The question of what happens after death is one subject matter that, like politics and religion, are either avoided at all cost or most fervently discussed among friends depending, and only depending, upon how well their beliefs are aligned; or how, on very rare occasions, their open mindedness lead to extremely tolerant acceptance of each other's opposing views.
Undeniably, the question of the after life had been asked since humanity acquired the ability to ask, to ponder and to speculate. In fact, long before there were historical records, fossil remains had so much to reveal about how our early ancestors dealt with the subject. There is no question that the mysteries surrounding the afterlife or our ancestors' inability to know or understand what happens after death led to superstition and speculation. Early civilizations - from Old Testament accounts of kings and kingdoms to the days of the Pharaohs, to the Persian empires, the Greeks, the Romans, and all that followed in both Eastern and Western Europe and Asia - produced many different ways of dealing with the subject of mortality, from spiritualism to theology to philosophy.
We find today that much of the questions still remain unanswered.
From my earlier musing, "Everything happens for a Reason", I wrote about how different major theologies address the subject, so I will not rehash them here. But there is something intriguing about the quote above on the "afterlife".
A friend, a former co-worker from the old country before we and our families both came to settle here, passed away recently. He was stricken by Parkinson's disease many years ago. The devastatingly downward trajectory of the malady, though slow, affects the person and the family in ways that is tragically heartbreaking. The weariness from the physical deterioration when motor skills gradually diminish is compounded by the frustration when one's speech is affected. The pain from the physical disability is made worse when the affected person gets frustrated from not being able to express oneself, when even the conveyance of an idea is a struggle, the ability to even tell a joke is near impossible. Towards the end the downward physical and mental spiral was a slow and torturous fading away of both mind and body.
One may ask then, what "stream of consciousness continues after the death of the physical body". This friend used to play (and played well) the highly physical game of basketball, was thoughtful and was a good chess player, and made a good living to support a family and two children. The retirement community he and his wife picked suited them well. Life had all the makings of a comfortable retirement. The sunset of their lives was way far into the horizon, hardly visible and out of mind, as they set to enjoy a long retirement.
Then the diagnosis came. He fought hard with the support of a caring wife and family and he managed well under the circumstances. Then came the wheelchair but that did not deter his will to fight on. From a year ago though the struggle was gone. The feeding tube was all that sustained an almost unconscious life. The family was long prepared before the sad day. Everyone was at peace during the short vigil, waiting for "God to take him away".
This adds to the complexity of how to answer the age-old question. Of course, this is not a burden to those who believe that everything is extinguished at the moment of death. Life ended, one's story is finished, there are no sequels, no continuation. To those folks, what I say or think here will have little or no effect whatsoever. There is no need to discuss that either.
We too can avoid discussing theology. How else then do we address the afterlife?
Well, if we must, there is no getting around these: first, life must mean something before we talk about the afterlife; second, why must there be an afterlife; and third, how long is the afterlife? Does it go on forever and ever?
And then we have to ask. Who or what makes all of these possible? And we say, this takes us back to theology or religion or philosophy, or other belief systems, doesn't it?
The Pew Research Center took a poll last year and found that 90% of Americans believe in "a higher power". However, a much lower percentage (though still a majority, but barely) expressed belief in God as depicted in the Bible. We can set this aside so as not to get into a debate. Now, we know that of the ninety per cent who believe in the "higher power" there could be a portion of them who would find God or the Universe (as a whole) as interchangeable; that is, God is all of everything we see and observe and that everything that is the universe is God. Still likely to be controversial but we have to start from somewhere that is as close to neutrality as possible in dealing with the ninety per cent. We will not address the remaining 10 per cent who are either agnostics or atheists.
We start by saying that the Universe/God has sets of rules that are fundamental and beyond dispute. The universe, as an isolated system, whether by creation or by the theory as postulated in the Big Bang origin, maintains that matter and energy are conserved, one can be converted to the other and vice versa, but that nothing is ever lost. That is fundamental to the laws of physics: physical and chemical changes may occur anywhere in the universe but nothing ever gets lost.
And this brings us to the concept of "stream of consciousness". First we come down a step lower. We begin with "information". We may take it for granted but that is where everything begins. DNA from which life begins is a bundle of information. A cell communicates with other cells through packets of information that it is constantly processing: everything from identifying nutrients that it needs and invaders like bacteria or viruses. Every living thing lives by information.
The painted lady butterfly lays a blue egg no bigger than a pin head. That pin head will hatch into a tiny larva that instinctively dines on the leaf where it was laid, becomes a colorful caterpillar in no time, changes into a chrysalis, pupate and turns into a beautiful butterfly - an exact copy of its mother. Everything begun as a bundle of information packed into strands of DNA in a tiny blue egg that will complete a life cycle of a year. Then that cycle gets repeated over and over.
Information, created by the butterfly, by an amoeba, the blue whale and by us all came about by processing matter and energy, consuming food, converting much of it into flesh and blood and a brain that uses energy in order to process and produce even more information. We know animals remember but we do more than that. We develop self awareness even from an early age, we have a superior intelligence, and a well defined sense of being - a conscience, a set of emotions, an aptitude for morality - and something else we are hard pressed to explain. We feel a connection to people, animals and inanimate objects beyond mere physical stimulus, as if there is much beyond the world of the senses. We feel a stream of consciousness that are often faint, but at times overwhelming. For how do we explain love, acts of goodness, introspection, the capacity to appreciate music, the arts, etc. Where do all these go upon death?
