Afterlife

Tags: English, essays
Created on Tue, 01 Dec 2020

There is nothing more final than death; I had both my grandmas die within a year about a decade ago and it's really this terrible empty feeling and all the good memories just come every once in a while and wash you away unexpectedly - time is the only healer. People left behind who have spent a long time feel the miss the most and again, time is the only medicine, no substitute can be enough to fill the void but friends and family help.

I'm quite scientific minded and of course - I wonder a lot. Although science doesn't stop belief (it actually requires it in a certain way) my mind reasons about the experience about death in a way that tries to be consistent with what I know. And that means that since we have no idea what the internal experience of dying and death might be - all bets are off. Therefore if you tell me you feel like going to heaven - okay. If you tell me you feel like there is nothing - okay. It's unknowable at this stage so any hypothesis is probably equally valid.

I find the following reasoning for me to make it not explode into infinities. Sense of time is experienced by the brain. People in sleep and especially in general anesthesia or coma or even psychodelics report having a very different experience of time passing. It stands to reason that time after death is probably not experienced (assuming what we know about the brain and no extra-dimensions or magic soul whatever).

However - if we continue this train of thought we can extrapolate that since (some of) the atoms that make you "You" are going to be recycled in the great circle of life, there might be a time that these same atoms start may make another being that is also conscious which would allow it to experience time. There is a limit to this probability and it may hit the end of Earth, Sun, and even eventually heath death of the Universe. Since you (by definition) are not experiencing time in the mean time without consciousness that would feel like a second to "You".

After the heath death of the Universe mainstream physics is quite speculative. However there is a chance [1] for quantum fluctuations to allow for another Big Bang that may arrange certain atoms to make you experience time again...

So: in that sense - I can say I believe in such "Afterlife" with all of the caveats that you would probably never know or remember any of your past lives and would not experience a gap in existence.

BUT that presupposes that consciousness is nothing more than atoms/particles, that same particles in same configuration would create consciousness etc... which - we also don't know unfortunately :( and that is the weakest part of my argument and it freaks me out...

Don't get me wrong - I understand the romanticism of The Mysterious, I like the intellectual stimulation of The Puzzle, and I enjoy having sex with some clothes on - some mystery turns me on, something for my imagination to also work with is more fun than complete nakedness for example

1 - "Time for quantum effects to generate a new Big Bang, resulting in a new universe."