Death
One of my (Malcolm’s) first jobs entailed regular visits to a medical examiner’s office. I was tasked with bringing fresh brains from the medical examiner’s office to the UT Southwestern Medical Center psychiatry research wing. I was doing this so that we could study the brains of individuals about whom we had extensive psychiatric records. This macabre task provided not just face-to-face exposure to hundreds of dead bodies, but also an opportunity to read a history of their lives and dive deep into their most personal thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams. I found myself the courier of the former seats of these individuals’ consciousnesses before they were cut apart and put on slides. This work gave me a unique perspective on— and comfort with—death that I wish more people could experience.[[167]](#_ftn167)
A culture’s relation to death is reflected in its relative fear of death and its rituals around it. Once a traveling Islamic scholar, Ibn Fadlan, spent time with a group of pre-Viking Rus. When the Rus king died, a message went out asking the king’s people who would join him on his journey to the afterlife. One young woman took on this burden. The Rus then had a large party, killed the intoxicated young woman, put both bodies on a boat filled with goods and ritually sacrificed animals, lit the boat on fire, and set it to sea.
What most horrified Ibn Fadlan about this ritual was that they lit the king’s body on fire. To a Muslim, burning a body is akin to mutilation and even witnessing cremation is technically haram. When he discussed this with one of its hosts, he was chastised: “You Arabs are foolish, you take the person that matters most to you and put them in the ground where they are eaten by worms. We burn them in an instant and they enter paradise that very moment because of the great love their God has for them.”
The interaction recorded by Ibn Fadlan is a microcosm of how practices around death can frame a culture’s views around life. That the Rus were willing to kill a woman to attend the king on his journey to the afterlife revealed the relative importance of human life in their culture (the king’s life was just that much more important than hers). That the celebration was drunken and festive without mourning demonstrates how the Rus genuinely saw death as passing from one stage of existence to another—they believed the individual was immediately carried up by a God, hence there was no reason to mourn.
Why cremate a dead body in one culture and not in another? Cremation preference appears to be an artifact of the environment in which cultures are nurtured. In colder weather environments, people are much more likely to cremate bodies—this is true even today and even within and between countries (with more northern states in the U.S. being much more likely to cremate bodies). Perhaps this is because bodies decompose much more slowly in cold-weather environments. However, this doesn’t explain why we still see this trend in 21st-century American states, which almost suggests the presence of some polymorphic instinct instigated by different environmental conditions (a pre-programmed genetic predisposition that changes based on environmental conditions). This regional difference is also particularly odd as rotting bodies become dangerous far more quickly in hot environments (Simone made me remove a vomit-inducing comment about me working with the body of a man who died next to a radiator and wasn’t found for a week or so here).
Within the House cultivar we are designing, we care little about what happens to our corpses. Should doing so be trivially inexpensive, it might make sense to freeze ancestors or save their DNA. Still, we wouldn’t want such flights of fancy to deprive living and future generations of resources they might otherwise utilize to carry forward an evolved iteration of the House’s goals. From the perspective of our family culture, it seems quite disrespectful to mourn a dead person to any extent that disrupts your ability to be efficacious. By doing so, you make their last act one of destruction. We don’t understand the purpose of that; it hardly seems like a sign of respect.
I, Simone, was exposed to two cultural approaches toward death as a child: The Mormon approach (to which I was exposed through a Mormon-run preschool) and the Buddhist approach (to which I was exposed through parent-mandated Sunday temple and dharma school attendance). These two traditions exhibit highly contrasting and interesting views on the true nature of death, with the Mormon view being the most optimistic of all cultural traditions and the Buddhist one being the most morose (despite cultural stereotypes to the contrary).
In the Mormon tradition, not only does almost everyone[[168]](#_ftn168)—Mormon or not—eventually get a “happy ending” (with the differentiation being how long one has to wait and the iteration one gets), but afterlife is conceptualized as training to eventually become a God yourself, ruling a planet like our own alongside your spouse. What we find so deeply satisfying about this belief is not the whole “becoming a God” thing, but that it is the only belief system (to our knowledge) that grants spouses afterlives alongside each other in which they get to work together on a clearly delineated, meaningful project. We could not imagine a more satisfying afterlife experience.
