Novelist Will Self debates physicist David Eagleman on the nature of the afterlife, courtesy of New Scientist:
Will Self, the novelist, doesn’t buy Eagleman’s bright-eyed, confident manner. He wanted to find out where fear lay in the scientist’s jumping between imagined afterlives.
Concerned, he said, that the conversation might get boring, he began to cross-examine Eagleman. “Was your epiphany emotional or intellectual?” he asked.
Earlier, Self had described his own epiphany. The experience of nursing his sick mother until her early death had profoundly altered the way he thought about death, and he suggested that all writers were inspired by such epiphanies.
Eagleman answered that his epiphany had been intellectual: after spending several years as a proselytising atheist, he found it was more interesting to think about God in new and different ways than it was not to think about him at all.
Self pursued his comic role as prosecuting counsel. “How old are you?” he asked. Thirty-eight, Eagleman said. Young, Self noted, but Eagleman is precocious - was he in the throes of a precociously early mid-life crisis? One that involved his spending his nights in hotel rooms gripping his mattress in dread of death?