of a projectile to the speed of sound is now called the Mach number. It was displayed in the passenger compartment of Concord supersonic aircraft during each flight, at times exceeding the value of two. His work in the area of sensory perception led to the discovery of an optical illusion called the Mach band. Mach is also widely regarded as the father of logical positivism. According to Mach the mind is allowed no power to know and understand reality beyond its own sensation.

Paradoxically Boltzmann’s lectures based on Mach’s philosophy became extremely popular, so that even the biggest lecture auditorium available was unable to hold all the students attending this course. In 1918 Einstein called the relationship between the inertia of a body with the matter of the entire universe a “Mach principle” in recognition of Mach’s work in this field. Mach’s principle contributed to the formulation of the theory of relativity, a theory which ironically Mach opposed.

Boltzmann’s work in thermodynamics received experimental verification in the atomic theory initiated and led by Albert Einstein in 1905, resulting in the triumph of his statistical notion of entropy – a triumph which Boltzmann himself never lived to see.

The heat death is only one of the possible final stages of the universe. In this scenario the temperature of the entire Universe will become very close to absolute zero. However it is not quite the same as the “cold death” in which due to expansion the universe will simply be too cold to sustain life. Currently there are a number of scientific hypotheses about the state of the universe. These can be divided into four main groups: -
· The Steady State theory, which was developed in 1949 by Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold. It states that matter in the universe is constantly created, a few hundred atoms of hydrogen in the Milky Way Galaxy each year is sufficient to maintain a steady state – by comparison a drop of water contains approximately a thousand billion, billion molecules. This creation of new matter should account for the expansion of the universe, which was discovered in 1929 by Hubble. However, the Steady State theory fails to explain the presence of microwave background radiation and the abundance of helium in the universe. There is also a quasi-stable theory, which postulates a creation of matter in a number of “small Big Bangs” occurring at some intervals.
· A second possibility is that the universe had a beginning in a Big Bang, expanded, and will continue expanding forever until it ends in either heat death in accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or in the cold death.
· The third likelihood is that the universe had a beginning in the Big Bang, expanded, but will ultimately start contracting, thus ending in a Big Crunch.
· Finally, there is a possibility that the Big Bang was a consequence of the previous Big Crunch and that these cycles of the beginning and the end will continue forever.

There are several other somewhat speculative hypotheses about the state of the universe which I shall briefly discuss and also assess some of the theological implications of these theories in the conclusion.

[Aleksander Samarin]

Mind – Body Problem

“Buddhism, Jainism and some other ancient Indian
traditions… do not accept the theory of God…
Even between the godless religions, there are differences.
Buddhists do no accept the theory of soul or permanent self.
Self, we say, is a momentarily changing.
His Holiness Tenzin Gyatso, the XIV Dalai Lama.

The mind-body problem is central to both the philosophy of mind and philosophy of psychology. By the early 1960s it had also become the object of thanatology – the scientific study of consciousness in patients who were revived after clinical death. A thorough treatment of the mind-body problem is well beyond the scope of this article, and I shall only attempt to give a very general overview of the concept as a preamble to the tragic life and remarkable ideas of Eugene Marais.

The mind-body problem emerged from a seemingly incomprehensible dichotomy of human consciousness – that of mind or soul and of purely physiological functions of the brain. This question of whether human mental states are just physical conditions of the brain, as in materialism, or suppositions that mind is distinct from a body and hence that these two belong to the different realms, as in dualism, were contemplated at least as far back as Plato (428 – 348 BC) and Aristotle (384 – 322 BC).

Plato held a dualistic view, that the soul – the essence of ourselves, and what in modern medicine is called mind – is capable of separate existence from the body and thus will survive its biological death. He believed that in a living body the center of the intellect is located in the head. But Aristotle, by some accounts, disagreed with his teacher Plato. He regarded the heart as the center of human mental power. The fact that a chicken can run with his head cut off seemed to reinforce his belief. He apparently considered body and soul as two aspects of the same substance, which may not have been in essence equivalent to “matter” as it is understood in classical physics.

It was however not until the advent of an epiphany into theology and metaphysics by René Descartes (1596 – 1650) that the mind-body problem became divorced from religious dualism and became a subject of formal philosophical enquiry. Descartes himself saw the enormity of this problem. In his Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Meditations on the First Philosophy, 1641) Descartes wrote: “So serious are the doubts into which I have been thrown… that I can neither put them out of my mind nor see any way of resolving them. It feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top”. He even doubted all sensual perceptions of existence, recognizing that dreams, illusions and hallucinations produce images in our minds which could possibly be mistaken for reflections of reality. The single certain fact is that if he can doubt, and doubting is thinking, then he himself must exist. From this he arrived at his famous canonical slogan: “je pense, donc je suis”, or in its Latin form: “cogito ergo sum”, translated into English: “I think, therefore I am”.

