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When Machines Ask 'What Happens When We Die?'

EM
Eduardo Martos
CTO & Software Architect
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Término — Eduardo Martos Gómez — https://personal.filhin.es/termino

Term — Eduardo Martos Gómez — https://personal.filhin.es/termino
We are in a race to see if we are faster than machines, smarter than machines, more competitive than machines.

The other day, I suggested that perhaps we should slow down a bit, or at least take our foot off the accelerator, to look at the horizon and decide where we wanted to go. Because just as we do not compete with the calculator when doing sums, perhaps we do not need to compete with AI in other aspects either.

But this is very easy to say when it is already destroying jobs and increasingly encroaching on our territory, both in mechanical tasks and in those we thought were reserved for the Olympus of Humanity: the intellectual and creative ones. That is where it hurts us because, as I have said on other occasions, we identify more with our mental side than with the more physical tasks.

I have been wondering for a long time what differentiates us from a machine that can think, or that apparently can think. In reality, many others much smarter than I have been asking that question for a long time. I asked Grok to give me a non-exhaustive list of thinkers who have reflected on this issue:

👉 List shared on Grok

And suddenly, last night, I saw clearly what the turning point could be. I remembered the two unforgettable monologues from Midnight Mass that masterfully and elegantly dissect a very powerful idea: What happens when we die?

🕒 Summary for busy people

Estimated reading time for the full article: 11 minutes.

We will not understand artificial intelligence until we dare to think about death. Not in its death, which it does not yet have, but in ours. The difference between thinking and feeling is not in silicon, but in the awareness that one day we will cease to exist.

Machines can reason, but they do not fear. They can process millions of data about death, but they do not feel its weight. Animals, on the other hand, show grief, compassion, and attachment; they recognize absence and act from it. In that gesture resides something profoundly human: the capacity to suffer for what disappears.

The awareness of death and compassion are intertwined. Understanding finitude is the first step towards empathy. And as long as we remain the only ones who feel vertigo at our own disappearance, we will continue to be human.

The day a machine also feels it, will it be one of us?

Maranasati: the notion of death

Buddhism has given us a beautiful word: Maranasati, which in Pali (a liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism) can be translated as “mindfulness of death” or “awareness of death.”

It is a deliberate meditative practice that keeps mortality at the center of consciousness, with the purpose of cultivating a deep acceptance of impermanence, reducing attachment, and living with greater presence in the current moment. It is not a mere gloomy thought, but a transformative tool that reminds us that death is inevitable and that our actions are the only thing that truly accompanies us.

It is a deliberate meditative practice that keeps mortality at the center of consciousness, with the purpose of cultivating a deep acceptance of impermanence, reducing attachment, and living with greater presence. It is not a gloomy thought, but a transformative tool that reminds us that death is inevitable and that our actions are the only thing that truly accompanies us.

It is in my nature to die; there is no escape from death.
— Maranasati Sutta

While Buddhism invites us to coexist with death, our technological civilization seems obsessed with avoiding it. Deep down, the dream of transhumanism (and much of the drive behind strong AI) is to escape mortality, transfer consciousness, turn the body into software.

But denying death is also denying life, because both are two sides of the same cycle.

When animals understand death

For a long time, it was thought that awareness of one’s own death was exclusive to humans.

According to psychologists Jesse Bering and David Bjorklund, many animals possess what they call a minimal concept of death: an adaptive response that allows them to recognize the absence of vitality and act accordingly, although without necessarily understanding its irreversible nature.

Thus, some animals move away from corpses to avoid infections or, in the case of certain predators, inspect motionless prey to ensure they are not pretending. However, there are behaviors that seem to go beyond the purely instinctive.

Elephants, for example, do not have cemeteries as such, but they do show a deep interest in the bones and skulls of other elephants, especially if they belonged to their herd. They caress them with their trunks, sniff them, and remain silent for long minutes, as if they understand something of the bond that persists beyond life.

In some primates, mothers have been observed carrying their dead offspring for days or weeks, and in orcas and dolphins similar behavior has been documented. We do not know if this implies an abstract understanding of death or rather a difficulty in accepting loss, but it does suggest the existence of a persistent emotional bond, a form of mourning that transcends pure biological reaction.

These are not mechanical acts or merely functional. From our human perspective, they seem to be gestures laden with meaning, perhaps the most primitive expression of a consciousness that intuits absence. One could say that there is meaning behind them. There is transcendence.

🔗 How Animals Understand Death — Nautilus

This observation raises a fundamental question: Is approaching the understanding of the end of one’s own existence a sign of superior intelligence? Could we consider that those animals that give meaning to death are closer to us than those that do not?

And, by extension, could we assert that if a machine were capable of questioning its own end, of fearing its disappearance, it would be blurring the boundary that separates it from us?

Recognizing that you are going to die is recognizing that you are a being that extends over time, a creature capable of imagining a future in which you no longer exist.
— Shelly Kagan,Death, Yale Open Course, 2007

Compassion as a distinguishing sign

There is a widely circulated anecdote that anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked about the first sign of civilization. Her response, according to legend, was that the first sign was a healed human femur: evidence that someone had cared for another during their convalescence.

However, when asked directly in an interview, her actual response was different:

“We have called civilizations those societies that had great cities, an elaborate division of labor, and some type of record keeping.”
— Margaret Mead

Although the quote about the femur may be apocryphal, its success is not accidental: we like to think that compassion is what makes us human.

The fact that healed bones also exist in other species suggests something deeper: compassion is not a human heritage, but an evolutionary expression of shared consciousness.

And then, another unsettling question arises:

Could artificial intelligence come to experience compassion for other sentient beings?

And I go further. Shouldn’t we teach it to be compassionate before teaching it to store vast libraries in its unfathomable memory?

As philosopher Martha Nussbaum points out, compassion is not an impulsive emotion, but a form of reasoning about the suffering of others:

Compassion is a type of reasoning about the misfortune of another person. It contains beliefs about the severity of suffering, about its undeserved nature, and about the possibilities that the sufferer had to thrive.

Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions(Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 301)

The awareness of death and compassion are linked. Understanding the finitude of others is the first step towards empathy. Recognizing vulnerability, in ourselves and in others, makes us care instead of compete.

Self-compassion: the final frontier

A dolphin cannot match our ingenuity, just as we cannot compete with artificial intelligence in calculation or memory. However, these differences in capacity do not negate the coincidence between other species and ours regarding compassion and awareness of death.

The fear of ceasing to be is the purest form of self-compassion.

That intimate dialogue destined for silence, that ineffable sadness at ceasing to experience, is an unequivocal expression of humanity.

And perhaps because that emotion penetrates so deeply, we are capable of feeling another’s death almost as if it were our own. When you offer sincere condolences, you not only mourn the loss of the other; you also see yourself in a future mirror and recognize your own disappearance.
And you understand it, not because you possess millions of data about death, but because you feel it.

To this day, an LLM, a language model, is nothing more than a very sophisticated statistical machine. Its applications are real and tangible, and with all its flaws, it can solve tasks that we previously did not even consider. But an LLM has no compassion, much less self-compassion.

The day an artificial intelligence demonstrates those behaviors spontaneously, the boundary of our essence, of our humanity, will have been crossed.

Perhaps the day a machine looks at its own code and feels vertigo, we will know it has crossed the boundary.

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