{"product_id":"2940014936200","title":"Soul Search, A Scientist Explores the Afterlife","description":"What happens when we die? Does everything we are just stop? Is consciousness lost forever? Or does some vital spark inside us, a spirit or a soul, live on? We find it almost impossible to think about not having a mind, of our awareness being snuffed out like a candle. Yet the stark fact is that within a century or so, everyone alive today – all six billion of us – will be dead.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHumans are the only creatures on earth that know they are going to die. But that foreknowledge has come fairly recently and it flies in the face of four billion years of evolution. Those eons have genetically conditioned us to do all we can to preserve ourselves and our kin. The result is that we are caught in a dilemma. We are programmed to survive by our genes yet made painfully aware of our mortality by our forward-looking brain. If we admit that death is inevitable, then our will to survive may be fatally weakened. On the other hand, if we deny death, we have to turn a blind eye to a patent fact of the real world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOnly one avenue of escape is possible – belief in an afterlife. With this we can face the nightmare that death poses to the rational mind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe distance ourselves from death by institutionalizing it. Whereas in earlier times most people spent their last days at home in the bosom of family and friends, today four-fifths of us are removed to hospitals or nursing homes. We are hidden from the gaze of the young and healthy and tended to by strangers. As the end approaches, we are discreetly moved to wards for the terminally ill and plugged into life-support machines. Technology takes over. And when we do eventually die, it is often the inadequacy of the equipment or the shortcomings of the treatment that are blamed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eInstead of accepting death as a natural and inevitable fact of life, we are in danger of convincing ourselves that, given further medical advances, we shall be able to stave it off for as long as we like. \"Some people want to achieve immortality through their works or their descendants,\" said Woody Allen. \"I want to achieve it through not dying.\" Now, for the first time, science seems to be holding out the slender hope of cheating death. Already, some of our vital parts can be replaced with natural or synthetic substitutes. In time, it seems, the transplant surgeon will be able to do for a human being what any competent mechanic in a well-equipped garage can do for a car.","brand":"First Edition Design Publishing","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47084136530160,"sku":"2940014936200","price":7.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940014936200_p0.jpg?v=1763617314","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940014936200","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}