It will come to many as a surprise to learn that it is possible to explain continuation of life after
death even if the brain is the sole source of consciousness! This decouples the question of whether or not the brain is the sole source of consciousness from the question of whether or not there is life after death. This is usually the bread and the butter of the afterlife argument. But it is doomed to fade away. The idea of 'soul' came when the ignorance of matter abounded, and bankruptcy of ideas was at its climax. No one during the times of Descartes, for instance, had any idea of an hologram.We should not use old arguments to justify something.
But first I must say that over time, the concept 'soul' has come to acquire another meaning other than 'invisible thing that can retain one's consciousness even after the death of the visible body.' It seems that people were desperate to say that our consciousness is caused by 'soul' to the extend that they equates consciousness or 'self' itself to 'soul'. It is not this latter type of 'soul' that I am trying to show that it is no longer necessary. This 'soul' still exist in the idea that I Will show you. Same is true for 'incarnation' walk in etc.We don't do away with all these in the sense that an equivalent of them exists in the holographic immortality.
Death-Life Homeomorphism
Mathematicians say that a cup is the same thing as a torus! It is so because one can mould a cup all the way into a torus without any cuttings. In other words changing a torus into a cup does not change how various portions of it are interconnected. So the concept 'topological similarity' is a similarity due to the similarity in the interconnectedness, caring less about other similarities.
It is not hard to accept that if consciousness is caused by the brain, then how its neurones are interconnected is what matter, but not the shape of the brain. It is much like a computer which can be made by inteconnecting all its component using flexible wires so that you can twist it, fold it, crunch it, chew it etc without damaging the computer even a little bit. but I will like you to extend these further and thinking of the necessity of maintaining the interconnection between atoms alone, and never caring about maintaining anything else. Then you are about to get the idea of death as a transformation of the body like in the case of transformation of a cup into a torus, i.e. as an homeomorphism of the body and that consciousness is a 'topological invariant'. In simple words the transformation that we call 'death' does not provide changes to the body that are necessary to erase its consciousness.
Hologram Analogy
Holograms have remarkable properties. Some give us great insights into the spiritual. Now first think of the fact that you can recreate the entire hologram even using a small piece of the holographic plate. That is to say if you smash the plate into pieces, you don't destroy the image. Literally, if you 'kill' the plate, you don't 'kill' the image. The image is the 'soul'. You can begine to see how hologram does the equivalent of or even explain 'soul'!
If you see the hologram, especially the transmission type, there is no image there to see! The image is 'dead'. Still if you shine the ordinary, decoherent light to the hologram, it doesn't reconstruct any image at the other end! The image is there relative to the coherence of the light you shine on the hologram. Finaly a 2D hologram has all the information pertaining to a 3d scenario. Literally, 3 dimensions exists inside of 2 dimensions!
Holographic Universe
The crucial feature of an hologram is that there is information pertaining to every portion of the hologram at every other portion. We say the information pertaining to the image is holographic throughout the plate. Now let us come to Quantum Mechanics .QM teaches us that before observation, a particle exists as a wave that is spread throughout the universe!! So at every point in space, there is a crisscross of all waves from all the particles in the universe! The information pertaining to every particle exists everywhere in the universe as if to be holographic! After observation, the waves don't cease to exist. Rather their amplitudes gets very small due to quantum decoherence.
In the brain, it is not hard to accept that what is goung on, ultimately, is one atom affecting the other atoms in the regions nearby. So if the same thing can happen to the same set f atoms forming the brain, even after death, there is no reason to think that death brings ab end to consciousness even if brain is tge sole source of consciousness! But why should we think that the same things as it happened during life cannot go on even after death if all the atoms are still and always 'near' each other in the sence that all their waves permiates everywhere? If a certain pattern of interactions between a set of atoms constituted a certain state of your awareness, then the same set of interactions between the very same set of atoms can still happen because the atoms are effectively 'everywhere' as waves. This is the crux of the idea of 'holographic immortality'.
Of course to fully explain 'holographic immorality' we must add in some few other adjustments to QM. But I am impressed that QM as it is almost explains the 'holographic immorality' entirely! There must be a way in which the wavicles that are spread throughout the universe maintains a notion of spatial configuration of the atoms in the brain but in a 'non local' way. Particles that are near each other in the brain are more 'entangled' with each other. The information pertaining to the degree of entanglements between what waves exists throughout the univers. So if we have 3 particles aligned in the brain, say A,B and C in that order, the wave of A is more entangled with the wave of B than it is wigh the wave of C, throughout the universe. So the information pertaining to the spatial order is encoded in the manner in which waves are entangled. This creats an information pertaining to the 'image' of the brain that is 'holographic' throughout the universe, hence some immortality that is analogous to the invisibility of the hologram even when we break the plates into pieces. In other words, we now have endless copies of 'brains' throughout the universe. Ergo the death if one of them is inconsequential.
Now how about the things that such awareness wilk experience in what will appear like 'living in a world'. The answer is that the mind will use the information gathered throughout the universe and reconstruct a spatial scenario that is a world on its own.
Comments