And so began Cartesian Dualism based on the deduction that the two fundamental entities of the real world are mind or consciousness (res cogitans) which is unextended and indivisible, and matter (res extensa), which is extended and divisible. Elio Frattaroli, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst at the Psychoanalytical Center of Philadelphia in his book Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain (Viking Penguin Books, 2001) gives the following assessment of Cartesian Dualism: “…dualistic philosophy reflects the universal human experience of inner conflict – a tension between opposing needs and tendencies within the self that triggers anxiety, shame, or guilt. This existential condition of inner conflict has been recognized and described by virtually every known religion as an opposition between the Flesh and the Spirit: between the ‘lower’ passions (our bodily appetites and emotional needs for pleasure and power) and the higher desires (our spiritual yearning toward truth, love and virtue). In this way, dualistic philosophy had been linked with the religious problem of good and evil. The dualism of Flesh and the Spirit was a way of talking about our inner sense of moral choice between our temptation toward sin and our aspirations toward virtue. What was truly revolutionary in Descartes’ thinking was that he divorced dualism from the religious problem of good and evil, and for the first time treated it in a way that can properly be called scientific – through a carefully described systematic observation of his own conscious experience”.

That does not mean, of course, that the mind-body problem had been solved by Descartes.This was just a first step towards the scientific investigation into this dilemma and since that first step has developed into a number of alternative theories. For example, monism accepts only the one substance in the universe. This substance can be “all mind” as in Neutral or Mental Monism, proponents of which were Spinoza, with his concept of God-or Nature (deus sive natura), and Hegel, who advanced the notion of the “absolute idea”. As already mentioned, this view was also expressed by Ernst Mach and proposes that all is mind, that is, that the idea of the natural world is itself a creation of mind, and can only be known through hypotheses tested by reference to experience.

On the other hand physical monism proclaims that all phenomena of mind and nature can be reduced to the laws of physics, chemistry and biology. One of the most passionate advocates of materialistic monism was Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach (1804 – 1872) whose acknowledged work Das Wesen des Christentums (1841), translated into English as The Essence of Christianity, defines religion as “the dream of human mind”. The materialistic view of consciousness was subsequently advanced by Frederick Karl Christian Ludwig Büchner (1824 – 1899). In his most famous treatise Kraft und Stoff (usually translated Force and Matter, 1855) he dismissed all religious dogmas by replacing them with scientific materialism. It created such an outrage among his god-fearing colleagues, that he was forced to resign his lectureship in medicine at the University of Tübingen. In the chapter of this book “Brain and Soul” he specifically addresses the mind-body problem. The opening sentence reads: “It is highly unlikely that a single physician or physiologist can ever doubt that the human brain is an organ whose functions are thinking, desire and feeling, and hence it is impossible to imagine these activities without the brain”. Although Büchner’s ideas have been challenged recently by many physicians and psychologists, it seems that physical monism is probably still the most widely accepted view held among the contemporary scientists, such as Francis Harry Compton Crick (1916 – 2004), who with James D. Watson and Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for the discovery of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, the molecule that transmits genetic information from one generation to another.

Over the past four hundred years the philosophical and scientific enquiries into the mind-body problem have resulted in numerous theories advocating variations of dualistic and materialistic approaches. Some of the more notable are occasionalism, conceived by Nicolas Malebranche (1638 – 1715) in his De la Recherche de la Vérité (1674/75), epiphenomalism attributed to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1646 – 1716), and more recently psychological parallelalism of Curt John Ducasse (1881 – 1969) popularized in his Carus Lectures, Nature, Mind and Death (1951), to name just a few.

I shall discuss the relation of some of the above theories to the concept of immortality in the conclusion to this essay.

I do believe that after Descartes, the first truly authentic scientific research into the mind-body problem should be attributed to Eugene Marais. Marais was born to a conservative Afrikaner family in Pretoria in 1871, which at the time was a frontier town in the Boer Republic of Transvaal. By strange coincidence, his first teacher was a Church of England missionary who could not (or possibly would not) speak Afrikaans, and thus young Eugene had to learn English. As a child prodigy he became a published poet by the age of twelve and matriculated when he was sixteen. In 1890, at the age of eighteen, Marais became a journalist for the Afrikaans newspaper Land en Volk (Country and People) in Pretoria. After one year he was the editor, and two years later the owner of this newspaper, a move which made him financially independent.

His newspaper articles were so critical of the Volksraad (People’s Council) activities, that he was not only banned from the press gallery, but also charged with high treason, apparently by offending with his acrid comments the founder and the President of Transvaal, Paul Kruger, affectionately known to his followers as Oom Paul. However, these charges were subsequently dismissed by the Supreme Court.

At the age of twenty-two Marais married Aletta, a young woman from Natal, but one year later she died while giving birth to their first child, a boy. Marais never married again. His bereavement was compounded by severe attacks of neuralgia, and to relieve both mental and physical pain he turned to morphine, a habit probably to some extent influenced by Thomas De Quincey’s 1822 masterpiece: Confessions of an English Opium Eater, still a very popular book at the end of that century. Marais till his death was unable to shake off this addiction.

In 1897 he gave up journalism, left Pretoria and went to England to study law. Five years later he qualified and was admitted to the bar at the Inner Temple in London. At the same time he studied medicine, but in 1899 before he obtained his degree, the Boer War broke out, and Marais was detained as an enemy alien, although soon released on parole.

