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The Impotence

By 0007: 0ddTaxi
For C0203 The Triumph

The Impotence of Death

When I was younger, I was implicitly a dualist. That is to say, when we studied science class in grade 5 and learned about atoms in chemistry and cells in biology, my 10 year old mind said “ah, that’s so simple: living things are made of cells and nonliving things are made of atoms.” It wasn’t until years later that I realized the truth: that living cells were also made of nonliving atoms. That, substance-wise, there was nothing fundamentally different between myself and a big rock. I became obsessed with the question of the origin of life, and decided to major in biochemistry in order to pursue the answer. After almost 30 years I wouldn’t say that I’ve arrived at an answer, but I have learned a lot and have developed some beliefs. Bear with me, we may be about to get a little “woo woo.”

As it has been famously noted, the average human body is a mix of water (35 L), carbon (20 kg), ammonia (4 L), lime (1.5 kg), phosphorus (800 g), salt (250 g), saltpeter (100 g), sulfur (80 g), fluorine (7.5 g), iron (5 g), silicon (3 g) and trace amounts of fifteen other elements. The question I asked myself ask was: What are all of these substances doing in order to make me “me”? My answer came from the world of medicine. Since around the 1960s, scientists have been engaged in using computers to help discover new kinds of medicines (rational drug design, or computer aided drug design). When I was in university, we learned how to use these same computer models, and learned how they are applied to discover drugs. The method is surprisingly simple:

  1. Load in a molecular structure data file.
  2. Using the molecular structure (atom positions, kinds, their bonds, and their electrical charges), calculate the force that is acting on each atom.
  3. Choose a short amount of time, dt, such as dt=0.000000000000001 seconds. Yes, seriously, that small.
  4. Using the atomic forces and positions, along with Newton’s Second Law of F=ma, calculate new positions for each atom and record them.
  5. Go to step 2.

What this gives you if you do it enough is a very long list of atomic positions, which you can visualize using specialized software, giving essentially a “movie” of what the atoms would be doing in real life. It’s so realistic that we are able to use these movies in order to ask questions like “what if I added a molecule with a certain shape into the solution? Would it have an effect on the cell?” This is not science fiction: this is how drugs such as Saquinavir, an early anti-HIV medication, were created. Once a desired molecular shape has been identified, it is sent to chemists to be created in real life, tested for safety, and then released to the public.

The eagle-eyed among you might be asking yourself “wait, how do we get the molecular structure data file in order to get everything started?” This, we get from teams of scientists who devote their lives to culturing cells, killing them, and separating their molecules. The molecules are then crystalized and examined using x-ray microscopes in order to determine their molecular structures. The world’s biggest repository of this data is the Protein Data Bank, which offers all structures free for public use.

Now, the hard part is that some of these molecules get awfully big - 1000’s to 10000’s of atoms. The more atoms you have in your structure, the harder it is for your computer to generate movies of them. Cells contain billions of molecules, so this problem gets messy fast. With our current most powerful computers in the world, we are able to perform simulations on molecular systems up to the size of an entire HIV-1 virus. That’s right: an entire, true-to-life simulation of a “living” thing. If we also had a simulation of a real-life Human T-cell then we could watch as the HIV virus takes over its host cell, pause, hit rewind, or even simulate the addition of Saquinavir and watch the infection get blocked. The only problem is that we don’t have a computer fast enough right now, not that there’s any kind of fundamental different physical nature of the human cell.

This leads us to a potentially uncomfortable thought: if we can simulate a human cell, in theory, why can’t we simulate an entire person? This may be controversial, but I have no reason to believe that it is impossible to simulate an entire human being, at least in principle You just need to arrange digital representations of the water, carbon, ammonia, lime, etc. etc. in the correct atomic coordinates and then begin the simulation. The computational power required might be greater than the total energy output of several stars, but it’s just a matter of practicality and not a fundamental question of the nature of the human being. Here, the conversation gets very messy. We could go down many subsequent avenues of thought:

I have spent decades in life pondering these questions and more, but I’m no closer to having an answer. One thing that remains with me is this: The naively dualist view that there is a fundamental difference between living and non-living matter is nothing but a story that we tell each other in order to feel better about ourselves. We are not a separate thing “in” the natural world, we are made “from” the natural world. Death, then, is nothing but a return of water, carbon, ammonia, lime, etc. etc. back to the planet, where it will be broken down, digested, re-used, and reborn as a million other things. There is no Death, unless all life here on Earth ceases… and even then, are we really so naive as to believe that there will never be another lifeform on any of the billions of planets across this galaxy alone?

