“But the individual body, so familiar to us on our planet, did not have to exist. The only kind of entity that has to exist in order for life to arise, anywhere in the universe, is the immortal replicator.” - Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene: 40th Anniversary edition (Oxford Landmark Science)

There is a question that when asked to all people, across all cultures, across all of time, everyone provides the same answer. Furthermore, observation would tell you that if you could ask all living beings this same question, their response would be the same too. The question is this:

“Do you want to die?”

Now spare yourself the vivid imagery of a scene in a horror film, and instead just for a moment, think about it genuinely. If this were a question in some sort of routine mental health questionnaire we would view it pragmatically; but all of us would have the same answer. But wait you say, that’s not true - what about suicide? Some people seemingly answer “yes” through their tragic actions. I’ll address that in a moment, but for now lets talk about the vast majority of people who would commonly answer “no”.

Can you think of any other question to which every person, and every mammal for that matter, across all of time would have the same answer to? I don’t think there is one, and I think this fact is extremely meaningful. There is almost nothing that we humans agree on besides this question, and this answer. That’s a big damn deal. If this answer is the one thing that is common across all of us, that unifies us, then maybe within it holds the key to understanding ourselves.

And I really do mean the only thing. Think about how much variation hides inside the stuff we assume is shared. Take food - everybody eats, sure, but get specific and the agreement falls apart fast. Some people will happily put away fermented shark, or balut, or a fistful of raw chillies; others can’t go near cilantro because a quirk in their genes makes it taste like soap. Sleep is the same story. Most people sleep at night, but plenty are wired as night owls, some chop it into two shifts, some live by an afternoon nap while others are wrecked by one. Music, humour, love, what counts as beautiful - all of it splinters the second you zoom in. Damn near every “universal” human trait turns out, on closer inspection, to be a strong majority at best. The one and only exception - no asterisk, no cultural carve-out, no weird minority who genuinely feels the opposite - is the desire to keep living.

Death has, and always will be, the dark undercurrent running through our society. Most people would probably say they don’t think about death on a daily basis, but that wouldn’t be exactly right. The concept of health and safety is a much more regular occurrence in our thoughts, and most people consider these on a daily basis.

And the thing about health is that, well, it’s quite simply just the opposite of death. I would guess that most people would tell you they hardly think about death at all. And they’d be wrong - they think about it constantly, they’ve just rebranded it. Every time you check the weather before a long drive, book a doctor’s appointment, eat a vegetable you don’t particularly enjoy, or tell your kid to be careful, you are thinking about death. You’ve just dressed it up in friendlier clothes and called it health and safety. “Avoiding death” sounds morbid. “Taking care of yourself” sounds responsible. It’s the same instinct wearing a nicer outfit.

Exceptions

On the topic of suicide, there is really two main types. The first we could call “sacrificial suicide”, this includes suicide bombers or anyone who voluntarily gives their life for a cause.

The second we could call “distress suicide”, this is the more commonly thought of type that takes their own life because they feel they can no longer handle living in the world. Oftentimes we refer to this group as “victims of suicide”. Notice the word choice there: “victims”. If you’re like me, you would say that is the culturally appropriate way to say that; while we may reflexively say “those who”, when we think about it, victims seems most appropriate. They are victims to a set of circumstances that brought them down a path that surely is not what we are meant to do. We may not know why we are here, but we are pretty damn sure we’re not supposed to do that. In other words, these are people who have deviated from the answer to that exact question. We are so convinced of this that even for someone who arrives at that terrible point, we all quietly agree there was an earlier version of them - a toddler, a kid, someone from before the circumstances closed in - who very much wanted to live. The “no” was there first. So the exception, when you actually look at it up close, isn’t really an exception to the rule. It’s evidence of how hard a life has to be pushed before that one universal answer can be overridden at all.

It’s a peculiar thing isn’t it to think about the one opinion we have on something that we all share.

