aBlog

Of course, in Jacques' case, his failure to die in any of the five alternative methods he had chosen can just be attributed to bad planning. Anyhow, he did accomplish his mission in the end. Or did he? Is it possible that he had intentionally hoped to die by exactly one of the methods he had picked and no other?

I think it is reasonable to expect that we should favor certain forms of dying over others, or at least disfavor some forms of dying. Most often the forms we favor are those that we judge to be least unpleasant. But how correct will our judgment be in this regard? In this chapter I will outline some reasons, based on a similar practical rationalization as in Pascal's argument from Chapter [*] for our need to be extra careful and thoughtful when choosing one form of death over others. I will present a few arguments that some supposedly painless methods of committing suicide, for example, could be the worst possible ones from the dying person's point of view, more so if he or she is an atheist and a reductionistic materialist.

A reductionistic materialist is a person who believes that mental states are all directly determined by electrochemical (or other) reactions in the brain, i.e. that brain states cause mental states. I allow for ``other reactions'' because although one may believe that electro-chemical reactions are responsible for mental states, a true scientist should never discount other as-yet-undiscovered empirical causes that influence the formation and modification of mental states. For example, she will allow for the slim (and based on today's knowledge, almost non-existent), possibility that gravity could have a subtle, but definite, and someday testable, effect on mental states and that this effect is unmediated by electrochemical reactions (in short, mood changes that don't require neurons to fire or any other changes in the electrical or chemical balance in the brain). What she will dis-believe with certainty, though, is that there exists a mind apart from the brain. Perhaps such a belief doesn't have too many subscribers in the real world. But it is hard to see how anyone who agrees that mental states cannot be extra-cranial in origin can't find sense in this. As we have seen already, any atheist who does not believe in a disembodied soul is more or less forced to accept that mental states are determined in the brain.

This chapter may also propose a justification that if any of our organs are donated for transplant or scientific research after death, the brain is one of the riskiest ones to donate. As an extreme precaution, one may even insist on incineration of his or her brain after death, perhaps through cremation, to make sure it isn't abused. Note, however, that this chapter will not be a judgment on suicide in general or on people who commit suicide.

Why not drugs?

Dying by an overdose of drugs, especially sedative or hallucinogenic is very low on my list for the following simple reason: We do not appear to have control over all the feelings that our brain may cause us to experience. Messing with the brain's dream-making machinery at the time of death could be a dangerous affair.

One of my colleagues insists that he can predict the onset of a flu or a cold with amazing accuracy because nostalgic dreams of his childhood begin the night before he sees the first physiological symptoms and often repeat several times during the course of the flu. I thought this was a unique phenomenon peculiar to him, but upon talking to some of my other friends and relatives, I find that this is actually quite common. I myself do have nostalgic dreams like this precede sickness, but perhaps not as reliably as my colleague claimed. It is no surprise that one should expect the brain to function differently under such circumstances. The body's chemical balance changes as it prepares to fight off the infection and this, of course, affects brain function. Indeed, we should expect not just a close brush with death, but anything that has a serious effect on the chemistry of relevant portions of the brain to trigger similar experiences.

In his 1975(?) best-selling book ``The man who mistook his wife for a hat'' Oliver Sacks writes about an Indian patient of his, Bhagwandi, who was undergoing treatment for a terminal brain tumor at 18. As her condition progressively worsened, Bhagwandi began to lapse further and further into dreamy states which often involved images of India that she had known and loved as a child. When asked whether these images were distressing to her and if she would like a change of medication, she replied that she liked the dreams and that they taking her back home. Sacks writes:

Day by day, week by week, the dreams, the visions, came oftener, grew deeper. They were not occasional now, but occupied most of the day. We would see her rapt, as if in a trance, her eyes sometimes closed, sometimes open but unseeing, and always a faint mysterious smile on her face. If anyone approached her, or asked her something, as the nurses had to do, she would respond at once, lucidly and courteously, but there was even among the most down-to-earth staff, a feeling that she was in another world, and that we should not interrupt her.

