Feature
Wonderland Series watercolour on paper
I’D RATHER BE A RADIO
words by mica lemiski art by caitlin mcdonagh terms like “biochemical machine” and “physical law.” I’m fascinated that my father, a self-proclaimed “man of science,” believes in some kind of afterlife. I’m fascinated by what feels like faith.
In darkness, Dad and I sit in the truck with the headlights on. The radio doesn’t play. Beyond the Ponderosas, stoic and protective as soldiers, the sky is full of stars. One shoots across the blackness then disappears. Of course, it’s not really a star. It’s a meteor—a molten rock that, having rubbed up against the earth’s atmosphere, releases a kite-tail of space dust into the sky.
Why have science and spirituality long been pitted as enemies? Both are products of the same human impulse: curiosity. We want to understand the world, and to rationalize the universe and its energetic properties. Is it even possible to study space or physics without faith? These fields require engagement with concepts and objects that are completely mysterious. Just look at the stars (except our sun, of course): massive collections of hydrogen and helium coalescing in their own gravity, visible yet so far away we’ll never even come close to feeling their heat. We can understand stars as functions of the physical universe, but doing so requires faith in our individual and collective perception, believing our means of measuring and computing are apt to analyze bodies that preclude our existence by billions of years.
“When I die,” Dad says, “I want to go to space.” At first, I think he’s talking about cremation, as in he wants his ashes loaded into a tiny rocket and launched into orbit. I picture the rocket exploding, Dad’s ashes fireworking into the atmosphere and raining down like confetti.
What if the brain were not a computer generating its own consciousness, but rather a radio?
I’m not undermining scientific methods—I think it’s miraculous and a credit to our species that we can manipulate aspects of the invisible world to work in our favour consistently. We shoot electrons through a circuit, produce a current, power a light bulb. We predict the orbital period of Halley’s Comet and when we’ll see it next: July 28, 2061. But what about aspects of the world that are not just unreachable or invisible, but imperceptible? We can’t travel back in time to witness how this all began, nor can we travel forward to see what happens next. We can study the hell out of a Martian rock but in the end we’re mainly left with questions. Because while we like to think we know a lot, we ultimately know that we don’t know very much.
I question the likelihood of pulling off this request—I can’t imagine getting a stowaway past NASA—but then Dad says he’s not talking about cremation. “Once I’m free of my body, I’m going to space,” he says. “What do you mean?” I ask. “Well, presently I am confined to earth by gravity. I exist within a biochemical machine. But when I die, my consciousness will no longer be bound by a container and subject to physical law. I’ll be able to go wherever I want. And I want space.”
I was four years old when my Grandma Shirley died of a heart attack. I don’t remember a thing about it. This makes me sad, angry, and a bit confused. My earliest memory (me in the backseat of my mother’s enormous bronze Cadillac, fiddling with a tape recorder we’d bought at a garage sale) precludes her death. Why did the tape recorder have a larger imprint on my consciousness than my grandmother’s death? Maybe because a consciousness has no physical properties; it cannot be imprinted in a literal sense. At least not to our knowledge.
I look out the window and imagine my father among the stars, his body sloughing off into the sky like the meteor’s tail. I feel something twist inside me, a sensation I get whenever I imagine a loved one dying. It’s like momentary vertigo: my brain rotates itself 30 degrees or so, misaligning until I’m able to shift my focus. This time, though, the twisting is eclipsed by a full-body sinking feeling. Would Dad rather be up in space, all alone, than here on earth with me?
Within the scientific community, the general consensus regarding consciousness is that it is created solely by the brain. That is, what we experience as thought and awareness is a product of electrical and biochemical processes occurring between neurons, in folds of soft tissue, in a seven-millimetre-thick case of bone. This is a materialist perspective, consistent with the belief that everything on earth and beyond—every aspect of reality—either has material properties or is the product of some kind of material. Scientific materialists say that matter is the only reality. They say when the brain dies, our consciousness dies with it.
He answers before I can ask. “The only thing I’m nervous about is finding my people. You and Mom. Your brother. Grandma Shirley. If I can, I’ll send you a signal. To let you know where I am and that it’s all OK.” Again, I see the flash of the meteor’s tail. Or maybe I imagine it.
For the next few days, I chew on Dad’s space theory like a piece of gum I can’t spit out. When I’m out with friends or serving drinks at the bar, I store it between my bottom gum and my lower lip, feeling a malleable pressure that never completely dissipates. What I’m chewing on is the tension between science and spirituality. The idea that death is a purely physical occurrence, a gateway to space travel, is a salvation narrative cloaked in scientific rhetoric—
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Others take what’s called a post-materialist approach—scientists like Stuart Hameroff and Gary Schwartz, who say, but wait, isn’t that a bit reductionist? Isn’t it a bit short-sighted to believe that everything shaded beneath the umbrella of reality must be tied in some way to the material world and our perception of it? Our perception cannot represent the entire equation. What if the brain were not a computer generating its own consciousness, but rather a radio, receiving
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