The Anglo-Boer war was fought between Great Britain and the two Afrikaner republics – Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Even though the total British armed forces were nearly half a million men, the Boers, with no more than 88,000 troops, in December 1899 in what became known as the “black week”, and again in 1900, under the command of Christian Rudolf de Wet and Jacobus Hercules de la Rey, achieved considerable military success. Subsequently, however, the fortunes of the British army changed, particularly when their Commander in Chief, Lord Kitchener, responded with the scorched earth policy. The farms of Boers were destroyed and the inhabitants were rounded up and placed in concentration camps. By some accounts more than 20,000 Boer women and children died from malnutrition and in the unhygienic conditions of the camps. The Boers had to accept the loss of their independence in May 1902, in the so-called Peace of Vereeniging. Transvaal became a British crown colony under the administration of Sir Alfred Milner till 1906, when its self-government was restored.
In the elections of 1907 the former commander of Afrikaner forces in the Anglo-Boer war, General Louis Botha, became Transvaal’s Prime Minister.

From the very beginning of the Boer War, Marais was devastated by the events in his homeland. He escaped from Britain and was heading towards Central Africa with supplies of munitions and medicine. However, on his way to assist his countrymen Marais caught malaria and was confined to hospital in Mozambique. By the time he recovered, the war was over. The attacks of malaria frequently recurred to the end of his life, adding to his misery.

His attitude towards everything British had changed dramatically, as he once remarked:
“The most enduring result was that it made me far more bitter than men who took part in the war at a more advanced age and who had less to do with the English before the war. It was for purely sentimental reasons that I refused to write in any language but Afrikaans, notwithstanding the fact that I am far more fluent and more at ease in English”. As a result all the major scientific works by Marais were written in Afrikaans – a significant factor which ultimately led to the tragic outcome of his life.

In 1904 Marais returned to Pretoria, but apparently was unable to fit into the local society and take part or interest in public life as he had before the war. In 1907, when he was 36, he arrived in Waterberg, also known as the Palala Plateau, in the Northern Transvaal adjacent to Eastern Botswana. For the next eight years he lived on a farm in Rietfontein, the property of Oom Gys and Tant Maria van Rooyen. These were the most creative and possibly, at least in the beginning, the happiest years of his life. During this time he collected material and conducted scientific research which resulted in the publication of several outstanding books, but in this essay I shall examine only one: Die Siel van die Mier or The Soul of the White Ant.

In 1976, while on a job assignment in Johannesburg and Pretoria, I visited this part of South Africa – a land of rustic beauty and splendor. Landscapes of the Waterberg plateau are decorated with a variety of sculptures of red earth. There had obviously been significant changes in the area since the beginning of the last century, but some features seem to have remained as they were when Marais commenced his quest for the nature of the inexplicable soul. The farm where he stayed was in depopulated country on the border with artificially created wilderness, as all the adjacent properties had been destroyed by the British scorched earth policy during the war. And yet, even seventy years later, I could see the main objects of his investigation – the termite mounds. These are the cooling towers, the air-conditioning systems for the intricate structures constructed by colonies of termites. Many were so large that trees were growing on their sides, providing wild animals and birds with shade and resting places.

Behind the Rietfontein farmhouse lay some low hills where Marais, always dressed in immaculate white, would stroll between the numerous termite mounds, at first just poking with his walking stick little holes in their walls and observing the reaction of white ants to the destruction he created. It is generally considered that termites communicate alarm by vibrations, odor and physical contact. When disturbed they tap their heads against the ground producing rattling sounds which are audible to the human ear, but not to the termites themselves, as they cannot hear airborne sounds. As soon as Marais damaged a mound, the termites began frantic repairs. In his later investigations Marais would create much larger gaps in the side of a termite mound.

In the middle of Chapter 12 of the Soul of the White Ant – “The Mysterious Power which Governs” Marais wrote:

“Let us look at the workers through a magnifying glass. We see them appear one by one from the dark depth, each carrying a grain of earth. Without the least thought, each worker rolls the pebble round and round in its jaws. It covers it with a sticky mucilage, sets it in position in the breach and vanishes again into the depth. No reasonable person can imagine for one moment that every small worker is conscious of the purpose of its work, that it carries in its mind the plan, or even part of the plan of the building operations. The tower or breach may be a million times larger then the termite itself. The workers attack the repairs from every side, and are totally blind. We can convince ourselves that the termites at one side of the breach never come into contact with those on the other side. They may fetch their materials from different parts of the nest. If we have any doubt of this we can easily dispel it. Take a steel plate a few feet wider and higher than the termitary. Drive it right through the center of the breach you have made, in such a way that you divide the wound and the termitary into two separate parts. One section of the community can never be in touch with the other, and one of the sections will be separated from the queen’s cell. The builders on one side of the breach know nothing of those on the other side. In spite of this the termites build a similar arch or tower on each side of the plate. When eventually you withdraw the plate, the two halves match perfectly after the dividing cut has been repaired. We cannot escape the ultimate conclusion that somewhere there exists a preconceived plan which the termites merely execute. Where is the soul, the psyche, in which this preconception exists?”