Near-death experiences

Now what does the brain do under oxygen depletion conditions such as during times near death when the heart has stopped pumping blood through it? Does it continue to have such dreams? Widely documented incidents about Near-Death Experiences, NDEs, for short, attest to the fact that there is a definite possibility of a lucid experience preceding many deaths and that these experiences are in fact, stronger by an order of magnitude over ordinary dreams. One report claims that 23 million adults in the USA have had a close brush with death and of them 8 million have had an NDE [Ref to Gallup, Jr]. While Kenneth Ring, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut claims that there is no reason to believe that any particular type of death has a predisposition to be preceded by an NDE [Ref Ring, 1986], Bruce Greyson, Professor of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Virginia published a study that the type of death at least seems to be a factor in determining the specific kind of NDE that the individual has. Cardiac arrest, for instance, appeared to be highly connected to NDEs and specific cognitive features of the NDE were related to the suddenness of death [Ref Greyson, 1991]. So it appears that at least from the NDE point of view, a person can be justified in preferring certain forms of death over others. This becomes infinitely more important if we taken into account the fact that time-distortion almost inevitably happens during dreams and, I suppose, during NDEs as well.

The Heaven and Hell syndromes

In a popular Indian story, a king who is sceptical about the Maya doctrine provokes a visiting sage to argument by asking him to demonstrate Maya. The sage obliges and uses the king himself as a subject in the demonstration. He is asked to dip his head into a bowl of water held by the sage. No sooner than he does this, however, the king is transported to a distant and unknown land where he is no longer king. He tries all possible ways of determining his whereabouts, but everything fails. Nobody in this new land recognizes him and nobody is willing to help him. Sworn to wreak vengeance on the sage when he returns, the king nevertheless temporarily resigns himself to his new life and tries to get on with it. He learns a new trade, gradually accumulates wealth and becomes rich, meets a beautiful woman, falls in love and marries her, has many children and grandchildren and lives a full life. During his last days, he starts to reflect on how lucky he was that the sage transported him away from his stressful royal duties to give him an opportunity to enjoy the real life. But soon he awakens --- it was all an extremely vivid dream in the few moments his head was immersed in water in the sage's bowl! That, the sage, instructs him, is Maya.

It is all very well if our dreams were always pleasant and fulfilling. Unfortunately, that is not the case. We sometimes also have unpleasant dreams. It is because of the definite possibility of being locked into a nightmare for what seems forever that I am biased against drug induced deaths. I call this the hell-syndrome because although the NDE only lasts for a few seconds from an observer's (non-dying person) point of view, it may last an entire lifetime, or even eternity for the dying persons themselves. If so, it would look suspiciously similar to the eternal damnation that many religions (Christianity in particular) prescribe as the cost of sin.

This is all perhaps not so significant if the rate of passage of time in our dreams coincided with the external rate. That is, the experience of a certain amount of time in a dream takes exactly that much time on your watch as well. That would guarantee that we would experience no more than a finite amount of misery in a nightmare. But if anything, that seems patently untrue. In most of our dreams, our experience of time is noticeably dilated. Many long dreams are known to occur within the space of a few seconds *[reference and anecdote from Paul Fraisse's Psychology of time, p.230, experiments with acetylcholine bromide]*. It seems that the rate of passage of time is necessarily a subjective feeling, possibly influenced by neurotransmitters in the brain. Thus it is possible that we may end up experiencing an exceptionally unpleasant feeling for what seems an eternity within the space of the few seconds in which death occurs. I'm not arguing the useless point here that a unit of time may seem longer for some people than for others, but only that it is possible to experience remarkably accelerated or retarded time in some psychological states [Fraisse, p.229]. Sometimes the action of drugs induces them, but most commonly we experience this in dreams. In ``My life after dying'', George Ritchie recounts his near-death experience where it is obvious that subjective time dilation has taken place:[Insert footnote ref: George Ritchie, 1991, ``My life after dying,'' Hampton Roads Publishing, Norfolk, VA.]

I had made two other discoveries about this strange out-of-body realm. First, one goes wherever his/her soul's sincere desire leads him/her. Secondly, time in this realm, if it exists at all, is much shorter than our normal human realm, or the capacity to cover great distances in a regular period of time is vastly increased, for the distance I knew I had traveled could not be covered in our fastest airplanes.