Mormon beliefs around death do a lot to influence their values in life. The Mormon afterlife hammers home not just the gravity of who one chooses as a spouse but also the importance of a continued positive relationship with that person. The knowledge that “you’re in it for the long haul—big time” likely contributes to the higher levels of satisfaction reported in Mormon marriages, vis a vis those of many other traditions.
The Mormon conceptualization of an afterlife is not wildly different from our own, as, in our view, we will endure—together—long after our bodies expire, both through our writing and through our descendants (who, as we pointed out earlier, are more “us” than we are in many ways). This belief motivates us to do everything we can to ensure our children thrive.
In contrast with the Mormon tradition, which involves enduring existence and commitment, the ultimate goal of most branches of Buddhism is to end the cycle of death and rebirth known as samsara. What is morose about this from our perspective is that it simultaneously frames sapience negatively—as a state defined by suffering—while also framing the ultimate positive outcome as a sort of mass suicide or genocide: An end not just to one’s personal sapience but an end to all sapience in the universe.
This is a great example of how religion is so much more than just theology. Given my cultivar’s lens, even if I 100% believed a Buddhist theology’s metaphysical framework for the world, I would see its stated cultural goal as not just suboptimal but the highest order “evil” possible. In the perspective of a Buddhist cultural framing, this goal is a noble coming-together of all things, an end of conflict, and a non-conscious feeling of blissfulness. From our cultural perspective, the Buddhist “final solution” is somehow inconceivably worse than mass genocide—it would be quite literally a worse event than anything we could ever imagine actually happening. The desired Buddhist outcome is the ultimate stagnation—supreme and inescapable homogeny. If genocide were a pop rock, a total end to samsara would be a nuke.
From our House’s cultural perspective, the highest order of good involves first protecting and spreading sapience across the universe, then ultimately becoming a weaver of realities, constructing innumerous new universes within which sapience can proliferate.
What is interesting here is how much in common we have with Buddhism; we just happen to arrive at an opposite goal. As with Buddhism, we conceptualize reality as a cycle of life, death, and rebirth—though we see this as happening through our children, culture, and ideas rather than “energy,” more broadly speaking. As with Buddhism, we also see suffering as predominating that cycle.
The core difference that produces our radically different cultural lenses entails our cultures’ divergent contextualization of suffering. Buddhism sees suffering as a negative state that we should aspire to end. In contrast, we see suffering as an evolutionarily important biological signal used to motivate essential action. In many ways, we view suffering more positively than “pleasant” emotional states, as suffering tends to motivate action and progress more than bliss and pleasure, which are more likely to produce inaction and complacency. In other words, bliss is the emotional state that most motivates stagnation, whereas stuffing is the totem of dynamism.
Suffering is the sole fire in a frigid, dark universe around which our souls gather. Stick your hand deep within it, and you will be burned. Put out that fire entirely, and eventually, the cold will overtake you. Should you extinguish the flame of suffering, your molecules would slow down, eventually settling into endless stillness, and the collective human soul would calcify into a frozen mockery of everything life has ever stood for.
One day we may find a better solution to motivate humanity than suffering. Eugenics.org is working to do just that: Edit humans at the genetic level to experience less pain and build new emotional motivational mechanisms. While we neither endorse use of the word “eugenics” nor the project, it’s an interesting direction for a faction of the transhumanist movement to take.
In the same way there are secular framings of most Christian traditions, there are secular framings of Buddhism championed by certain philosophies, such as “negative utilitarianism,” which argues that reducing negative emotions is more important than increasing positive emotions (i.e., that emotional states are the most important thing and any given amount of suffering cannot be canceled out by an equal amount of happiness). Secular movements motivated by this philosophy include the antinatalist movement (whose proponents go so far as to campaign for forced sterilization)[[169]](#_ftn169) and radical vegetarian advocates (like Brian Tomasik, who focuses 25% of his philanthropy on relieving suffering in things like insects and 25% in things like electrons).[[170]](#_ftn170) For more on the deeply insidious antinatalist movement, skip to: “Think of the Suffering! (Antinatalism & Negative Utilitarianism)” in the Appendix on page 703.
