With our understanding of quantum superposition, most
quantum theorists accept the implication of infinite parallel space-time realities,
what is known as the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, the
idea that, from our point of view in time and space, reality splits off at
every quantum instant into space-time structures of infinite variation.
Imagine a scenario in which lightning strikes a tree.
Both the lightning and the tree are infinitesimal space-time manifestations of the infinite
superpositioned realm to
which they belong. Elsewhere along the continuity of their existence,
the event varies across the board, in every possible fashion. The lightning struck a
safe distance away. The tree grew in a spot a safe distance from where the
lightning struck at that particular instant. Ad infinitum.
Remember that Platonia, the realm of the
superpositioned, exists in a
continuum, just as space-time, entangled worlds are 'digital' in
nature, or quantized, broken into pieces at the Planck level where these
constituents of space-time reality 'resonate' and join forces
with one another. In space-time, trees hit by lightning live or die in
absolute terms. In the broader multiverse, the tree is being born as often as
it dies. Within that continuum, were we able to view its spectrum,
the trees and the storm would shift and morph and eventually become
unrecognizable as we ventured away from that initial event.
What then happens if we place a woman
walking a child beneath our tree the moment lightning strikes? The woman
and child exist in the same manner as the tree and the lightning.
Consciousness only 'sees' space-time structure, so we can extrapolate
multitudinous versions of the woman and child experiencing every variation
their tree and lightning has to offer.
The question that first enters our mind is the nature
of the individuality of the woman and child. Is consciousness contained
like a seed in a pod within the brains of each of these discrete
space-time individuals, or does quantum interference join the many
conscious experiences of the woman and child into multidimensional
entities?
The thing called 'quantum immortality' is the single
most stunning implication of quantum theory. If the woman and child are
killed in our reality, many claim that the woman and child who were not
killed in a nearby parallel reality were not the same two individuals.
However, the observation that we experience change
within acausal quantum interactions lends credence to the idea that
consciousness transcends quantum events as space-time events to the
degree that we experience what we define as 'time'. If consciousness could
not span otherwise acausal quantum interactions, we would have no
awareness of change. There would be no time. We would not exist.
If time is born of consciousness embracing multiple
quantum events, only a select few would contribute to, or associate with,
the world we experience. The key to creating worlds is to focus on what
fits and ignore the rest. Veritable infinity is ignored. Our current human
experience is highly improbable. Most possible changes in the
immanent Now would herald the instantaneous termination of our current
history.
From the standpoint of an observer, mistakes in
conscious choices may terminate a space-time history now and then, but the
observer itself is not space-time in nature, and it does not lose its
history at the time of a 'fatal' event. History is an acausal
structure, part and parcel of the observer. Only from perspective of
another observer is biological death seen.
Worlds disentangle, but lives that incorporate
space and time as means of processing information do not end. There are
always viable possibilities for the continuation and growth of any
personal history. We branch into veins of such possibility on a continual
basis. We die from the standpoint of others as well, but since when are
any of us capable of directly experiencing 'death'? It is likely, however,
that we have distant connections with those who do experience entangled
worlds of which we have never been, are not, and will never be, a part.
Like the wave function of an electron, we each occupy all of Platonia, and
we each have our infinitesimal focus assimilating experience, what we
think to be our 'past', our personal history.
If the woman and the child are struck by lightning,
their corpses would remain from the perspective of a conscious observer
in that space-time event. From other perspectives, including their
own, they survive. Anecdotal reports of near death experiences hint at a
disjointed experience at the instant of greatest danger, a break in the
smooth continuity of our lives. These are generally attributed to shock,
although some occur in relative tranquility. A woman drifts to sleep at
night while driving a dark highway. She awakens an instant before slamming
into a concrete bridge abutment. In the next instant, she is driving
further down the highway with no conscious awareness of how such a
transition could be possible. Likewise, survivors guilt may be more than
just feeling unworthy of surviving an accident that claimed other lives.