Marais then describes the diversity of repair structures built by termites, each one put up differently, depending on the type and the extent of the damage, thus eliminating all possibilities of the instinctive, inherited plan of reconstruction. He then continues thus:

“If we carry our experiment a little further, new light begins to trickle through on our problem. While the termites are carrying on their work of restoration on either side of the steel plate, dig a furrow enabling you to reach the queen’s cell, disturbing the nest as little as possible. Expose the queen and destroy her. Immediately the whole community ceases work on either side of the plate. We can separate the termites from the queen for months by means of this plate, yet in spite of that they continue working systematically while she is alive in her cell; destroy or remove her, however, and their activity is at an end”.

And still further on:

“The mysterious power which streams from the queen functions only within a limited distance. Every termite is under the influence of this power. If their termitaries are situated close to each other, the power of each queen operates on both nests. It is through this psychological power of the queen that the termites of one nest are capable of recognizing their fellow-citizens and discovering strange intruders.”

Marais then asks how one can compare this soul with that of a human being.
It seems that the queen is the brain, the mind, but also the womb; the workers, the tissue builders are equivalent to the animal cells in a human body; the soldiers function as the white blood cells in a human circulatory system, and the humus gardens in the termite mounds are acting like our digestive organs. However, in all primates the nervous system consists of the brain and the spinal cord. Connected to it and running through the body is the peripheral nervous system, which has two main parts – the somatic or voluntary nervous system and the autonomic or involuntary system, which deals with the unconscious control of body’s organs. The signals in the case of a human body are the nerve impulses, transmission of which through a living cell involves the movement of electrically charged particles – ions. At the junction between nerve and muscle fibers a chemical transmitter is released from the nerve in response to the electrical impulse. The nerve cells that conduct the chemical and electrical traffic inside our bodies are called neurons. Neurons are made up of a central cell body and two main branches: axons, which carry signals away from the neuron to other neurons, and dendrites, which receive incoming signals. But communication between the termite queen and the white ants has no means of transmitting either electrical signals (there is a steel plate obstacle), or the chemicals, which require direct contacts. And thus Marais opened a new debate on the nature of the mysterious soul of the white ant, the essence of which presents yet another puzzle of the real meaning and the dichotomy of consciousness. It was the human mind, the psyche that preoccupied Marais, but to look for the answers to his quest he turned to nature.

His stunning discoveries originally appeared in 1923 in a series of articles in the Afrikaans press and in 1925 his main treatise on the psyche, which governs termite behavior, was published in the Afrikaans journal Die Huisgenoot. Almost without exception only the natives of South Africa could speak Afrikaans when Marais published his work, but this language of course is very similar to the West German group of languages, including Dutch. It is in fact also related to Flemish, which is one of the official languages of Belgium. In 1926 Marais discovered to his surprise that Count Maurice Polidore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck (1862 – 1949) published a book with the intriguing title: Le Vie des Termites (The Life of the White Ant) which, upon examination was obviously plagiarized from the dissertation Die Siel van die Mier. Although born into a French-speaking family, Maeterlinck was Belgian, and apparently also fluent in Flemish.

Maurice Maeterlinck became famous with his play La Princesse Maleine in 1890, and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911. Some critics named him “The Belgian Shakespeare”. Two main themes of his work were the meaning of life and death. Maeterlinck’s Le Vie des Termites was met with outrage in South Africa, but in Europe there was no response to this commotion. In 1935 Marais described his frustration in a letter to Dr Winifred de Kok, who was commissioned to translate Die Siel van die Mier into English. “You must understand”, he wrote, “that it was a theory which was not only new to science but which no man born of a woman could have arrived without a knowledge of all the facts on which it is based, and these Maeterlinck quite obviously did not possess. He even committed faux pas of taking certain Latin scientific words invented by me to be current and generally accepted Latin terms”. He then continues: “The Afrikaans publishers of the original articles communicated the facts to one of our ambassadorial representatives in Europe and suggested that Maeterlinck be approached. Whether or not this was done, I never ascertained. In any case, Maeterlinck, like other great ones on Olympus, maintained mighty and dignified silence”.

Eventually his recollections of the tragic events of his youth, the loss of his wife, memories of the brutal war, his recurring attacks of malaria and neuralgia, his drug addiction and finally the cruel blow of the plagiarism of his life’s work by Maeterlinck led Marais to the inevitable finale. In the summer of 1936 he put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

[Aleksander Samarin]

Conclusion

“O Lord, if there is a Lord, save my soul, if there is a soul”.
Joseph Renan (1823 – 1890).

It seems that nearly all the credible current scientific theories predict the end, in one form or the other, of the universe, of which our Solar System is but a minuscule part. The most probable scenario, according to the latest cosmological studies of the background microwave radiation (a kind of “fingerprint” of the early universe after the Big Bang), of the amount of helium in the universe (one of the first elements created after the Big Bang) and the overall density of matter in the universe (including the invisible “dark matter”), is that the universe will continue expanding forever. Both the Steady-State and the Big Bang-Big Crunch theories are not corroborated by the latest cosmological data.