Again, this would not be a major issue if unpleasant or distressing NDE's don't exist. Unfortunately, again, evidence points otherwise. Maurice Rawlings, a physician in Tennessee reports that when he was trying to resuscitate a heart-attack victim, the patient cried out ``Don't let me go back to hell'', but later denied any such painful experience near death. Dr Rawlings hypothesised at this point that the patient had an unpleasant near death experience and that it was so distressing that all memory of it was repressed soon after he had regained consciousness.[Insert footnote ref: Maurice Rawlings, ``Beyond Death's door'' Nashville, Nelson Publishers.]

In his book ``Saved by the light'', Dannion Brinkley writes anecdotally about his own NDE which at least partly was hellish. [Insert footnote ref: Dannion Brinkley, 1994, Villard books, Random House.] He says he was made to relive the pain and suffering of his victims during the Vietnam war. We may perhaps discount anecdotal accounts such as the above. But well documented cases of distressing NDEs have been made even in the academic sphere, for example by Bruce Greyson and Nancy Evans Bush. Greyson is Professor of Psychiatric Medicine at the University of Virginia and is the editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies. Bush is a pastoral counsellor in Connecticut and President of the International Association of Near-Death Studies. Here is an experience they report in a paper.[Insert footnote ref: Cite Greyson and Bush, 1992.] It is from a 48 year old woodworker who tried to hang himself from a utility shed:

From the roof of the utility shed in my back yard I jumped to the ground. Luckily for me I had forgot the broken lawn chair that lay near the shed. My feet hit the chair and broke my fall, or my neck would have been broken. I hung in the rope and strangled. I was outside my physical body. I saw my body hanging in the rope;l it looked awful. I was terrified, could see and hear, but it was different --- hard to explain. Demons were all around me; I could hear them but could not see them. They chattered like blackbirds. It was as if they knew they had me, and had all eternity to drag me down into hell, to torment me. I would have been the worst kind of hell, trapped hopeless between two worlds, wandering lost and confused for an eternity.

Another account from the paper details a pleasant NDE that had somehow mutated into an unpleasant one. This is from a woman who had been in labor with her second child for three days and was extremely exhausted and in severe pain. Her NDE initially consisted of a pleasant dream in which she was floating down a narrow river into the shadow of a beautiful arched bridge made of larged stones:

... I was floating with my body all down in the water, except my head was floating above it and bobbing up and down. I was very peaceful, but I wanted to get in the shadow.

After I reached the shadow I was in the heavens, but it was no longer a peaceful feeling, it had become pure hell. I had become a light out in the heavens and I was screaming, but no sound was going forth. It was worse than my nightmare. I was spinning around and around and screaming. I realized that this was eternity for all mankind. I had become all mankind and this was what forever was going to be. You cannot put into words the emotions that I felt.

While heavenly NDEs are said to consist of friendly beings, beautiful, lovely environments, conversations and dialogue, total acceptance and an overwhelming sensation of love, and a feeling of warmth and a sense of heaven, hellish ones are said to consist of lifeless or threatening apparitions, barren or ugly expanses, threats, screams, silence, danger and possible violence or torture, a feeling of temperature extremes, usually cold, and a sense of hell.[Insert footnote ref: P.M.H. Atwater, 1996.]

Given a choice between an eternity of either heaven or hell and no NDE at all, we should choose the no-NDE option if we were trying to avert the worst possibility.[Insert footnote: In fact, as I will argue in a later chapter, an eternity of heaven in the above sense is not really heaven at all, but an eternity of hell is really hell. Thus the best possibility, heaven for eternity, is not really the best possibility being only of finite positive value. However eternal hell is really the worst possibility and is of infinite negative value. So the choice that we have above is actually between the worst possibility and some not-so-bad possibility. So if at all the choice exists, we should choose against the NDE option. [Insert footnote ref: From this point of view, Richard Dawkins' suggestion to me below that we should experiment with drugs that are known to be neither heavenly nor hellish seems the most reasonable thing to do.] In this context, interestingly, it has been claimed that ``medical factors that cripple communication with the external world also cut down on phenomena related to an afterlife [Ref: Osis and Haraldsson] and that ``overmedication is robbing terminal patients of the glimpse of heaven that is their deathright [Ref: Kubler Ross]. See also Zaleski, p.176.] But then, as I will point out a few paragraphs later, it might actually turn out to be worthwhile to forego a chance at this glimpse of heaven if it means that there is a possibility of entering hell as well.

