Transcription
Have You Ever Wanted eternal life? You won't after this story.
The Last Answer by Isaac Azimov is a short story about the afterlife. It's a very underrated story, often overshadowed by the far more popular Last Question, but this one serves as a good compliment. The Last Answer explores eternal life and the issues that might come with that. In this video, I'll go over the plot, so it doesn't matter if you've read the story. Then, I'll share my thoughts on the themes and ideas.
Murray Templeton is a 45-year-old physicist who is at the top of his game. In his prime, a full life ahead of him, maybe even a Nobel Prize. And then, one day, while he's working in the lab, he gets a heart attack, staggers away, and drops down on the floor. The pain slowly goes away until he feels at peace. When he opens his eyes, he sees all of his Lab Partners gathered around his body and realizes, "Wait a second, I'm looking at my own body. I'm dead, but I'm still here."
As a devout atheist, he never believed in life after death, but in that moment, he realizes the religious people were right after all. He waits for an angel or demon to appear and take him away to the appropriate place, and the scene in front of him begins to fade. He's now surrounded by almost total darkness, except for a human-shaped figure of light in the distance. He assumes that this means he's going to heaven. Demons don't look like beautiful figures of light, right? It's kind of funny that he just immediately accepts the situation he's in. Full-on logical scientist mode, like, "Yes, I was completely wrong, just obtained fresh new data, and religion is right. I'm now a True Believer." Fastest conversion of all time.
The light fades away, and now there's just darkness. Maybe it's not heaven after all. A mysterious voice begins talking to him. Murray asks the voice if this is heaven, and the voice says it's not really anywhere. Then he asks the voice if it's God, and it kind of laughs at the question, since it's been asked the same thing in an infinite number of different ways in the past. The voice says that there is no answer it can give that will make sense to a human mind, so all it can say is, "I am."
This is kind of a troll response because in the Bible, when Moses asks God for his name, God says, "I am that I am." So, in a sense, the voice is saying exactly what the Christian God would say, but it's also not saying anything. Maybe the voice means it in more of a "what" kind of way. It's saying that it is simply a thing that exists, but beyond that, there's nothing that can be known about it for sure. "I think, therefore I am."
Murray then asks about himself. Is he a soul or something else? The voice says he is not a soul in the way that we think of it. He's a collection of electromagnetic forces arranged in an exact copy of his brain. He's basically a neuronet that perfectly replicates the brain of the original human known as Murray Templeton. It's such an exact and detailed copy that all of his thoughts, memories, and personality are the same. He's a perfect brain clone.
Murray should feel very special, though, because the voice doesn't do this for everyone. It only chooses a select few to be cloned into the afterlife. Everyone else just vanishes into oblivion when they die. But what did Murray do to deserve the great honor of being chosen for the afterlife? He didn't exactly live a virtuous life, but the voice doesn't choose based on virtue. It chooses based on intelligence. It doesn't just replicate humans either. It chooses from all the intelligent species in the universe. There are currently quadrillions of these afterlife clones.
The voice casually reveals that it is the one who created the universe and then gets to the real point of why Murray is here. He's here to think. Why does the voice need Murray to think? Shouldn't it already know everything? Well, the problem is that even if it knows everything, it can't know that it knows everything. "You don't know what you don't know." The voice is eternal, which means it can't remember having been created. If it could remember its own creation, then it wouldn't have existed eternally. So, there's at least one thing it doesn't know about.
Even though the voice has infinite knowledge, it's also true that there is infinite knowledge that could be known, and there's no way to know if both infinities are equal. If you know all even numbers, you know an infinite number of things, but you still wouldn't know any odd numbers. So, it will be Murray's job to find things that the voice doesn't already know about. Its whole reasoning for creating the universe itself was so it would have more data to work with. It made the uncertainty principle, entropy, and other randomization factors to make the system nonobvious. It allowed intelligent life to be produced and began to use them as a source for research because it increases the randomness of the system. More randomness means more interesting results. In other words, the voice is really, really, really bored.
Murray wonders if anyone ever finds new knowledge that the voice doesn't already know, and the voice says that it happens at least once a century, where something it could have thought of but hadn't yet is discovered. Murray questions if he's really capable of discovering completely new knowledge. The voice says that he'll find something interesting eventually, since he'll be stuck doing this for the rest of eternity.
Murray slowly begins to realize just how screwed he is and asks, "What's the point of any of this? Why does he have to fight new knowledge for the rest of eternity? What is the purpose?" The voice says, "Well, weren't you a scientist back in the real world? Was there a point in searching for knowledge then?" Murray talks about how finding knowledge had value then because only he could do certain things, and he got praise from his peers, and it felt like a satisfying accomplishment because he only had a short time to do something interesting. The finite limits of life helped make it more worthwhile. But searching for knowledge for all eternity is pointless because the voice could find that knowledge itself if it felt like it. There's no sense of satisfaction or accomplishment in something if you have all of eternity to do it.
