Death is a necessary feature of
biological organisms, in terms of time and space. In classical terms, the
organism is expendable for good reason. It may fall prey to predators, a
changing environment, disease, fatal accidental, or deliberate injury.
Newborn organisms are the product of genetic drift and are not exact copies of their parents, allowing, as an example, an
animal with heavier fur and more body fat to survive and pass on genes in a
cooling space-time environment. Within the same litter may be born a sibling with
thinner fur and less body fat more suited to a warmer environment. It's
survival rate will be lower in that cooler environment.
Survivors pass on
their genes. Death, therefore, is a feature of biological evolution.
Biologically speaking, parents serve their purpose by
having reproduced. Species in which adults promptly die after having
reproduced are more likely to thrive. The old harm the species when they
compete with the young for food, shelter, and reproductive rights. Humans as
long-lived primates are exceptions, but only because grandparents are
significant survival factors in the lives of their children and
grandchildren, and it is these advantaged grandchildren who then pass on
their genes of longevity.
That which survives, survives.
As humans, though, we are interested in the fate of
conscious individuals. We are concerned with our self-aware existence.
We'll wear prosthetics to avoid approaching death. We already wear glasses,
plastic teeth, hearing aids, and titanium knee joints. We'll do mechanical
hearts, lungs, bones and muscles, as soon as they come on-line. We'll
augment our brains with electronics. We'll live eons, if we can get by with
it. What else are we if not our conscious selves?
In light of classical thinking, biological death implies
the cessation of the consciousness of the individual and the destruction of
the biological memory of the life of that individual. In the moment after death, it's
as if we've never even existed. We endured an eternity of nonexistence
before our births and now we're in for another eternity of oblivion
following our deaths. A 'moment' following our deaths, eternity has passed
and even our children and the world they lived in has evaporated in the heat
of a dying sun.
Objective physical reality has no regard for the
individual. In turn, the individual who declares himself or herself merely a
physical biological entity can have no deep allegiance to a 'dead' reality in
which conscious lives come and go like grass falling to the scythe each
fall. Conscious reality is terminally conditional, it would seem, and beyond
the conditions, there is no further reality to be had.
When we speak of life and death in such terms, our proper
cultural attitude is to concur with the implications of classical physics.
We define personal existence as conscious continuity from a third-person
perspective, because we cannot experience our own deaths, and clearly
conscious continuity gets broken a lot from a third-person perspective by
sleep, comas, anesthesia, and death.
We see this happening to others. We do not experience our
own unconsciousness except in terms of implication, as with awakening in a
hospital bed, emaciated after a decade of comatose sleep. Conscious
experience is otherwise continuous, although only an allusion. In terms of
an 'objective physical reality', we'd be the same body, not the same
'person'. Under these circumstances, 'persons' are defined in purely
physical terms. A consciousness brought to life after a decade is as fresh
and new as the infant being born in the nearby maternity ward.
From a 'quantum' standpoint, this is not the case.
Consciousness is a continuum by virtue of its acausal existence. A
third-party space-time experience that includes our biological icon is
relevant to that party, not to us. We may have dreamed during that ten year coma, but
if we lose memory of the dream, the experience is still continuous, because
biological memory is limited to providing continuity only for the space-time
body. When we say that
we take our environment with us from one conscious experience to another, it
is a culmination of every change of our immanent Now experienced in terms of
space-time. We carry with us connections to 'past' experience itself, each
and every change experienced in the immanent Now, which is not memory, but
selfhood.
If we have died in one world, we may seem to be saying
that we may awaken in another
'parallel' reality in which our death does not occur, and this cannot
happen, because a 'parallel' self already inhabits that world, but selves generate
space-time; they are not contained within.
Movement through quantum possibilities is that which provides us with our
sense of time and space. 'Parallel' realities are conscious identities. Our
superpositioned, undifferentiated sea of infinite possibility is their
resource.
Believing in and accepting one's own inevitable death is
not a terrifying prospect for many. We can't imagine nothingness, so we
don't really believe it, and most of us are secretly intimidated, even
terrified by the notion of personal immortality regardless. Or, we imagine
heaven, but then we make a mockery of its infinite potential by never
changing. What do we do with our millions upon billions of eons at our
disposal? Nobody bothers to ask. Nobody cares. Nobody wants to do anything
in particular. We just don't want to cease to be.