The Big Crunch however, is an essential requirement of the “Omega Point” theory, developed by Frank J. Tipler, Professor of Mathematical Physics at Tulane University. According to Tipler, this supposition, and I quote from his book: The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, London, McMillan, 1994: “is a testable physical theory for the omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent God, who will one day in the far future resurrect every single one of us to live forever in the abode which is in all essentials the Judeo-Christian Heaven…” However, if the universe is not going to stop expanding and start contracting, ultimately collapsing into a Big Crunch, Tipler’s prediction must be doomed to failure. On the other hand, if the amount of “dark matter” will be proven to provide the critical mass in the universe which is necessary for it to contract, then Tipler may be right.

Regardless of the density of matter in the universe, which will determine its ultimate destiny, our Solar System will be annihilated when the Sun, following the evolutionary process observed in all stars of similar size, becomes a Red Giant. Humanity, of course, may be wiped off the face of the Earth before that happens by a natural cataclysm, such as Earth’s collision with an asteroid. Asteroids crossing Earth’s orbit typically have velocities exceeding 17 kilometers per second and thus have colossal kinetic energies. It is estimated, for example, that the Meteor Crater in Arizona, which was created by an explosion equivalent to between 15 and 20 megaton atomic bomb approximately 50,000 years ago, was the result of a collision with the asteroid of only 40 to 50 meters in diameter. The likelihood of such encounters in future can be reasonably well estimated. For example, the recently discovered Near-Earth asteroid, known as 2004 MN4, has 1 in 37 chance of collision with Earth on April 13, 2029.

Judging by the past geological history of the Earth, the onset of a new Ice Age some time in the remote future for humans, but not at all distant on a geological scale, is highly likely. Geological records also reveal that the organic life on Earth existed for approximately three and a half billion years, surviving endless natural cataclysms. However, the emergence of “intelligent” humans, homo-sapiens, currently technologically advanced, but greedy and aggressive, often driven by the killer instinct, could lead to self-destruction of the human race. The exact nature of this obliteration triggered by the runaway conditions can vary, as I have indicated in my article: Anthropogenic Paradox, published by the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering in the journal Focus, No. 110, January/February 2000.

The ultimate unsolved question, which Marais tried to answer, is that of the nature of the human mind, consciousness or soul. Does it belong to the non-material realm, and if so, what is material and what is not? If this dichotomy exists, just how are the spiritual and material dominions related? After all, the nature of sub-atomic particles, as it is understood in quantum mechanics, is not exactly the “material” concept of the classical physics. How is it that a “non-material” soul is capable interacting with the material world while it is located in a living human body, but can not communicate with other human beings after the brain becomes biologically dead?

During the past thirty years thanatology, the scientific evidence of consciousness in people who were pronounced clinically dead that is in the state when their brains were still maintained alive, produced seemingly indisputable evidence of “out-of-the body experiences” and thus the possible existence of what some may call a soul. However, it did not answer a question of whether this human soul is mortal or immortal. There is apparently no evidence whatsoever of the survival of consciousness once the brain becomes biologically dead.

If there is a non-material soul, at what stage of the development of a human embryo is it “implanted” or does it become “emergent” inside the body? If we accept Darwin’s evolutionary theory, as indeed many modern religions do, when exactly in the evolutionary chain of the development of a humanoid, who was apparently without a soul, does this sub-human becomes a human, thus being graced with the immortal soul? In the Judeo-Christian tradition the Book of Genesis resolves this problem by the miracle of an instant implant of souls into Adam and Eve.

Other religions offer different explanations of mortality or immortality, ranging from the reincarnation, or re-planting of a soul from a dead body into a newly born, to the absolute non-existence of souls, known as anatman in Buddhism. To a Buddhist the idea of a creator God also seems nonsensical. Coincidently, some of the modern cosmological hypotheses appear to be in close agreement with several traditional religious beliefs. This also applies to quantum physics, and particularly to the so-called Copenhagen interpretation, which states that the sub-atomic particles “materialize” only if they are observed by a conscious mind. Anton Zeilinger from the Institut für Experimentalphysik at the University of Vienna in his attempt to explain what quantum mechanics might mean in our understanding of the reality of the world (Weltanschauung) quotes Wolfgang Pauli (1908 – 1958): “Das physikalisch Einmalige ist vom Beobachter nicht mehr abtrennbar – und geht der Physik deshalb durch die Maschen ihres Netzes. Der Einzelfall ist occasio und nicht causa”, i.e. “That which is physically unique cannot be separated from the observer anymore – and therefore falls through the net of physics. The individual case is occasio and not causa”.