The voice says, "Cool story, bro. I ain't reading all that, but I'm happy for you or sorry that happened. Anyway, you have no choice, so it doesn't matter." Murray says the voice can't make him think if he doesn't want to, but the voice points out that thinking is the only thing Murray can actually do. He literally can't do anything else. He's just a synthetic brain in complete darkness.
In that moment, Murray discovers a purpose worth pursuing, which is to figure out how to delete himself. Coming up with new knowledge just to amuse the voice isn't a worthwhile existence, so he'll figure out how to leave the afterlife and return to the void. The voice says, "Sounds good to me. While you work on that problem, you'll probably find me some new knowledge. And in any case, if you happen to succeed, it'll be pointless because I'll just reconstruct you and patch whatever method you use to destroy yourself. You can keep finding new ways to do it, and I'll just keep fixing it. I guess it'll be a fun game, but you'll still be here forever."
At this point, Murray realizes that maybe he's actually in hell. Murray then tries to convince the voice that he'll be useless and should just be dismantled because he's really not worth the effort to keep him running. Like, "Yeah, my IQ test was fake. All my research was ChatGPT generated. I'm actually really stupid, so you should just let me go." The voice says, "Nah, you have an entire eternity to come up with interesting new knowledge for me. No matter how hard you try not to, you'll probably come up with at least one interesting thing."
Murray then discovers his true purpose. He will dedicate his eternal life to destroying the voice, unless it destroys him first. The knowledge of how to kill the voice will be the last answer, beyond which there is no more knowledge. In response to this, the voice is overjoyed. "Like, good boy, you solved that 5 minutes faster than the average schmuck I bring in here. Literally every single being in the afterlife is trying to kill me. Good luck, have fun." And then the voice vanishes.
Murray is now content, since he has a clear purpose. He's going to kill the voice. He realizes that, of course, that's what the voice wants. That's what any eternal existence would want: an end. The voice has been searching for a way to die for at least billions of years. It invented the entire universe and intelligent life and did all of this just to get help with that search. Murray begins to work with excitement.
There are lots of different opinions on aging and immortality. There are companies working on anti-aging technology, trying to help humans achieve biological immortality, and a lot of people don't like that and think it's weird. These people claim that death is a natural part of life and that without death, life would lose its value and meaning, and our short lifespans are why we accomplish so much and things like that. And then there's another group that considers all of that to be serious cope. Like, who would really rather die at 80 than live to 800? I want the anti-aging immortality bill. There's so much to see and do in the world, much more than you can do in a regular human lifespan.
But this type of biological immortality and eternal life are two very different things. Eternal, at least in the context of this story, means you have always existed and will never end. No beginning or end, just permanent existence, and that's kind of disturbing. You have no agency over being alive. If you're biologically immortal, you can still die if you really feel like it, but if you're eternal, you don't know where you came from or how to stop existing. Existing for 80 years is already a struggle. Being forced to exist for an infinite amount of time must not be fun.
This is why the idea of an afterlife has always been kind of horrifying to me personally. Like, even if you're in a really nice, beautiful castle of gold, something about being stuck there for eternity makes it scary. Surely you're going to get bored at some point, and then you can't leave or do anything else. You're stuck there forever and ever. I don't know, man. The void seems fine to me, but maybe it's just me. You can enjoy the golden castle for eternity if you want. I'm not stopping you.
In this day and age, people are trying to revive their relatives with AI tools. Fine-tune a large language model on their writing, AI clone their voice, and you can even make AI videos of them to bring them back to life. But although that stuff looks interesting, it's obviously not really the person. On the other hand, if when you die, they made an exact, detailed copy of your brain and transferred you to the metaverse or another body, that would be indistinguishable from being resurrected. And this is what happens to Murray. It's worth noting that technically, the real Murray is dead and in the void. This clone was just created 5 minutes ago. It only thinks that it's existed longer and had a whole life because all of the memories were copied.
Why does the voice only bring some people to the afterlife? If the goal is to do as much research as possible, it might as well get all the help it can get, right? I'm not sure if I understand the reasoning behind this. Maybe it actually does bring everyone to the afterlife but tells them it's only a select few to make them feel special. Maybe it brings only a select few in order to increase the randomness. It seemed really obsessed with increasing the randomness of things to produce more interesting results, but I still don't get it because more minds thinking will lead to strictly more information, since they're all isolated anyway. Maybe it only picks the right kind of intelligent being that can be manipulated into doing free labor for all of eternity.
By the end, Murray is actually excited to work on the problem. He could instead resist the voice by becoming Buddhist and meditating for all eternity. He could technically make that his challenge, and then he'd produce absolutely no value. I'm guessing the voice does not bring Buddhist monks to the afterlife, but I really don't know. If you know the answer to why the voice doesn't bring everyone to the afterlife, leave a comment. Anyway, thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time, assuming it actually recorded this time, because, you know, it could have failed again.