Evolution 101

Okay, so none of us want to die, now what? Well as we alluded to earlier, “us” actually extends beyond humans and into all mammals and frankly almost every living being. It’s the common thread within all of life, with very few exceptions (many of which we will address because it turns out they are not actually exceptions).

For the sake of analysis, we could flip our common thread of “not wanting to die” to its more cheerful inverse: “wanting to live”. As a result, it’s then fair to say that “life wants to live”. Seems pretty obvious and straightforward hey? Great. Now that we have that established, we can ask the next logical question of “how life accomplishes its desire for wanting to live”.

How do we do it?

Here’s the trick, and it’s a good one: it doesn’t.

Not in the way you’d hope, anyway. No individual living thing has ever actually managed to live forever. You won’t, I won’t, the oldest tortoise you can find won’t. On the level of the individual, life loses every single time. The house always wins.

So if every individual dies, how does life itself keep going? It cheats. Instead of keeping any one body alive forever, it copies the instructions for building that body and hands them off before the body gives out. You, right now, are a temporary container for a set of instructions - your genes - that are far older than you and fully intend to outlast you. Dawkins called this thing the immortal replicator, and the name is doing a lot of work. The replicator is the gene. You are the vehicle it built to carry itself into the next round.

It’s a strange thing to sit with. The part of “you” that’s actually winning the immortality game isn’t your personality, or your memories, or the thing you think of as you. It’s the recipe. The recipe is immortal-ish; the cake is very much not.

This is the original immortality project, running long before anything was around to give it a name or have a single conscious thought about it. Copy the information, ditch the body, repeat. Life has been running this exact play for something like four billion years without a single day off.

But to run the play - even the simplest version of it - something has to want to keep going. Something has to flinch away from death and lean toward food, safety, a mate. How much wanting does that take? Does a bacterium “want” anything at all? That’s where it gets blurry, and if you’ve been paying attention, blurry means we’re about to talk about a gradient.

Consciousness is a Gradient

Quick detour, because I’m about to lean hard on a word and I’d rather not leave you hanging on it. The word is nucleotide. Here’s the whole thing in one breath: inside nearly every cell in your body sits a molecule called DNA, and DNA is basically a very long instruction manual written in an alphabet of just four letters - A, C, G, and T. Each of those letters is a nucleotide. Line them up in a particular order and you get a gene, which is roughly one instruction: “build this protein,” “make the eyes brown,” that sort of thing. You’re carrying something like twenty thousand of these genes, and here’s the part that matters: almost nothing interesting about you traces back to a single one of them. Your height, your temperament, the shape of your face - they’re all team efforts, dozens or hundreds of genes each nudging the result a little one way or the other. Hold onto that, because it’s the whole point of what comes next.

If you look up the word “consciousness” you’ll see its (at the time of writing this) defined as a noun. That’s consistent with the way most people use the term; we think of ourselves as conscious and a tree as not conscious. However, it doesn’t take much consideration before this classification system quickly falls apart. Consider your favorite mammal (besides humans); ill use a dog for the sake of example. Is a dog conscious? Most people agree that a dog is somewhat conscious; not as much as a human but more than say, an ant. And there it is, the usage of the word somewhat implies that there are different levels of consciousness, and therefore it must be a gradient. This is consistent with the fact that if we agree that evolution is a continuous spectrum, then point me to the exact gene that controls consciousness. As of right now we haven’t found it, but even if we did we could go a level further and ask “within the consciousness gene, point me to the exact pair of nucleotides that controls consciousness”. No biological scientist worth their weight would tell you that this could ever be done. No one trait, especially one as complex as consciousness, is ever the result of one single pair of nucleotides - that we know for certain. Consciousness most certainly arises from a complex interplay of different genes, which means that it is not simply a binary switch. If it were, then where on the evolutionary spectrum might this “switch” exist? Is it between the dog and the ant? If so, what exact nucleotide turned it on? And more importantly, what set of nucleotides are responsible for the varying levels of consciousness? You can look for them but I am quite certain you won’t find them because consciousness is not only a gradient amongst all living things, but it is an emergent property resulting from complexity, not a “consciousness gene”.