In many cases, it feels more like an queasy awareness that death did
take place and that one's survival was somehow 'unearned'.
Language gets in our way in these descriptions of a
multidimensional life limited to space-time experience. We are
forced to use words that contradict one another if not redefined by new
understandings. Still, the only alternative to our argument is the common-sense notion that
space-time rules with an iron fist and consciousness can somehow move calcium ions,
thereby directing the functioning of the human brain and body.
Our conscious histories are a walk in time and space,
but they do not exist as such at their source. Every acausal Planck
instant is discrete primal entity unto itself as well as a crossroad intersection
joining infinite numbers of possible space-time worlds of
experience. Our personal histories are embedded in the histories of
infinite others, and it is not ultimately possible to draw a line around
individuals as a boundary aside from our immaterial conscious histories
that no one else can ever share. Nobody occupies our point of view. Lives
may run parallel with one another, but as soon as we part company with
that other, their memories of our association may differ in odd ways in
future encounters, not because our memories are necessarily defective,
although they can be notoriously inaccurate, but because we are not
'exactly' the same people who met that first time around.
The immanent Now is the overall perspective of Platonia
itself, a spacial and temporal singularity. It is said that the physical
universe was born of a quantum singularity, but at what point did it ever
cease to become a singularity? We see expansion and time and space and
matter and energy at work within the context of the universe,
knowing we can never stand outside for an objective view. We speak of
energy interactions in the physical universe, but conscious interactions 'consume'
no resources. Only within the conscious sensorium do we live in that model
of 'physical' reality that humanity insists reflects the 'real' world.
Any appearance that reality takes speaks of attributes
of consciousness, and we know nothing of consciousness beyond personal
experience. We have no way of knowing, for example, how many qualia others
may experience, whether 'red' to us is the same 'red' others experience.
Those born deaf or color blind are oblivious to qualia we experience, but
birds have more of different kinds of rods and cones in their
retina than ourselves, hinting that they may experience qualia of colors
of which
we are completely oblivious.
Should we ever become absolute masters
of 'physical' reality, our ultimate quest in exploring the universe may
not be a quest for alien worlds, but a search for, and an effort to
entangle with, conscious realities that differ from our own. Imagine a
future technology that would allow us to experience other conscious
perspectives from their point of view. What would it be like to
share a night with a timber wolf, or a blue whale, or perhaps a highly
intelligent being afloat in the high atmosphere of a gas giant like
Jupiter?
Now we can see the fate of the woman and the child
walking beneath the lightning-struck tree with more clarity. As they transverse quantum realities, they
move from one possible world to another each Planck instant to give rise to the
illusion of their passage in time and space. They are entangled with one
another, sharing the same world of their sensorium. From our perspective, they
can be struck by lightning and killed, because they are part of our
space-time sensorium in that regard. From their own perspective, they can
be separated by the death of the other, but they can never as individuals 'step into a world' in which they do not exist.
No such possibility exists. The worlds
available for their next 'step' are infinite in number, a continuum, like
walking through the colors of a rainbow.
We speak continuously of perspective, but consciousness
in itself is the perspective, and it has its horizons based upon its
limited ability to process information. Those horizons are in motion,
approaching inexorably, revealing behind them even more distant horizons,
but they are not barriers to experience. We may have wasted our lives taking for
granted that nothing exists beyond the nearest horizon to our lives. Had we
known, and we had the capacity to know, we could have invested those
wasted years into the creation of even more marvelous vistas awaiting our
arrival to the far side of what we thought would be oblivion.
Consciousness is a focus. Focus is like wearing blinders. Blinders are
useful in facilitating focus. Neither focus nor the blinders
it imposes upon us, or we impose upon ourselves, determines where our
selves begin or end. Driving down a space-time highway, we don't fear we
will cease to exist around a bend we cannot see, because we know by
experience that roads do not end that abruptly and without warning. Likewise,
consciousness does not cease where our lives end because we see that the
world of our experience is in essence a projection of consciousness. Like a headlight of a car that cannot pierce the darkness, we have learned
not to fear the darkness.