Anaesthesia

Why do I think drug induced deaths are the only ones that could cause the hell-syndrome and not other deaths? Well, actually I don't. But I think that the chances of a hell-syndrome could be greater in a drug-induced death. This has partly to do with the fact, as I mentioned earlier, that drugs have the potential to mess up the dream making machinery of the brain --- If we don't want to take any chances of landing up in hell, then we should steer clear of drugs to end our lives, at least those that are known to be potentially hallucinogenic. Some years ago, when I was initially toying with the idea of the heaven and hell syndromes, and trying to come up with scenarios in which they could have evolved naturally in humans, a draft of my thoughts on the matter was read by Richard Dawkins, a prominent zoologist at Oxford, who has written several books on genes and evolution, most popular among them being ``The Blind Watchmaker'' and ``The Selfish Gene''. A series of exchanges subsequently took place between us in which Dawkins suggested that we might eventually be able to find the right drug for humane lethal injections. Here are some excerpts from the communications between us (RD = Richard Dawkins):

RD:

I must think further about your rather disturbing article ... Why is it so hard to find a drug that is unlikely to produce the hell syndrome (or, even better, positively likely to produce the heaven syndrome)? Couldn't we just experiment with drugs on people who are nowhere near death and see which ones reliably produce happy dreams?

Me:

I think it is because of the possibility that subjective responses elicited in a normal brain under the action of some drug might be quite different from the responses elicited in the same brain under the action of the same drug but in, say, near-fatal oxygen depletion conditions. We might never know the answer to this until we examine people who have been through completed suicides!

...

What is to stop a drug-induced heaven-syndrome metamorphosing into a hell-syndrome when the brain starts to panic from lack of oxygen?

RD:

Yes, your point is all too plausible. But how about drugs that are not known to be heavenly or hellish? Say the ones that are injected by anaesthetists when you have an operation. A surgeon can do what he likes to you when you are under, and it is not interpreted as hell (the wound is painful only when you come round). If you just don't come round, presumably you have not suffered the hell syndrome. Why, wouldn't you prefer a lethal overdose of an anaesthetic?

Me:

Anaesthetists carefully make sure that although the brain under question is unconscious, it is kept alive and well and out of emergency-mode. If I designed a brain, I'd probably put it in an emergency-mode to try and wake the subject up when it is in danger of being damaged. Wouldn't such a feature in fact be selected for by evolution?

At this point Dawkins gave up his end of the conversation and chose to stay silent, as any true scientist would. I was arguing for a no-win situation. I was pushing a point of view that was and would forever be untestable. In fact, as I say in the next paragraph, it would remain untestable regardless of how advanced our scientific instrumentation gets. Scientifically speaking, it appears perfectly possible that we should be able to control incidences of the hell syndrome one day, or even better, positively induce the heaven syndrome in dying patients. But realistically speaking, we would never know what is going on. From this point of view the decision to exercise caution over the method of death a person chooses does not appear to be unwise. Although this kind of practical rationalisation is similar in kind to the one employed by Pascal, it is different in spirit. Pascal's argument requires us to believe in a god, the existence of which can be shown to be logically and scientifically untenable. The practical rationalisation involving the heaven and hell syndromes, however, are regarding human experiences of pleasure and pain which though [unavailable?] to science for empirical testing, nevertheless do not conflict with it.