And we don't want to be challenged beyond our ability to
understand the world. We don't want to change to the extent we fail to
recognize ourselves for what we are. We only see one shared space-time world
and its biosphere. It's hard to imagine that others must exist. Therefore, we assume they do
not, or actively find rational ways to keep them at a safe distance. As
mentioned, most interpretations of quantum theory find ways to peacefully
coexist with Isaac Newton when we know it cannot be so.
In that fashion, by a process of denial, we escape the
incredible and all it implies and retain the sanctuary and established
security of 'what we see is what we get' here and now. The multiverse is
nothing more than a rag-tag collection of Newtonian universes within which
consciousness is, again, an epiphenomenon of a brain forever trapped in
space-time.
Consciousness remains a subject untouched and untouchable
because of the catastrophic effect it has upon our notion of objectivity,
and nobody wants their comfort zone ruffled by an earthquake of that
magnitude. We resist the more obvious implications of quantum theory until
we become metaphysical jugglers tossing more and more Newtonian and
Aristotelian beliefs and theories
into the air rather than risk trying to fully integrate them, at which point
the fallacies would fall away and leave us naked to a reality our animal
brain is not equipped to handle. We forget the full extent
of that which we've rendered airborne and the whole disorganized structure
threatens to collapse upon our head. Or, it has already done so and we
assiduously ignore the mess it has made.
Regardless of all that, no system can know itself. What
the mind sees of itself is contained within the system. It has no way to
step outside of itself to achieve any objective view of its nature aside
from the illusion of 'otherness' offered by emotional dissociation. We can,
in other words, pretend to be objective, if we wish, but internal
objectivity is hardly true objectivity. Should we allow too much in the way
of self-deception to satisfy our need for objectivity, we're are the
equivalent of a dog disowning its own tail.
We, our consciousness, our bodies, our society, our
civilization, our world, live inside human mirrors, and consciousness is the
primary unknown that science can never isolate and study objectively,
because the laboratory of science is wholly contained within the
subjectivity of human minds and their limitations. A laboratory housing a thousand scientists
monitoring satellites throughout the heavens remains a thousand interactive
conscious sensory experiences laden with subjective emotional baggage that
renders each incontrovertibly unique and fully interactive, but never truly
objective. The sensory icons of even the stars remain human, because we
never see more of anything than we are capable of understanding.
Awareness of biological death beneath the spotlight
of Isaac Newton's legacy has left us with an animal's view of reality. Dead
is dead. Walk away from it. We have far more potential than that, however.
Without tapping that potential, we starve ourselves emotionally. We need an
'out' if an 'out' exists, or we will kill one another en masse trying to
safeguard the limited psychological resources of our space-time prisons.
We do have a way out. There's breathing room beyond if we
would but make an effort to understand its nature. Some still believe the
Earth is flat and angels pull stars across the sky. Most of us have
updated that world-view. The world is matter and energy, objective and real,
and we are veritable ghosts in the machine. But it's not our latest update.
Stop at that point and we haven’t as yet escaped
the dilemma of the first self-aware human beings. We are conscious. We are
conscious of the world. What are we? What is it? Why are we here?
Where did we come from? Where are we going?
Have we ever really answered any of these questions, or
are we still hung up in the impossible paradox of mind and body that makes
an answer impossible? Quantum theory resolves the dilemma, hardly more than
an understanding of quantum superpositioning, entanglement, and interference.
We are not saying at this point exactly how quantum theory applies to
conscious reality as opposed to 'objective physical reality', but it should
be clear by now that quantum theory is real and the notion of 'objective
physical reality' questionable. It'll take an effort to adjust to our new
paradigm, but we can at least begin the process. It's overdo and of critical importance to humanity in the
twenty-first century. It undoes absolutely nothing of what science has
accomplished in terms of information gained, but it implies an entirely new
perspective within which to implement science and technology.
We, as a culture, have not as yet seriously considered
the implications of any of this upon the nature of our lives. The closest we
have come to contemplating eternal, varied existence is the concept of
reincarnation. In terms of time and space, we live, learn, die, and repeat
the process. Reincarnation is a compassionate fantasy as far as it goes.
After all, why burn Adolph Hitler in hell? Better to feed his soul through
the lives he affected for better or for worse. Without harming the man,
Adolph would learn a lot reaping the feedback of his behavior of all his
interacting lives. So would we all.
