Houston Southard

david eagleman - Sum - 40 tales of the afterlife

We imagine an afterlife not just because we fear death, but because we're incapable of considering nonexistence (even though we crave it in eight hour increments at the end of each long day).

So what happens when you die? For wonderings funner than the dour reality, David Eagleman's got your back. Sum is one of the most fun thought experiments by one of the most prestigious neuroscientists we have the pleasure of hosting on planet earth. Rather than taking the path most commonly taken by the areligious, Eagleman describes himself as a Possibilian, living with the understanding that the Abrahamic ideologies are but a few possibilities amongst the world's almost 8,000 religions. Christianity is as possible as Atheism is as possible as the Bakuban's Mbombo. He does this to analogize that what we know about science should be applied to the creation stories people told about the world before we had the resources to explain our existence, because just as theories evolve when poked, so too should our reliance on stories we use as crutches to batten down existential dread. Really, though, he's just being polite.

To be clear, this isn't a book about Eagleman's beliefs, or any religious beliefs. It's a literary experience mixing hopeful and fantastical vignettes, each a different and ironic eternity from the next.

The afterlife is living as a background character in other's dreams. It's living your life backwards. It's living in eternity alongside annoying versions of who you could have been. It's filled with only those you remember. God is a single celled organism battling microbes in your body and has no idea you exist. God's a married couple whose house you live out your afterlife in. Forgotten gods live in an old folks-style campground reminiscing back to times when they were still worshiped.

Besides being authored by Eagleman, what drew me to this book was that in a few short pages he wrote forty better versions than the one I tried to create a few years ago. For a free headache, check out my short story God State University where gods need a degree to open up their own universes. Link in bio.