“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my works. I want to achieve it through not dying.” Woody Allen.

David Santos Martinez

I’m afraid that Woody Allen will have to be satisfied with being remembered through his works, because the achievement of evading death is something that remains unknown, if possible.

Death: the most relevant and oldest question in the history of humanity. Well, actually, we can explain why we die, and it is because our chromosomes loose some genes in every cellular division. Despite the impact of this action being reduced by some ‘un-useful’ genes, which are placed on the extremes of the chromosome with a protective purpose, once the number of divisions reached is too high and we have lost all the waste genes, degeneration starts to affect some essential genes, which carry out important functions in our organism. And, finally, as a consequence of the loss, some major problems happen and our heart definitely stops beating.

But, what we don’t know is what happens after death. Obviously, our organic components go back to the environment, but what about our only abstract part?

Plato said that when we die, the mind goes back to the perfect and immortal world of ideas where it comes from. Christianity says that our souls go either to heaven or hell. And some empiricists, like David Hume, have assured us that the mind does not exist because our experience has never got in touch with such a thing.

First of all, I will discard the third possibility, because, although I haven’t seen any “minds” flying around, my personal experience makes me believe that the mind is something independent from the body. However, as a belief, it can be true or false, but unfortunately the answer is only likely to be found after death, so we can just guess it.

Now, to justify that the mind is immortal, I’ll use a theory from Kant.

He said that to affirm that something exists, its concept must appear in reality and in our minds. He also stated that a concept could only be presented in the mind, but not vice versa. A concept can’t stay in reality without being also in our minds. Let’s go again with the example of the unicorn. Its concept is only part of our minds, but at least this fact gives it the possibility of existence. The problem is that, until nowadays, we haven’t found any.

Now, try to think about the mortality of the mind. That means to conceive a state in which we are not able or reflect anymore, because this is what “death of the mind” means, isn’t it?

You will realize that it is impossible to imagine such a state without thinking. So, if we can’t create the concept inside of our minds, it is because it doesn’t exist, and as a result our minds are, then, immortal.

And there is one more thing: where does the mind / soul go after death?

Woefully, it is something with such a huge range of possibilities that even guessing would be a waste of time. Nevertheless, we can tell Woody Allen that, despite the fact that his body will inevitably die, with a stroke of luck, his mind will survive forever.