Structural Souls
Particles come and go, through the skyscrapers in our cities and the bones in our bodies. We are built from the same sub-microscopic stuff as the fuel we consume to keep our cogs whirring — notice how almost everything we eat was once biological tissue? — yet it is through this stuff that people often sift, searching for the ‘essence’ of what makes us not only alive, but somehow more alive than the rest of Earth’s biosphere.
Frequently this leads introspectors to the aether-like phenomenon of souls, impermeable ghosts that give rise to consciousness by puppeteering our material bodies. Conveniently, this paves the way for an equally ethereal afterlife. I, and others, have written much on how this dualistic approach is self-refuting and — arguably worse — explains nothing. But why does the concept sprout up all across human space and time? And if it is untrue, then what is going on when we die?
The secret lies in structure, the source of our complexity. Dualists are correct in the belief that the molecules comprising us are not especially important in defining us — rather, it is their precise and evolutionarily-tuned arrangement. As our technology evolves in parallel, we are learning the beauty of using more and more abstract structures to relay information. I can now carry the complete works of Beethoven around in my pocket as a series of ones and zeroes. If I had the patience and memory span, I could even write that number sequence down on a piece of (very long) paper. Not a very useful form for the information to be in, but a form in near-bijection to the original music nonetheless, and the same method that a theoretical teleporter might use to beam our structural information from one point to another at the speed of light.
Our DNA is literally an instruction manual for mindless cellular structures to build every part of us. The Human Genome Project famously perused the entirety of this instruction manual, and you would be surprised at how short it turned out to be — yet we understand so little of the organic complexes it is used to construct, especially the brain. When we reproduce, a new instruction manual is written by taking random words from both the mother and father, with a handful of translational flaws (that this process is flawed is a glorious, glorious fact).
It is not particularly important that the mortar used to piece you together and keep you running day after day may have come from the ham sandwich you ate for lunch. Death is simply the result of this maintenance coming to an end, either because of decay over the decades or because of extreme trauma. Some parts of the body — particularly the blood-hungry brain — notice this much quicker than others.
Your cells stop maintaining your structure, and you decompose into dust with the help of Earth’s other creatures.
Hopefully you weren’t expecting a different ending.