Our cultural differences with Buddhism extend beyond differing takes on suffering: By our cultural framing, it is one of the highest forms of evil to rob someone of their individuality. While you can eliminate conflict by removing a person’s individuality and merging them into a single collective, conflict is the fuel on which life and ideas thrive. From our perspective, individuality, diversity, and conflict play essential roles in human progress (and in protecting sapience on the whole).
Simone has a different theory as to why we see things differently than Buddhists do—why even if we believed in a Buddhist metaphysical framework for reality, we would see their goal as evil: While both Buddhism and our culture see the individual as just one part of a greater entity, Buddhism sees the internal subjective experience of that collective entity as being the core of it (thence suffering presenting motivation to escape Samsara) while our culture sees the large thing we are part of as being the cycle itself. We are just one tiny aspect of the cycle of death and birth, the bubbling cauldron of evolutionary pressure our genetics and memetic identities were born through. To us, the bubbling cauldron is the thing of value, not the aggregate experience of the things boiling within it.
In Buddhism, everything that perceives itself to be an individual is part of a wider interconnected entity (hence Buddhists try not to cause suffering to other animals and many branches of Buddhism are vegetarian). In contrast, our culture sees everything that perceives itself as an individual as really being one aspect of a cycle—and we believe it is the cycle itself that has value.
From the first nervous system to today, the cycle has been fueled by suffering, divergence, and conflict between and among individuals, species, and groups. This is not a flaw of the cycle or something to escape; it is the cycle. It is amazing that this slight difference in interpretation can produce such logically consistent yet diametrically opposed ideologies—one aimed at preserving and spreading life and sentience and the other dedicated to its systematic eradication. (Again, we are just speaking from our cultural perspective.)
Today the individual human is barely sapient. We only achieve anything of value at the civilizational, multigenerational level. But, one day, through a process red in tooth and claw, sapience will reach a state we cannot yet conceive where individuals will experience genuinely meaningful existence. That state may exist in a human-like body or something yet to be imagined. Maybe by then, we will be able to dissociate the negative feelings that are often associated with suffering, but for now suffering remains an instrumental tool. Bliss is superfluous, a gift evolution sometimes grants us when we are on task.
Not All Buddhists Favor Sapience Genocide
Just as many people join the LDS Church for the benefits its lifestyle yields while not necessarily believing everything in the Book of Mormon, many people practice Buddhism for the various benefits a temperate Buddhist lifestyle can yield and are not themselves negative utilitarians. Entire branches of Buddhism, such as Mahayana Buddhism, exemplify this (with a key differentiating factor of Mahayana Buddhism being that while adherents strive for enlightenment, they choose to remain in the cycle of samsara). Our differences with Buddhist cultivars obviously do not apply to them.
Regarding Buddhist Apologetics
While adherents of Theravada Buddhism may argue that an end to the cycle of suffering that is samsara doesn’t lead to an end to sapience, and may even claim that nirvana is akin to an endless explosion of sapience, we cannot accept that argument as a universal claim given the evidence we have on hand about sapience as an emergent property.
Sapience is defined by an ability to encounter new information and challenges and use those to improve oneself. If the self is spiritual, sapience is intrinsically ended by removing the both challenges and the opportunity to encounter new information.
If the self is material, humans appear to have evolved the prefrontal cortex and an ability to critically think about their actions as a means of accelerating evolution (the human species can reason through problems rather than power through them via sheer life-and-death-based selective pressures). Sapience is not an ephemeral, metaphysical concept but rather an evolved trait. Ending biological or mechanical mechanisms that use sapience for practical reasons won’t open a wonderland of sapience that exists for its own sake—anything that ends a cycle of rebirth will just end sapience.
Either way, an end to samsara is the very definition of homogeneity and stagnation.