This is part two in a series about the deathbed regrets of a person who strapped a doomsday machine dead man switch to their brain. Part one can be found here.
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They must have brought me to the brink of death, then kept me there. I can only assume they must have done something surgical to my spinal and cranial nerves, because I have no access to any function of my body, sensory nor motor. Or else the afterlife always looked like this.
One could imagine that: Suffused in darkness so dense you couldn’t tell it apart from light, and echoes loud enough to sound like thought … and don’t I wish? I wish all this was an echo.
But I don’t assign much likelihood to it. Had I been dead, the world would have ended with me.
For I have a Doomsday device strapped to my Cartesian gland, the location where my mind exchanges information with my brain, and at cessation of the exchange, a signal is set to go out to a distributed network of underground doomsday machines and destroy absolutely everything.
So, I am almost certain they do what they can and spend all resources they must to keep me alive.
Add to that: Apart from mental echoes, I am under no active torment. While in an afterlife, I would surely have suffered for what I did.
Assuming an afterlife even exists … results so far have been inconclusive.
And wouldn’t I know! I used to be an afterlife researcher. I knew before it went public when they discovered the Cartesian gland (which is not the pineal gland, only shares its once hypothesized function), and it gave me the idea for what I did; by measuring activity in the Cartesian gland, we could point to a definitive moment of death, so it provided a site to strap my dead-man’s-switch onto so I could blackmail the world (in the name of misanthropic irony; as an art project).
But I digress ..
… and why wouldn’t I digress? I have no rush; I have no concept of time. And no other audience than myself.
Given that time doesn’t matter, not subjectively, I may as well go over every piece of the argument, as many times as I would like, and consider every hypothetical, and repeat them all to myself often enough so I can get a sense of their relative probability, by which I mean how likely it is that I am, indeed, alive.
Oh! The probabilities! How I wish I could simply have counted them. Envisioned a table. But I don’t think I have proper access to my working memory, which is required for counting. (Though, isn’t it also required for the reasoning I can perform?)
I do know I have access to some sort of feeling, which possibly supports the position that feeling belongs on the mental side of the Cartesian divide (unlike emotion, which is decidedly of the body), though I’m not in a position where I can report back on that … so my method is that I decide, with each pair of hypotheses, which one I like the most, and then let the sense of liking accumulate.
It might do as a substitute for proper statistical weight.
That is what I am up to now, anyway.
And in case you are wondering (which you are not, being the same entity as myself): The reason I have this monologue with myself is not to avoid losing my mind. I would, if anything, like it much better if I could have lost my mind. But I am nothing but my mind; if it got lost, I’d still be there along with it.
The reason I have this monologue with myself, is that silence would have been even harder to bear.
But I digress again …
They wouldn’t have poisoned me unless they knew some way to forestall my death and thereby the death of the world. To knowingly destroy everything … just to get at me … would have exceeded even humanity’s capacity for spite. Wouldn’t it?
Unless there was some single perpetrator behind it. (An individual who didn’t care if the world died out. Maybe even wanted it.)
No. It must have been a rational decision. They must have decided to neutralize me rather than comply with my (ludicrously petty) demands based on … sound reasoning, one must assume.
Though reconstruction of those reasons would probably be beyond me. It must have been based on value judgements too different from my own. Or so I suppose, building on this: If our values had been similar, even commensurable, how could I have miscalculated so poorly?
(Or ought I to say: Miscalculated well? If something is miscalculated poorly, it must have been calculated well, and my calculations were certainly not that.)
And given that: They must have known a way to keep me alive.
But this brings me to back the other question: What now?
My time on earth was an era of rapid medical advance, they must have had the knowledge even then to extend the durability of my comatose body into a few centuries – at least. And in that time span, they must likely have found ways to extend it further, as every resource necessary must have been spent on it, to prevent everything else from dying along with me. But there is now way they can preserve me like this forever …
Which means – and I would have looked forward to it almost, had it only been myself, but haven’t I made it clear, again and again that it is the very opposite of that – that eventually, I too will die.
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