Quantum reality, though, goes far beyond our human focus
in our human worlds. It's not at all anthropocentric, although being human, the central question is entirely anthropocentric. What about us? What does
this mean for our personal conscious reality, especially if such conscious
realities, human and otherwise, permeate reality to its very core?
So far, we've addressed the issue of death, but there's a
flip-side to death. Where do babies come from? We're not speaking of
biology, but of an apparently new consciousness entering our shared world.
If consciousness has no beginning or end, what of the source of a newborn in terms of time and space?
During the course of our lives, quantum theory implies
that we sidestep death and continue our history in terms of a constant
biology, but when our bodies no longer function, sidestepping death no
longer provides us with the opportunity to continue our biological history
as we have known it. We each have a birth and a death as the horizons to our
biological lives for this reason. We can't see beyond either in terms of space and
time, but given an understanding of the synchronous structure to our lives,
we can make good use of the analogy of reincarnation.
We've implied that we transcend our known world during
sleep and so-called altered states of consciousness where we associate with
resonate events beyond our known selves, and then access by virtue of that
association events 'alien' to our history that we find useful. If we can fit these new features
into our lives, we do so. Even in conventional terms, we sometimes sense
that some unremembered dream has imbued our waking reality with unfamiliar
feelings and perspectives.
As biological death approaches, we transcend our known reality in search for ties for our next moments of experience. There may be deep and well
established patterns within conscious selves that oversee the process. We
maintain our current biology in terms we are familiar with, but what needs
to change if our current biology is no longer viable? If space and time are
ways in which we process information and have no objective reality, our
ability to continue our biological integrity 'elsewhere' falls upon our
understanding of quantum entanglement to maintain the integrity of a system
that may seem to disconnected in terms of time and space.
Keep in mind that we only have a definition of ourselves
in terms of the space-time reality we manifest, which includes the part of
our world we share with others and our biological bodies. If our moment to
moment expression of that reality is drawn from superpositioned possibility
and we are not imprisoned in space-time as we seem to be from standpoint of
our biology-derived sensorium, we have no life-or-death loyalty to our
current space-time circumstance. It will never dictate our reality or erect
insurmountable barriers or limitations in our path.
Our biology is in itself a quantum structure shared by
all who share it. Even in conventional terms, we see the sustainability of
biology at work in almost independent fashion. We see it at work in terms of
time and space, but we know by now that not all connections are visible in
those same terms. The concept of quantum immortality, the fact that reality
is acausal at heart, and the emergence of consciousness from biological
newborns implied a connection. The processes belong to the same system.
In practical terms, we reach
where we must to maintain our biology in space-time. It's a bit unsettling,
perhaps, to imagine such possibilities endless, and the true size of the
human race in terms of numbers a veritable infinity upon countless Earths
and worlds like it. Perhaps the biology of the species to which we belong is
a minor consideration. In terms of 'parallel' worlds, the further we dwell
from the world we know, the more space-time variation we would see. We can
imagine human worlds in which human biology is stretching the limits of our
own definition of what it means to be human. Animals are born seeming to
'hit the ground running', as if they are familiar with the environment at
birth. The far more complex reality of human may require a far greater
investment in 'infrastructure', because the possibilities of being human far
exceed those of beings whose worlds are smaller in scope.
Those special liaisons of which we spoke are our future parents just as we may
have been parents and a conduit through which a 'new' life emerged into our
world. Likewise, the world of our future parents will become ours, in terms
of space and time. Once a new biological
foundation to our lives is established, once we are born, we begin the
process of reacquiring our independence and moving as close as we
are able to our new space-time ideal. Our new world contains is as much what
we are as was the old, although superficial details will vary, just as in
fiction when a story is told in terms of unimportant events and
circumstances. It differs primarily in that it is free of the accumulation
of errors that proved unsustainable in our old world, just as a tire will go
flat driving down a highway in our current experience should it be pierced
with a nail. Error is part of the information processing system of life. We
can't have 'one plus one equals two' without first disposing of 'one plus
one equals three'.
We are the history of our perspective of conscious
experience. It's not something we carry along with us. It is what we are.
Given the infinity of worlds to which we have access, we can access those
that resonate with our values with absolute precision. Resonance is a form of belonging, sharing, a
form of identity. We are always where we need to be and where others with
whom we cooperate need us to be.