Imagine that in some distant future, we claim to know exactly what activity in our brain causes some unpleasant situation and what causes other pleasant situations, and even what causes the perception of the passage of time?[Insert footnote ref: Actually, ``causes'' is too strong a word to use in this context. Instead of ``causes'' we should read ``precedes and accompanies''. Since that is too cumbersome, I will continue to use ``causes'' where I mean the latter.] For instance, suppose that it is claimed that the firing of some nerves called C-fibres in our brain causes the pain sensation. Suppose also that it is discovered that C-fibers fire significantly during the course of unpleasant nightmares concurrently with the release of a certain neurotransmitter known to dilate the experience of time. What now, if we were able to determine, by observing C-fibres and measuring neurotransmitter concentrations, which form of dying caused how much pain (or displeasure) for how long (in subjective time terms) and then choose a drug to die based on that information? I personally don't hold out much hope for this possibility as long as Hume's problem of induction remains unsolved (See Chapter[*]). For one thing, I'd be reluctant to indubitably conclude that C-fibre firing causes the pain sensation. On the contrary, I would say that the firing of C-fibres is postulated to explain our pain sensation. For all we know, C-fibre firing might be an insignificant side-effect of some other subtler physiological phenomenon that actually causes the pain. We will never know the answer to this as long as the mind-body dichotomy exists. However close we may be to the actual state of things, the risk would still be too great if we are dealing with the possibility of eternal damnation. Applying the logic of Pascal's wager here, even an extremely small chance of spending an eternity in damnation is unfavorable compared to a high chance of some other good or bad of finite value, no matter how high the latter chance is. Typically the preferred choice would be to have neither a heaven syndrome nor a hell syndrome.

From this viewpoint then, the best way to go seems to be instant vaporisation.[Insert footnote ref: Best in the sense that it guarantees to avoid the worst possibility.] But instant vaporisation requires the molecules in a brain to be heated to boiling point in zero seconds. In other words, it calls for infinite power. This is physically impossible. Energy can only be transferred at a finite rate. The next best thing we can hope for then, is vaporisation of the brain within the time it takes for a single neuron to process a signal, which is somewhere between 6 and 35 milliseconds. I guess this unique privilege only belongs to the select few who live within a mile's radius from the site of detonation of a hydrogen bomb. More practically, as Dawkins says, we should prefer overdose of an anaesthetic that has been determined to a high degree of certainty to also suppress dreams. Ideally, though, we are looking for the ability to die a natural death upon just willing it, and for this death to be painless, humane and unaccompanied by the hell-syndrome. That is the topic of Chapter [*].

Could the heaven and hell Syndromes have evolved naturally?

What about death through some natural cause, say, old-age, drowning, bleeding, infection, exhaustion or starvation? I think perhaps that these could actually be safe. In fact, anything that has been a major natural killer in the past might be ok. The reason I say this has something to do with my degree of confidence in the way Nature evolves species. Nature may not be benevolent, it may be indifferent and blind most likely, but I confess I find it extremely difficult to imagine a malicious Nature. Only a malicious Nature would have allowed something like endlessly nightmarish near-death experiences when it would have been of no use to it whatsoever. The thousands of billions of lives which have been lost in the past several millennia could not all have been extinguished after a pointlessly cruel experience, at least not if Nature didn't have a practical use for the hell-syndrome.

That is, if we assume that the hell-syndrome was caused by a randomly created gene and that it had no evolutionary value, then, we could say that if Nature was malicious then it would actively select in favour of this gene. If it was benevolent, then it would actively select against it. An indifferent Nature would do neither. So on the average, a creature can hope that it doesn't have the hell-syndrome gene. Even better, every mutation has a cost associated with it. So if the hell-syndrome gene didn't confer an evolutionary edge to the species possessing it, then it would actually be edged out gradually because the non-mutants who didn't possess the hell-syndrome gene will be at an evolutionary advantage by not having to pay the cost of maintaining the hell-syndrome gene.

But that is true only if the hell-syndrome gene didn't have evolutionary value; ie, it was useless from the point of view of the organism possessing it, in giving it an edge in survival over competing organisms. If not, then the tables would be turned completely. Even indifferent Nature would select in its favour. Nature doesn't try to evolve comfortable species, regardless of how much our well rounded soft bottoms might try to convince us to the contrary. It only tries to evolve successful species in their environments. Survival of the individual to reproduce is Nature's first and only priority.[Insert footnote ref: This statement, courtesy of Richard Dawkins.] Nothing else matters. We have to ask ourselves then, is it possible to imagine a scenario in which the hell-syndrome gene actually had evolutionary value? I describe some scenarios below which could have been instrumental in causing Nature to select actively in favour of the hell-syndrome gene should one have evolved by chance.