Death is a third-person phenomena. It is the parting of
ways between space-time worlds, histories, that were 'entangled', but now
break and go their own way. From the point of view of a witness, our
bodies cease to function when we die. They are icons belonging to the
witness that no longer serve as a bridge between the world we previously
shared. When our entanglement with our bodies end from the point of view
of others, they cease to function as an interface between us.
From our own point of few, when we die, our space-time bodies
persist as part of our 'environmental' history, the quantum accumulation
of all we are. If our bodies harbor lethal disease, defect, or injury,
these cannot survive once they reach the point of
'one-plus-one-equals-three', but only the impossible 'errors' of our lives
drop away. The overall timeless system of reality is always coherent and
never affected. At death, therefore, we do not leave one world and enter
another. Our world adjusts to the necessary changes. We adjust without awareness of
the process, because memory of errors end with the errors themselves, and our lives continue.
Entanglements change, and if we say that these are 'new' worlds,
remember that every moment of our lives is a 'new' moment, literally a
'new' universe. Nobody ever experiences the same configuration twice.
Why do bodies die to begin with, aside from murder or
accident?
Our biology is a blind evolutionary process and is not
an error-free process. The next 'moment' contains infinite possibility.
Probability limits our range of exploration, but errors that will
culminate in failure accumulate as we age. This is not a 'bad' thing
because our biology is also 'programmed' to die. Biological death is also
a reproductive advantage for the species.
We tend to become set in our ways as we age. If the
environment changes, we cannot easily change with it. Change, however, is
provided at random by genetic variety in the young, some of which are more
suitable to a changing environment in which they are born. These fittest
survive and pass along their useful mutations. The aging miss countless
opportunities for useful experience as they become less effective thinkers
and doers. The young do not miss those opportunities so easily. They
flourish as we once flourished, but we all replicate, age, and die in
terms of our biology. In terms of time, the cycle of life has survived
frozen Earths and superheated Earths, verdant Earths and desert Earths.
Errors are a byproduct to the process of evolution, but
remember that our worlds process information quantum mechanically, and to
say that random mutation could not possibly result in life as we know it
over the lifespan of the known universe means nothing to Platonia. Errors in our biology and even our mind accumulate
until they break the entanglement with our world, but in that very
instant, the errors cancel, leaving behind a new, error-free
world, although this 'new' world may also contain the seeds of its own
destruction. We 'see' the same process at work in our mathematics,
although we are blind to its tedious aspect of 'error correction'. Fifty
plus fifty equals one hundred, but what happened to fifty plus fifty
equals one hundred and one and every other potential wrong answer inherent
in the simple calculation? We cannot count the potential errors give
eternity to do so. This is how our coherent reality is constructed from
the superpositioned background of Platonic's infinity and eternity we
confusingly believe lurks within a quantum singularity of no space and no
time. We are blind to the true process at work, but it 'feels' to us like
time and space. Time and space are inherent in our mysterious,
inexplicable conscious experience. We can forever discuss and 'process'
the content of our experience, but never its source.
When we die, we find ourselves in the same world as
before, from our point of view, or as close to it as probability allows. It is essentially the same world
as before, simply free of the fatal errors
that brought it to us.
Given that we do not bring with us memory of the
self-destruction we wrought, we seem to start afresh, but each
self-destructive process will endlessly repeat itself until we consciously
recognize what is happening and resolve it. Those past mistakes are part
of our 'past', buried in what we consider to be our interactive sensorium,
our 'objective physical reality'. If, thirty million years ago, we were a
creature who zigged instead of zagged and died, the fossil record of its
death lies beneath our feet. This is not however, a truly 'physical'
record. We still carry the conscious experience deep within us. We are not
today totally oblivious to the errors we made as far more primitive
beings. That experience contributed to our current status as human. Our
experience as human will, in turn, contribute to whatever manner of being
we will have become, in terms of time and space, one million years from
now.