Of course, you may find yourself thinking “Okay, so what if life goes on? What about me? None of those other living things are me. I’m still going to die.” You might be right, from a more pragmatic point of view. As I’ve said here before, I don’t have any answers… just a handful of beliefs. Lately, I’ve found a particularly relatable set of views in Buddhism. Like myself, the Buddha believed that the soul was an illusion and the reality is that there is no soul. I’ve taken the liberty of replacing the word “self” with “soul” here, but I challenge anyone to define a difference between the two words. I’ll end this essay with an extremely loose translation of the Heart Sutra, of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition, as I have come to understand it:

Buddha-to-be Avalokiteśvara
 While seeking to perfect his wisdom
 Suddenly discovered that
 The true self is an illusion
 And with this realization
 He overcame all unhappiness

“Listen, Sariputra [the name of a monk]
This Body itself is made of inert matter
 And inert matter itself is this Body
 This Body is not other than matter
 And matter is not other than this Body.
 The same could be said of all feelings,
 perceptions, thoughts, and consciousness. [since they arise from the body]

Listen, Sariputra
 All events are devoid of intrinsic nature
 Their true nature is the nature of
 No Birth, no Death
 No Being, and no Non-Being
 No Defilement, and no Purity
 No Increasing, and no Decreasing

This is why, devoid of intrinsic nature,
 Body, Feelings, Perceptions,
 Thoughts, and Consciousness
 Are not the true self

Therefore, the eighteen realms of Phenomena
 Which are the six sense organs [eyes, ears, nose, tongue, skin, and brain]
The six sense objects [sight, sound, smell, taste, feeling, thought]
And the six consciousnesses [awareness of sight, awareness of sound, …]
Are also not the true self

All ignorance, all choices,
 All consciousness, all objects,
 All senses, all impressions,
 All emotions, all desires,
 All cravings, all existence,
 All birth, all death
 And all seeking for their cessation
 Are also not the true self

Unhappiness, the causes of Unhappiness
 The End of Unhappiness, the Way to end Unhappiness
 Insight and attainment,
 Are also not the true self

Whoever can understand this
 No longer needs anything to attain

Bodhisattvas [a highly ranked monk] who practice
 Seeking to perfect their wisdom
 See no more obstacles in their mind
 And because there are no more obstacles in their mind
 They can overcome all fears
 Destroy all misconceptions
 And realize Perfect Inner Peace

All Buddhas in the past, present, or future
 By seeking to perfect their wisdom
 Are capable of attaining
 Authentic and Perfect Enlightenment

Therefore, Sariputra
 It should be known that
 Perfection of Wisdom is a great Mantra
 The most illuminating mantra
 The highest mantra
 A mantra beyond compare
 The True Wisdom that has the power
 To put an end to all kinds of suffering
 Therefore let us proclaim
 A mantra to praise
The practice of seeking to perfect one’s wisdom:

Gone, gone, gone away, utterly gone away, newly awakened!
Gone, gone, gone away, utterly gone away, newly awakened!
Gone, gone, gone away, utterly gone away, newly awakened!

I feel like I don't have too much commentary to make on this piece since it's an essay and should (hopefully) explain itself. I struggled to find some sense of inspiration from this work (the triumph of death). The one thing that did hit me was the irony that we are all sitting here discussing artwork that declares that death is the end of all things... hundreds of years after the death of its author. I wanted to play with this irony in some way, maybe to write a browser extension that silently removes all images of the painting such that it can truly die. This didn't appear to be practical for my skill set. My next inspiration was to point out the self-centeredness of the belief that death was the end of all things, given that life will go on without us. I had imagined painting over the landscape with a lush forest, full of wild animals. Unfortunately, I'm not a painter. Instead, I thought about writing a poem or a story from the point of view of one of those animals, or from one of the people who died. I think there's a lot to explore there, but I didn't have the time to dive into a deeply involved project in time for the deadline. Instead, I decided to share some of the beliefs I have that would have inspired such a project, so that we can all view the painting for what it is - short sighted and dripping with doomerism.