When Death Disappears from Thanatology | Hideyuki Tokuda (Dean of the Faculty of Environment and Information Studies)

2009.06.10

The new semester has started safely, and new students from various backgrounds are on campus. Together with Mr. Uehara and Mr. Nakazawa, I am in charge of "Creation of Environmental and Information Studies" for the new first-year students. I have taught classes at undergraduate and graduate levels in Canada and the United States, but teaching a class with this many students is a significant challenge. As this is a course taught by the dean, I have been grappling with it since last year, but there are still many things that need to be improved.

In "Creation of Environmental and Information Studies," we have introduced an attendance system developed in our laboratory, which students use by connecting to a local Wi-Fi access point called "kankyo" from their browsers during class. However, it seems that the new first-year students do not fully understand this Wi-Fi access point, and some are unable to use the system because they connect to the campus-wide SFC network ("000000SFC") instead. Furthermore, some students even set up a new ad-hoc network named "kankyo" from their own machines, unintentionally leading nearby students to a spoofed "kankyo" access point. With over 400 students, there is truly a wide variety of situations. Even at this scale, we are making various efforts to conduct substantial, interactive classes with the guest lecturers, but I believe further improvements are necessary.

Now, about the topic. I understand it must be difficult to come up with various topics each time, but this time the topic is "thanatology." To be honest, it is something I have not really thought about head-on.

According to Wikipedia, "Thanatology is the study of an individual's death and their views on life and death. Specifically, it is the study of how to live until death by confronting death as the annihilation of the self." It further states, "The subject of thanatology is human annihilation, death. According to Ariès, one of the pioneers of thanatology, 'Man is the only animal that buries its dead.'"

I am neither a futurist nor a singularitarian, but as I introduced in a previous Okashira Diary entry ( 2008/11/14 "150 Years Ago or Later?" ), Ray Kurzweil claims that the "GNR Revolution (the convergence of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics)" will overcome all cancers and other diseases, allowing humans to attain eternal life. Furthermore, as a singularitarian, he asserts, without any sense of incongruity, that the reverse engineering of the brain will advance exponentially, and we will enter an era where the biological intelligence of humans merges with the non-biological intelligence we have created. According to the thinking of singularitarians like him, "death," the very subject that thanatology is meant to confront, will disappear. Thanatology might then become "the study of life," questioning how to live for eternity rather than how to live until death.

For someone like me, who belongs to the 20th-century "being natural" school of thought, "human life is short and transient," and by no means eternal, so I believe we should not waste our time "alive."

(Date of publication: 2009/06/10)