The world in which we find ourselves at death is
no further away than necessity dictates. In the case of 'premature' death, as with an
accident, our 'afterlife' will be identical to the one left behind aside
from the accident. In the world of the accident, a funeral takes place. In
the world in which we continue, the accident never happened. Still, if we decide
to get up late one morning, we may no longer share worlds with family and
friends who chose circumstances that would have clashed with our decision.
Our every quantum moment is shared by multidimensional aspects of
family, friends, and associates who unknowingly accommodate our decisions. Our
space-time experience is
that fluid in a multidimensional
reality.
Minds as well as space-time events are entangled.
Because mind is the source of space and time, making this statement is the
same as saying that reality is a conscious field of experience generated
from infinite conscious, interactive perspectives. At some level, the partings of worlds,
when they happen, are mutually
agreed upon events 'behind the scenes', although perhaps not events we
necessarily want to happen. If we
deem such events as unavoidable, we accept them. Otherwise, we alter the
interface to which we belong. We shift to a interface in which
participants reject that group event, and life goes on as usual.
We are largely oblivious to the errors we make, but
sudden conscious insight does occurs on a daily basis, and many of our
potentially fatal errors are corrected on-the-fly. We learn as we grow and we become more
efficacious human beings. Many errors we once considered impossible
to address because of our erroneous assumptions of the nature of life and death,
as with the nature of disease, we can now address and resolve with ease. We still have other, far greater arenas of
misunderstandings to address as time passes in our experience.
Again, in a manner of speaking, when we see others die,
that choice is ours. From their point of view, perhaps their deaths
never happen. If they do happen, they are not aware of the experience. We acquiesce to many such
deaths because our lives and our common worlds are a cooperative affair,
but we and friends, family and associates are not necessarily moving in
the same direction, certainly not in the long run. We are those proverbial
ships passing in the night. We can move apart in terms of time and space
and lose track of one another, but if we 'move apart' within view of one
another, broken worlds necessitates a death. However, we may not always be
aware of the circumstances of a fatality on a fully conscious level. We
may have connections with people we have never 'physically' met. Dramas
may be taking place beneath the conscious sphere of daily life we are
insufficiently sensitive to recognize. There is more to our lives than we
currently recognize which is why so much of the world seems to be 'other',
without visible ties to us.
We are oblivious to the choices others make when they
choose to experience circumstances that exclude us from their world. Vital
factors are at world. We don't see everything from our highly focused
perspective. They
are likewise oblivious when we choose to experience circumstances that exclude
them from our
world. If we die from their point of view, our corpses are
theirs to bury, but we continue life elsewhere not missing a beat. We may be aware
of injury or ill health, but never of death itself. Conversely, the
deaths of others become corpses that are part of our space-time sensory
environment and they continue their lives without missing a beat
'elsewhere', in worlds, or at least in histories, we do not experience.
Our larger selves manifest multiple histories. We can
greet loved ones in one world who we buried yesterday in another. Our
respective personal 'histories' would not contain the experience of the
other. Our linear
space-time history will be forever just that, a trail of time and space
within a superpositioned reality we cannot see with our space-time eyes,
but it's nice to know that there are worlds in which we flourish when we are
dying and despondent. As environmentalists, it's nice to know there are
infinite pristine Earths unmarred by the human species. It may be a bit
difficult to fully accept that any coherent reality we can imagine runs
unseen right alongside of us, but such is the nature of reality as we
currently understand it. The size of the reality we each recognize as
valid will grow in depth and
complexity as time passes, but it will never regress to the mistakenly
comforting myth of simpler times and places.