Another essential quality implied by the quantum theory is non-locality. This means that the universe itself cannot be decomposed into independently existing smallest units but can only exist as an integral, interdependent whole. There are elements of all of the above concepts of quantum mechanics in many eastern religions and also in some previously mentioned philosophies, such as neutral monism or psychological parallelalism. In the western tradition I have already mentioned Tipler’s “Omega Point” which claims to be a scientific proof of the Judeo-Christian faith. No wonder that in her book Models of God (1987) Sallie McFague writes: “The picture of reality coming to us from contemporary science is so attractive to theology that we would be fools not to use it…”

If the Big Bang was a consequence of the previous Big Crunch and if this process is recurring again and again, then we can see apparent similarities with this “circular progression” in some ancient religions. The Egyptians, Zoroastrians, Gnostics, Hebrews and Stoics believed that individual reincarnation and the world cycles are eternally repeated. The universal cycles were considerably longer than the individual and, according to various religious beliefs, ranged in duration from 7,000 to 864,000,000,000 solar years.
In Hinduism reincarnation is a chain of rebirths in which each soul, through virtuous living, can rise to a higher state. The final stage is reached upon the emancipation of the soul from the chain of rebirth. The soul then becomes one with Nirvana, like a drop of spiritual fluid dissolving in the eternal ocean of universal consciousness. Quoting from the great Hindu epic Bhagavad-Gita (The Song of the Exalted): “They worship me as one and as many, because they see that all is in me”. The concept of Nirvana thus resembles the non-locality principle of quantum physics.

The nature of the material world becomes, using Lewis Carroll’s expression, increasingly “curiouser and curiouser” if we examine some of the alternative interpretations of quantum physics and cosmology. Major advances in understanding the reality of the physical world have revealed apparent contradictions between special relativity, quantum mechanics, general relativity and quantum field theories. Quantum mechanics provides the foundation for our physical world from the subatomic to atomic and molecular realms. The theory of relativity takes us into the world of very high velocities and enormous distances in space and time.

There are four fundamental interactions: - gravitational, electromagnetic, strong and weak which generate all the existing forces acting between every known substance in our universe.

Gravitational interaction is long-ranged, presumably infinite. The force which it generates acts between all bodies that have mass and it is always attractive. It is the fundamental force on the cosmological scale, but on the atomic scale it is negligibly weak.

Electromagnetic interaction generates forces which are 1040 times stronger than the gravitational. It controls atomic structure, chemical reactions and all electromagnetic phenomena. Electromagnetic forces can be either attractive or repulsive.

Strong interaction generates forces 100 times stronger than the electromagnetic, but it is very short-ranged, effective only at about 10-12 mm. It is responsible for the stability of the atomic nucleus.

Weak interaction is 1012 times weaker than the electromagnetic and is also very short-ranged, limited to about 10-14 mm. It is responsible for β-decay in an unstable atomic nucleus which changes into a nucleus of the same mass number, but of different proton number, as a result of this decay.

Thus, the phenomena described in quantum mechanics are based on the electromagnetic, strong and weak interactions, all of which are evident on the atomic and sub-atomic scale. The laws of quantum mechanics were derived from experimental observations the results of which were formulated by theoretical mathematics. It is this agreement between the experimental data and its viable mathematical interpretations that gives each scientific theory a claim to legitimacy. For example, some of the earlier experimental data suggested that all the sub-atomic particles known at the time can be divided into two classes: bosons and fermions. Bosons are responsible for transmitting forces; photons, gravitons and gluons fall into this category. Photons carry electromagnetic force, gluons nuclear and gravitons gravitational force. On the other hand, all known elementary particles of matter, such as quarks, electrons and leptons, belong to the class of fermions. There is a fundamental difference in the behavior of these types of particles described by the Pauli repulsion law: the inability of the particles of matter, of fermions, to share the same space the way bosons, the force transmitting particles, are able to do. The Pauli repulsion law in effect explains the structure of the periodic table of elements and the stability of atoms, and thus of all matter. An invariance principle that aspires to place fermions and bosons on equal footing is known in physics as supersymmetry. I shall return to this concept later in the text.

At subatomic distances the fields, or physical quantities which vary from point to point in space, are described by quantum field theories. Attempts to resolve apparent discrepancies between the experimental data and the mathematical formulations of interactions between elementary particles with the objective to derive a single theoretical framework, a unified field theory, have resulted in a number of progressively more accurate theories, such as quantum electrodynamics, electroweak theory and quantum chromodynamics, which together make up the Standard Model of particle physics. However, none of these unified field theories have been able to account for gravitational interaction on the atomic and sub-atomic level. In order to achieve this amalgamation a theoretical framework is required which, if discovered and confirmed by experiment, should be able to provide a unified description of all forces in nature. It is known in physics by the somewhat pretentious name of the Theory of Everything.

One of the potential candidates into the revelation of the Theory of Everything is the superstring. Superstrings are envisaged as inconceivably minuscule, constantly vibrating strands of pure energy. Everything in the universe, from subatomic particles to entire galaxies is composed of superstrings, according to this theory. Superstrings, if they exist, must measure only 10-32 mm in size, a distance known as the Plank length, which is so small that the quantum effect of gravity can no longer be ignored. This of course overcomes the previously mentioned problems of quantum field theories.

Comparing the atomic and subatomic sizes, if we can look inside the atom, we shall see that it is a cloud of electrons some 10-7 mm in size, with a nucleus in the order of 10-12 mm. To give a virtual perception of these orders of magnitude I shall provide the following example: in one gram of radium around 37,000,000,000 atoms are subjected to radioactive decay every second. The half-life of radium, that is the time in which half of the atoms of radioactive nuclide will undergo at least one disintegration, is 1620 years. Now, superstrings are infinitesimally smaller than the atom. For example, the equatorial radius of the Earth is 6378.17 kilometers. The ratio of the size of the Earth to that of the atom is of the same order of magnitude as the ratio of the size of the atom to that of the superstring.

