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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Metaphysics & ontology
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Soul Search (Paperback)
Loot Price: R473
Discovery Miles 4 730
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Soul Search (Paperback)
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Loot Price R473
Discovery Miles 4 730
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What happens when we die? Does everything we are just stop? Is
consciousness lost forever? Or does some vital spark inside us, a
spirit or a soul, live on? We find it almost impossible to think
about not having a mind, of our awareness being snuffed out like a
candle. Yet the stark fact is that within a century or so, everyone
alive today - all six billion of us - will be dead. Humans are the
only creatures on earth that know they are going to die. But that
foreknowledge has come fairly recently and it flies in the face of
four billion years of evolution. Those eons have genetically
conditioned us to do all we can to preserve ourselves and our kin.
The result is that we are caught in a dilemma. We are programmed to
survive by our genes yet made painfully aware of our mortality by
our forward-looking brain. If we admit that death is inevitable,
then our will to survive may be fatally weakened. On the other
hand, if we deny death, we have to turn a blind eye to a patent
fact of the real world. Only one avenue of escape is possible -
belief in an afterlife. With this we can face the nightmare that
death poses to the rational mind. We distance ourselves from death
by institutionalizing it. Whereas in earlier times most people
spent their last days at home in the bosom of family and friends,
today four-fifths of us are removed to hospitals or nursing homes.
We are hidden from the gaze of the young and healthy and tended to
by strangers. As the end approaches, we are discreetly moved to
wards for the terminally ill and plugged into life-support
machines. Technology takes over. And when we do eventually die, it
is often the inadequacy of the equipment or the shortcomings of the
treatment that are blamed. Instead of accepting death as a natural
and inevitable fact of life, we are in danger of convincing
ourselves that, given further medical advances, we shall be able to
stave it off for as long as we like. "Some people want to achieve
immortality through their works or their descendants," said Woody
Allen. "I want to achieve it through not dying." Now, for the first
time, science seems to be holding out the slender hope of cheating
death. Already, some of our vital parts can be replaced with
natural or synthetic substitutes. In time, it seems, the transplant
surgeon will be able to do for a human being what any competent
mechanic in a well-equipped garage can do for a car. Key words -
Death, Reincarnation, Consciousness, Cosmos, Science, Soul,
Afterlife, Universe Author Bio - David Darling is the author of
more than 40 titles including narrative science titles:
Megacatastrophes , We Are Not Alone, Gravity's Arc, Equations of
Eternity, a New York Times Notable Book, and Deep Time. He is also
the author of the bestseller-The Universal Book of Mathematics:
From Abracadabra to Zeno's Paradoxes. Darling's other titles
include The Universal Book of Astronomy, and The Complete Book of
Spaceflight, as well as more than 30 children's books. His articles
and reviews have appeared in Astronomy, Omni, Penthouse, New
Scientist, the New York Times, and the Guardian, among others.
David Darling was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, England, on July 29,
1953, and grew up in the beautiful Peak District, close to Kinder
Scout for those who know the area. He went to New Mills Grammar
School and then on to Sheffield University, where he earned his
B.Sc. in physics in 1974, and Manchester University, for my Ph.D.
in astronomy in 1977. David Darling's interests, apart from his
work and family, include singing, song-writing, and playing guitar.
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