Death is the product of error, much of it beyond our
current control, but when it happens, we
fall back upon proven realities from which we launch ourselves into new
potential to explore and manifest. Errors are the necessary consequence of blind
explorations into new realms of experience to be mastered. They are
resources and not failings. We fall back time and time again from worlds
new to us, in terms of time, until we gain footholds of understanding in those new
realities. When we have mastered those, we move into other realms to
be experienced and mastered.
Another analogy of the life-death process would be that
of the amoeba extending feelers into its environment, encountering
constant dead-ends, but flowing bodily into areas of nourishment and optimal environmental
conditions when it encounters such. Like the amoeba, we cannot see into
the true unknown, because it is infinite in scope. A part of us has to reach out
blindly and explore to
find fresh avenues of experience that resonate with our values. Life is the
culmination of constructive rather than destructive choices.
Biologically, amoeba replicate by cellular division.
Ultimately, so do human beings, which is common knowledge biological, but the details
are different and far more significant when 'objective physical reality'
is redefined as the human sensorium in our entangled conscious realities.
How then do we replicate? How do we follow two choices at once and then
proceed to experience each from a point of view that will never again
encounter the other?
Entanglement is a relative affair in our lives, not an
all or nothing process. We are
far closer to some places, people and things than we are with others. The
most intense entanglement in human conscious experience takes place within
sexual intercourse and conception. Three rather than two
parties are involved. Two generate a new biological interface with their shared
world. The consciousness that emerges from that union will be new to their
world, but not new to conscious experience per se, and not at all new to
the the world in which it
finds itself. New lives enter any given world as immortals. We all
occupied our immanent Now. We have always done so. It is acausal. It had no beginning and has no
end, even as we define it in terms of time and space. Change occurs in
every immanent Now, including those of birth and death. Life feeds upon
itself, but far more is involved than predators and prey. Predators and
prey cycle, but they are aspects of one another. We live, die, feed, are
fed upon, are born and give birth, all to mutual advantage. Our unique
perspectives may be in conflict at any give 'time', but ultimately those
perspectives expand outward and are destined to meet at 'omega', the place
where perspectives are born as 'alpha'.
Such ideas may seem undisciplined, junk science,
desperately and despairingly New Age, but they
fit quantum theory far too well to be discounted. From what we can currently see of the implications of quantum theory,
we can say with some confidence that no rabbit is ever caught by the
pursuing predator, and no pursuing predator ever dies of hunger for lack
of a rabbit, not from those individual respective conscious points
of view.
The one choice we may not have is the choice of whether
we wish to participate in this eternal evolutionary drama of which we are
part. We can be oblivious to it, if our reality is exclusively sensory.
Even when we suspect the existence of a larger reality and react
fearfully, we can hide from horizons and boundaries beyond which we have
no desire to explore. Death itself, in any case, is never an option.
Choices are unseen doorways we enter. Those doorways
close as we step through our chosen selection, locking within our very
souls the consequence of our behavior, moving us deeper into worlds of
light, or of darkness. We'd do better to be aware of the overall dynamics
of choices rather than live by the short-term pleasure/pain principle.
Animals are mindlessly herded by pleasure and pain, but those instincts
have limitations.
What is there to fear? Walking through fire hurts, but
like a mathematical equation resolved in a quantum computer, all factors
that fail to promote solutions cancel themselves in the
world we experience. It's probably safe to say that all human
worlds are inherently unsustainable, places ultimately of fire, but
solutions survive and accumulate, inexorably becoming a part of our very
being and giving birth to worlds that are increasingly viable. This
anti-entropy is a central hallmark of life.
There is no ‘good’ except for growth. There is no 'evil'
except as fodder for growth. There are solutions, and there are mistakes,
but we make mistakes out of ignorance and thereby render ignorance our
most valuable resource, not a thing to be denigrated after all.
We grow and we learn by the errors of our lives. In
Platonia, regardless of how dark the worlds we encounter along the way,
there is no alternative.