Imagine a people who evolved in a land where there was danger of silent asphyxiation. This could happen, for example, to people who live in a land where there is a likelihood of formation of noxious gas pockets. If this happens frequently, then people are at risk from dying in their sleep if they do not detect that they are asphyxiating. In our own time, Carbon monoxide especially is notorious in having caused many deaths in this way. It results from incomplete combustion of carbon or hydrocarbons such as petrol, kerosene or LPG. Encyclopaedia Brittanica says that Acute carbon monoxide poisoning is a common and dangerous hazard.

When the carbon monoxide concentration in the blood reaches 40 percent (that is, when the haemoglobin is 40 percent saturated with carbon monoxide, leaving only 60 percent available to bind to oxygen), the subject feels dizzy and is unable to perform simple tasks; judgment is also impaired. Haemoglobin's affinity for carbon monoxide is 200 times greater than for oxygen, and in a mixture of these gases haemoglobin will preferentially bind to carbon monoxide; for this reason, carbon monoxide concentrations of less than 1 percent in inspired air seriously impair oxygen-haemoglobin binding capacity. The immediate treatment for acute carbon monoxide poisoning is assisted ventilation with 100 percent oxygen.[Insert footnote ref: See ``Acute carbon monoxide poisoning under Respiration and Respiratory Systems.'']

For milder cases of poisoning, prompt removal of the patient to a well ventilated area and inhalation of oxygen rich air is enough to restore well-being. But, of course, for this to happen, the sleeping subject must first be woken up. If I were an engineer who designed the human brain, what would I do in this circumstance? The answer is simple and obvious. I wouldn't initiate a pleasant dream sequence in the mind of the sleeper. What I will start playing out will almost certainly be a nightmare. There is some evidence, though anecdotal, that this is indeed what happens. In India, people who sleep under trees at night often report being awakened by rude nightmares. Folklore attribute the phenomenon to spirits that supposedly inhabit the trees. Present day analysis could perhaps point to high carbon dioxide levels under trees caused by respiration at night.[Insert footnote ref: It would be interesting to empirically test this by subjecting people to controlled asphyxiation during sleep under safe laboratory conditons.]

Further, as an engineer with only a limited amount of time at my disposal (the danger of fatal asphyxiation is increasing with every passing second) I will probably use everything in my power to make sure the brain I design will wake up. One of the most important of these is my ability to distort subjective time. I would manage to distort the few seconds available to me into as long a subjective duration as possible for the sleeping brain so it has that much more time to react to my nightmare. Indeed, the less time I have at my disposal, the more I will stretch it subjectively for the brain. Does this sound familiar? Here then, we have the primitive beginnings of the hell-syndrome. A nightmare, coupled with time distortion so as to make it last longer than it really does, is really Nature's best bet to get a sleeping asphyxiating creature up and away before it dies. Pleasant dreams lull us deeper into sleep. At any rate, when a subject having a pleasant dream is abruptly awoken by a friend, he or she would wish to just roll over and return to sleep hoping that the dream will return where it left off. A nightmare is more likely to wake us up than a pleasant dream. Under this situation, a nightmare does seem to have serious evolutionary value. So much for people who suffocate themselves to death via car exhaust fumes!

However, we may take some satisfaction in the thought that this kind of nightmare may not necessarily turn into a full blown hell-syndrome. It is only useful to the creature as long as the it wakes up in time to prevent fatal damage to the brain. It is doubtful that the brain will continue to play out the nightmare to completion once irreversibly fatal damage has occurred. Such a disposition might indeed have little evolutionary value. Also, if at all this is the way that the human brain reacts to asphyxiation during sleep (regardless of whether the sleep itself was the result of initial stages of poisoning, as is often the case) I doubt if it will play out the hell-syndrome whenever it panics from lack of oxygen as opposed to just when it is being poisoned by toxic gases.

*[Note to myself: Oh dear, it seems as if there is a plausible set of environments under which a hell syndrome gene *could* have evolved! I must remember to go back and change my position on this in the first few paras of this section]* Here is another scenario, this time mediated by socio-cultural factors, which might been instrumental in actively selecting a hell-syndrome gene. This is an example of how the hell-syndrome might even have evolved in recent times, evolutionarily speaking.