There's no way to directly confirm that this
reincarnational process is specifically factual, although neither is there
any way to retain a strictly Newtonian view of life and death. The growing
need for a great deal of reconsideration of the nature of our lives lies
before us as we become increasingly better educated in the nature of the
reality within which we live, but is there
any evidence at all that we invisibly sidestep death during the course of our
biological life?
Anecdotally, we hear stories of momentary confusion
following near-death incidents. Although this may be merely a psychological
affect, perhaps confusion or distraction that caused the near
accident to begin with, or the consequence of nervous shock following, the clue to look for is a
'supernatural' element to such stories. A woman falls asleep at the wheel of
a car while driving at high speeds down a county highway in the early
morning hours of a new day. She recovers an instant before colliding with a
bridge abutment at high speed. A startled instant later, with no sense of
transition at all, she's driving further on down the highway, unaffected by
her moment of terminal crisis.
Her thought is, "What the hell just
happened?" It's not at all unusual for those recovering from near fatal
disease or injury to feel a stranger to the world in which they have
survived. They can suffer for the balance of their lives the suspicion that they died,
or should have, and yet lived on. If so, the dead do not come back to tell the living of what
happens after death for clear reasons. There are no dead. Even when death
does occur and a funeral takes place, the 'dead' are not aware
of loss. From our point of view, if we are
returning home to a loved one, why would there be a need to 'return' to let
that loved one know of a death we did not experience? The loved one is at
home waiting for us.
Is it possible that we awaken some mornings feeling
especially invigorated and seeing our life and the world around us in a
fresh new light, oblivious to the fact that we died a slow and painful death
an identical 'parallel' world of some unfortunate disease or genetic defect? From the perspective of our larger self, the most
appropriate 'next moment' at the point of biological death is the most
appropriate derived from the infinite smorgasbord of possibility available
to us. There is no other world already in motion to join. We create a new
one, readjust the connections we have with others who share these
multitudinous experiences and nothing is lost in the transition. There is no
need to be force-fit where we do not fully belong. Death is entirely a
third-person experience. Life is multidimensional by nature.
In practical terms, what this all means exceeds the
potential of the human imagination. If we think carefully about our lives,
we could never have anticipated at birth the experience of a toddler. We
could never have experienced as a toddler our first day at school. We could
never have experienced as a preadolescent the wonders of sex and childbirth
and the lives we would leave as adults. And as aged individuals looking back
at the past because there is no future, we have no way of knowing what will
happen at death. But we can live our lives with far greater satisfaction if
we give the nature of space and time far greater consideration than we have
in the past and await the next moment in time and space with literally
baited breath.
In all probability, nothing we can
imagine approaches the facts of our reality beyond the world we know. We
exist in terms of space-time. It seems to be the forte of consciousness. If
it is possible to consciously experience multiple conscious foci as some
experience in dreams, it is not
as yet a skill we wield with any expertise. If we have that potential, we
can rest assured that we will acquire it in terms of time. We have roughly
another half billion years remaining on this world before the sun heats and
the core of the Earth cools and absorbs the oceans, in terms of time. In
another few hundred thousand years, we will be unrecognizable to ourselves
as we are now, another species entirely. We will have survived and
flourished somewhere in the infinite potential of Platonia. If we have evolved as we see
ourselves evolving currently, we will have become a blend of genetic
engineering and technology more dynamic than nature could ever have created,
and from there we can imagine that we will join those who manage entire universes.
We can imagine all of this
because the immanent Now is weeded of unviable error and founded upon success.
With new understandings of the nature of time and space, we have no reason
to believe the process can end in those terms.
And, yes, the universe will end someday in terms of time
and space, but it is an acausal structure of which we speak, and alpha and
omega are but poles of the spectrum of existence, like two sides of a fish
bowel, two sides of an ocean, housing an ecology of life in between. In our
case, we dwell where we choose within the structure, because the
structure itself is what we ultimately are.
Imagination, though, works only with past experience.
Isn't that an absolutely fascinating and frightening thought? Knowledge
cannot be foreseen before it is discovered, explored, understood, and
assimilated. We forever stand on the brink between what we perceive as the
past and the future. The past brought us to this immanent Now within which
we continue to pick and choose, but the consequence of choice will take us
totally by surprise.
Would we want it any other way?