Unlike the zero-dimensional points or particles in the earlier physics, strings are extended, one-dimensional objects. By eliminating problems associated with the presence of point-like particles, string theories allow the computation of space-time dimensions from first principles. When a string oscillates in space and time it sweeps a two-dimensional surface. This surface is known as the world sheet and it replaces the world line of a particle, creating a two-dimensional spacetime, where the division between space and time depends on the observer. Strings can be open and closed, and their different modes of vibration correspond to the existence of specific elementary particles. In the generic quantum theory there are quantum states with a negative norm known as ghosts, which create extra unphysical states in the string spectrum. The original, so-called bosonic, string theories required a 26-dimensional spacetime for these extra unphysical states to disappear. However, bosonic string theories were found to be unstable. It was subsequently established that the ghost states decouple from the spectrum if two conditions are satisfied: the number of spacetime dimensions is reduced to just 10 and the supersymmetry is observed; that is, there must be equal numbers of bosons and fermions in the spectrum. This supposition became known as the superstring theory.

At one time it seemed as if there were five distinct superstring theories and that finally only one of these will be proven as the authentic Theory of Everything. The very latest theoretical work however has indicated that all five superstring theories are connected to one another as if they are each a special case of some more fundamental theory. It is known as M-theory. There is one more twist to the M-theory. Apparently in essence it is an 11-dimensional theory that appears to be only 10-dimensional at some parts in its space of parameters. In this case it should have a membrane, as opposed to a string, as its fundamental entity. Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton University, who was largely responsible for the development of this concept, explains: “M stands for Magic, Mystery or Membrane, according to taste”.

There are, however two new hurdles which physics must overcome, if the validity of the string theories is to be legitimized. One is the experimental verification of the mathematical derivations and second is the problem of extra dimensions.

All of the current quantum field theories have been confirmed by experimental data. This is not the case with the string theories. Does it mean that they belong to the abstract ideas of philosophy and not to the real world of physics? Richard Morris in his book Dismantling the Universe (1984) seems to disagree: “…a correct theory is one that can presumably be verified by experiment. And yet, in some cases, scientific intuition can be so accurate that a theory is convincing even before the relevant experiments are performed”. A Nobel laureate Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (1902 – 1984) gives the aesthetic aspects of nature even greater significance by declaring: “It is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit the experiment”.

The problem of extra dimensions was also resolved through the revelations of pure mathematics. In 1921 a little known Polish mathematician, Theodor Kaluza (1885 – 1955), who was born in Ratibor, Germany, realized that the unification between gravitation and electromagnetism could be achieved by making a paradigm shift in our perception of the space-time continuum. It required a new type of five-dimensional geometry in place of the conventional, with the usual three dimensions of space plus one time dimension. However, it was apparently impossible to accommodate this fifth dimension into our established perception of reality, as it was extremely difficult to imagine what this dimension would look like and how it would fit into the existing spatiality.

It was not till 1926 when a former student of Kaluza, Swedish physicist Oscar Klein (1894 – 1977) proposed an ingenious solution to the perception of this fifth dimension. He suggested that a particle moving a short distance along this fifth axis would return to where it began. According to Klein it is in effect a “circular” dimension, “rolled up” to a very small size. Experimental physics does not rule out the possible existence of even larger numbers of such “curled up” dimensions, provided their size is smaller than 10-15 mm, the limit of present-day accuracy of measurement.

And as before, there seems to be a possibility of a somewhat artificial similarity between the extra dimensions in string theories with the numerals, which were revered in the old religious beliefs. This time there appears to be a strange coincidence between the value of higher dimensions in the string theories and in the hidden meaning of the symbolic names of Jewish Cabbala. Apparently gematria of the most sacred name yod-hey-vav-hey - that is of God - is twenty six, and Cabbala also proclaims that the universe was created through ten utterances, the ten sephirot.

Thus, the perception of reality in modern physics and cosmology displays at times albeit arbitrary similarity with different religious beliefs. In recent years, however, there has been an emergence of a number of hypotheses, based on alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics, which defy not only our common sense and understanding of what is “material” and what is not, but even reality of the existence of the world itself. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, already mentioned, is a possible consequence of what is known as the collapse of the wavefunction that is one of the processes by which quantum systems apparently evolve. There is an alternative way of perceiving the wavefunction collapse, known as the Everett many-world interpretation.


In essence, in the Copenhagen interpretation, the mathematics of quantum mechanics allows the probability of prediction of several alternative events to take place. In the many-world interpretation, all these events occur simultaneously, therefore creating a possibility for many, possibly of an infinite number, of universes to exist simultaneously. These universes may or may not interact with each other. The terms parallel universe or multiverse are sometimes used to describe this phenomenon. There is also the many-minds interpretation, which postulates that it is only the observers’ minds that are split, instead of the entire universe.