Consider two groups of people, A and B. One of them, say group A, has by chance developed the hell-syndrome gene. It might not be unrealistic to expect that in both groups, over a period of time, there might be people with near-death experiences. However, whereas in group A the survivor might recount horrible stories of how he or she paid for all their misdeeds for what seemed an eternity and so on, the group B survivor has nothing to tell his fellow community members. As a result, in view of the particularly vivid and strong nature of these near-death experiences in the hell-syndrome, group A might quickly evolve a religion based on these rewards and punishments after death. If such a religion has strong views (as is usually common with religions founded on doctrines of retribution), and is exclusionist, it might eventually classify anyone not also of that religion as an infidel who must be exterminated. Since dogmatic religions are more likely to try and eliminate tolerant ones, A could try to eliminate B and not vice versa. If it is sufficiently early in the life of these two groups, and the societies are small, A might even be successful. Alternately, A might forcefully interbreed with B and pass on the hell-syndrome gene.

What about the heaven-syndrome? Could it have evolved naturally? Here is one scenario suggested by Michael Grosso, who teaches Philosophy and the Humanities at Jersey City College. He proposes that that a heaven-syndrome could be caused by means of endogenous opiates produced by the brain under the stress of dying.[Insert footnote ref: Michael Grosso, 1996.]

Somewhere in the secret codes of our genes, there may be instructions for making dying easy, especially after the struggle for survival ceases. If that code is part of a ground plan that understands, as Hindu scripture does, that everything is food for everything, then there might be providions for easing indidvudal death, for the benefit of the food chain as a whole; indididual death is nutrition for the biosphere.

Hmmm... Sound reasonable? Doubtful. I don't buy it. I think it is much more implausible than the scenarios I proposed for the hell-syndrome. I cannot seem to think of any reasonable scenario in which a heaven-syndrome gene could have evolutionary value. But that does not stop me from noting the empirical observations that many (and perhaps most) near-death experiences are recorded to be pleasant ones.

I agree that this is all wild speculation and the converse situation, where there are no heaven or hell-syndromes is also possible. But we do have documented near-death experiences, both pleasant and unpleasant. Thus we don't need to account for them. We only need to deal with them. We also need to keep in mind the redeeming possibility of a heaven-syndrome. What really matters then, is whether our last dream, if there is one, is going to be a pleasant one or a nightmare, and whether it is going to last forever or not at all.

In this context, it actually makes sense to live life like George Kostanza in the popular TV series Seinfeld. Jerry Seinfeld, too embarrased to admit to watching the TV show ``Melrose place,'' is one day forced by a friend to take the lie-detector test to prove the fact. Scared that the lie-detector might lift the lid on him, he requests the George, the master of deception to help. George refuses at first, but as parting advice before leaving the corner cafeteria, he offers ``Remember, it is not a lie if you believe it.''

To the extent that our dream life is characterised or affected by our past waking life on earth, and given the likelihood that excessive feelings of guilt could manifest as nightmares during sleep, it seems possible to espouse the belief that a person who willingly commits malicious acts and feels guilty about them deep down, might actually go to hell and suffer eternal damnation after death.

The ideas I propose here apply not just to non-believers and reductionistic materialists, of course. They also also apply to theists. In fact, they allow non-believers to now return the pity and condescension that theists are often so fond of dispensing to non-believers. Suppose that what I said in this chapter is true and that it is not whether you sinned, but rather whether you believed you sinned that determined whether you went to hell (suffered the hell-syndrome). Then we can tell theists, who typically believe they have sinned, to seek psychological counsel to rid themselves of guilt before they die. A dogmatic theist, however, is unlikely to buy this just as non-believers. find it impossible to believe in his theological doctrines. This is unfortunate for the theist. He refuses to believe in what could have potentially saved him. Instead he continues believe in ideas about sins and divine redemption. He is fully aware of the fact that he has sinned, especially so at the time of death, tries vainly to repent, eventually just hoping that God will take mercy upon him and save his soul. Alas, God does not exist. Only the brain does, with its fearful capacity to unleash the hell-syndrome. The theist who believes in sin and consequently feels intrinsic guilt actually does end up in the hell he feared most in his life.