The Emergence of Symbols

So consciousness is a gradient, and somewhere along that gradient our ancestors picked up a particular trick that, as far as we can tell, no other animal runs quite as hard as we do. They started using symbols.

It probably began with something completely practical. Picture a group of early humans, and one of them makes a specific sound every time a big cat shows up. Do it enough times and that sound starts to mean “big cat” - not because the sound has any cat-ness in it, but because everyone agreed it points at one. That grunt is a symbol. It’s a stand-in. The sound is not the lion; it’s a little portable token that lets you talk about the lion when the lion isn’t currently standing in front of you.

That’s all language is, when you strip it down. A big pile of agreed-upon symbols. Sounds, and later scratches on a surface, that point at things. (Nuance was basically a whole chapter about how leaky and imprecise those pointers are - but leaky or not, they work well enough.)

The first symbols would have been tactical: that animal, this food, danger, over there, follow me. Useful stuff. Stuff you can point at. And if it had stopped there, we’d be a slightly chattier kind of clever ape and not much else.

But here’s the leap, and it might be the most important one in this entire book. At some point we stopped just using symbols and started grasping the concept of a symbol itself. Once your brain understands that one thing can stand in for another, a door swings open - and on the other side of that door is everything you can’t point at.

Because now you don’t have to limit your symbols to physical things. You can build a symbol for tomorrow, even though tomorrow isn’t anywhere you can walk to. You can build one for mine, for fair, for honour, for god, for the tribe - concepts with no physical body at all, that nobody has ever held in their hands, and yet we all sort of nod along like they’re real. We constructed an entire invisible world out of pointers that point at nothing you can touch.

And once you can symbolize the intangible, you eventually get around to symbolizing the most intangible thing of all: yourself. Your own future. Your own absence from it. You become the one animal that can hold, right there in its head, a little symbol of its own death - a fully formed concept of a world that just carries on without you in it.

That is a heavy thing to be able to imagine, and no other creature has to carry it. The tortoise isn’t lying awake running the math on tortoise mortality. We are, because we’re the ones who built the symbol for it.

But - and this is where the whole book quietly turns - the exact same trick that lets you imagine your death also lets you imagine outliving it. If “you” can be boiled down to a symbol, then that symbol doesn’t necessarily have to die when the body does. The replicator already worked out how to copy itself by passing genes to the next generation. We just stumbled onto a second way to copy ourselves: through symbols. Through a name, a story, a child, a cathedral, a song, a flag, a theory scratched onto a page.

That’s the move. That’s basically the entire game from here on out. We took the oldest trick in biology - copy the information, outlast the body - and learned to run it with meaning instead of genes.

We have a name for the various ways people pull this off. We call them Immortality Projects, and they’re what the rest of this book is about.

Conclusion

So let’s pull the thread all the way back through.

Nobody wants to die - it’s the one answer every living thing gives to the one question they’d all agree on. That isn’t a coincidence or a personality quirk; it’s the engine. Life, at its core, is a copying machine that wants nothing more than to keep copying. The immortal replicator, ditching bodies and keeping the recipe, running the same play for four billion years.

We are one branch of that machine that got complicated enough to become aware of itself - aware enough to build symbols, and then aware enough to turn those symbols back on our own existence and realize, with some horror, that the copying machine we’re part of doesn’t come with a forever-version of us. The individual always loses.

So we did the most human thing imaginable. We invented a second way to live forever. Not in the body - we gave up on that one a long time ago - but in symbol. In the things we make, and join, and pass on.

We are just self-replicating chemical concoctions - nothing more, nothing less. But don’t despair, a belief that life is meaningless does not have to result in nihilism. “Meaningless” and “miserable” are two very different words, and the whole rest of this book is an argument that you can hold the first one without ever having to pick up the second.

So no, none of it means anything in some grand cosmic sense. You’re chemistry that got worried about itself. But that worry might be the most interesting thing in the known universe - it invented art and gods and grandchildren and pyramids, all trying to do something about it.

Let’s go have a look at how.

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