Yet another hypothesis proposes the formation of our universe from a “bubble” of a multiverse. It is known as the theory of Inflationary Cosmology. The 2002 Dirac medal in physics and cosmology was awarded to Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to Paul Steinhard of Princeton University and to Andrei Linde of Stanford University for the development of this theory. In an interview with Jim Holt, a journalist with The New Yorker, Andrei Linde stated: “When I invented chaotic inflation theory, I found that the only thing you need to get a universe like ours is a hundred-thousand of a gram of matter. That’s enough to create a small chunk of vacuum that blows up into the billions of galaxies we see around us… If somebody had told me that twenty-five years ago, I would have thought he was crazy, but that’s what we’re getting this medal for. It represents the acceptance of our theory by the general community”.

Inflationary cosmology and several alternative current hypotheses are based on different interpretations of the nature of dark matter in the universe. For example, Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College in New Hampshire advanced in 2003 the idea of so-called “phantom energy”. In his view dark energy is likely to become stronger, expanding space at an ever-increasing rate and creating a “big rip”, which will result in the destruction of all the atomic structure in the universe when the phantom energy exceeds in strength the electromagnetic force.

Another assumption, put forward by Fred Adams of the University of Michigan, considers the scenario when the dark energy stays constant. Our observable universe in this case will ultimately consist only of dead stars surrounding a massive black hole.
Black holes were originally thought of as a singularity, or a region of space-time where all known laws of physics break down and nothing can escape their infinitely strong gravitational force. Black holes cannot be seen by distant observers because light is trapped inside by this very strong gravitational field. The boundary of a black hole, which separates events that cannot be seen from outside from those which can, is called an event horizon. But the latest hypothesis suggests that ultimately even black holes will evaporate, so that in the end every single particle in the universe will exist in complete isolation inside its own horizon.

Nothingness spreads around us, but should we find something non-material, a psyche, or a soul in this nothingness? Quoting Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961): “Sooner or later, nuclear physics and the psychology of the unconscious will draw closer together, as both of them independently of one another and from the opposite directions, push forward into transcendental territory”.

This brings us to the fundamental question which almost ended the life of Count Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828 – 1910), a question which remains unanswered to this day, and it seems will be answered not by science, but in dogmas of blind faith of different religions, as these are interpreted in a dissimilar way by each living human being.
As Tolstoy writes in his Confession (published in Geneva in 1884): “My question, the question that brought me to the edge of suicide when I was fifty years old, was the simplest question lying in the soul of every human being, from a silly child to the wisest of elders, the question without which life is impossible; such was the way I felt about the matter. The question is this: What will come of what I do today and tomorrow? What will come of my entire life? Expressed differently, the question may be: Why should I live? Why should I wish for anything or do something? Or to put it differently: Is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my inevitably approaching death?”

Somehow I do not feel that Lord Bertrand Arthur William Russell’s (1872 – 1970) agnostic view provides a viable solution to the meaning of life, and I quote from his treatise What I Believe (1925): “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. Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting”.

Mainlander’s vision that non-existence is better than existence provided one of the theological doctrines of the creation of the universe of his vision, which is destined to complete obliteration. The seeds of this idea were evident not only in Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy, as he mused on the meaning of life: “The objective value of life is very uncertain, and it remains at least doubtful whether existence is to be preferred to non-existence…”, but even for a much more affable Voltaire the problem of existence and non-existence was also a predicament: “On aime le vie; mais le néant ne laisse pas d’avoir du bon”, i.e. “We like life, but all the same nothingness also has its good points”, and also: “Je ne sais pas ce que c’est que la vie éternelle, mais celle-ci est une mauvaise plaisanterie”, or “I do not know what eternal life is, but this present life is a bad joke”.

Boltzmann’s concept of entropy can be seen as the scientific foundation for several of the above doomsday scenarios. This presents us with the enigma which Marais attempted to resolve: if all humans are mortal, and if a material world is either unreal or doomed, what is the fate of a human psyche, of the human soul? Our limited ability to perceive reality complicates this issue further. A disciple of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus deliberates on this ambiguity: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Logic pervades the world: the limits of the world are also its limits. So we cannot say in logic, ’the world has this in it, and this, but not that’. We cannot think what we cannot think; so what we cannot think we cannot say either”.

But even logical contradictions never compelled billions of people practicing the most diverse and contradictory religious beliefs to waver in their faith. As Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullian (160 – 230), who was probably the very first Christian apologist, proclaims in his De Carne Christi: “Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est; certum est, quia impossibile”, that is “It is thoroughly credible because it is absurd; it is certain because it is impossible”.

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Plank (1858 – 1947), celebrated for his creation of quantum theory, and awarded in 1918 the Nobel Prize for his outstanding contribution to science was of the opinion that there are some fundamental aspects of nature which are beyond our perception, and I quote: “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And it is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of the mystery we are trying to solve”.

It seems to me that each one of us will find the answer to the question of the very essence of soul, the question presented to us by Marais, only when we die, and obviously only if we do have a soul.

******

A Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering since 1988, Dr. Aleksander Samarin is an Adjunct Professor, Faculty of Science, University of Technology, Sydney.