The Universe/God does not waste anything. Nothing is ever lost. Not even information! Physics and a very complex mathematics which we will not get into here, speaks to the conservation of information. Suffice it to say that it is at that level of complexity that for the moment is beyond our capacity to understand. But it is also true that just from the principle of the conservation of matter and energy we may gather confidence that perhaps the preservation of information is what the afterlife is all about. We will admit ignorance to what it is exactly that awaits us beyond this physical life but to believe that there is better than 50-50 chance that information is carried over in the form of a stream of consciousness is and should be a safe bet.
We may not know until we know it but what is certain is that the universe does not waste anything. If God is an all knowing God then God must be the Universe.
We find today that much of the questions still remain unanswered.
From my earlier musing, "Everything happens for a Reason", I wrote about how different major theologies address the subject, so I will not rehash them here. But there is something intriguing about the quote above on the "afterlife".
A friend, a former co-worker from the old country before we and our families both came to settle here, passed away recently. He was stricken by Parkinson's disease many years ago. The devastatingly downward trajectory of the malady, though slow, affects the person and the family in ways that is tragically heartbreaking. The weariness from the physical deterioration when motor skills gradually diminish is compounded by the frustration when one's speech is affected. The pain from the physical disability is made worse when the affected person gets frustrated from not being able to express oneself, when even the conveyance of an idea is a struggle, the ability to even tell a joke is near impossible. Towards the end the downward physical and mental spiral was a slow and torturous fading away of both mind and body.
One may ask then, what "stream of consciousness continues after the death of the physical body". This friend used to play (and played well) the highly physical game of basketball, was thoughtful and was a good chess player, and made a good living to support a family and two children. The retirement community he and his wife picked suited them well. Life had all the makings of a comfortable retirement. The sunset of their lives was way far into the horizon, hardly visible and out of mind, as they set to enjoy a long retirement.
Then the diagnosis came. He fought hard with the support of a caring wife and family and he managed well under the circumstances. Then came the wheelchair but that did not deter his will to fight on. From a year ago though the struggle was gone. The feeding tube was all that sustained an almost unconscious life. The family was long prepared before the sad day. Everyone was at peace during the short vigil, waiting for "God to take him away".
This adds to the complexity of how to answer the age-old question. Of course, this is not a burden to those who believe that everything is extinguished at the moment of death. Life ended, one's story is finished, there are no sequels, no continuation. To those folks, what I say or think here will have little or no effect whatsoever. There is no need to discuss that either.
We too can avoid discussing theology. How else then do we address the afterlife?
Well, if we must, there is no getting around these: first, life must mean something before we talk about the afterlife; second, why must there be an afterlife; and third, how long is the afterlife? Does it go on forever and ever?
And then we have to ask. Who or what makes all of these possible? And we say, this takes us back to theology or religion or philosophy, or other belief systems, doesn't it?
The Pew Research Center took a poll last year and found that 90% of Americans believe in "a higher power". However, a much lower percentage (though still a majority, but barely) expressed belief in God as depicted in the Bible. We can set this aside so as not to get into a debate. Now, we know that of the ninety per cent who believe in the "higher power" there could be a portion of them who would find God or the Universe (as a whole) as interchangeable; that is, God is all of everything we see and observe and that everything that is the universe is God. Still likely to be controversial but we have to start from somewhere that is as close to neutrality as possible in dealing with the ninety per cent. We will not address the remaining 10 per cent who are either agnostics or atheists.
We start by saying that the Universe/God has sets of rules that are fundamental and beyond dispute. The universe, as an isolated system, whether by creation or by the theory as postulated in the Big Bang origin, maintains that matter and energy are conserved, one can be converted to the other and vice versa, but that nothing is ever lost. That is fundamental to the laws of physics: physical and chemical changes may occur anywhere in the universe but nothing ever gets lost.
And this brings us to the concept of "stream of consciousness". First we come down a step lower. We begin with "information". We may take it for granted but that is where everything begins. DNA from which life begins is a bundle of information. A cell communicates with other cells through packets of information that it is constantly processing: everything from identifying nutrients that it needs and invaders like bacteria or viruses. Every living thing lives by information.
The painted lady butterfly lays a blue egg no bigger than a pin head. That pin head will hatch into a tiny larva that instinctively dines on the leaf where it was laid, becomes a colorful caterpillar in no time, changes into a chrysalis, pupate and turns into a beautiful butterfly - an exact copy of its mother. Everything begun as a bundle of information packed into strands of DNA in a tiny blue egg that will complete a life cycle of a year. Then that cycle gets repeated over and over.
Information, created by the butterfly, by an amoeba, the blue whale and by us all came about by processing matter and energy, consuming food, converting much of it into flesh and blood and a brain that uses energy in order to process and produce even more information. We know animals remember but we do more than that. We develop self awareness even from an early age, we have a superior intelligence, and a well defined sense of being - a conscience, a set of emotions, an aptitude for morality - and something else we are hard pressed to explain. We feel a connection to people, animals and inanimate objects beyond mere physical stimulus, as if there is much beyond the world of the senses. We feel a stream of consciousness that are often faint, but at times overwhelming. For how do we explain love, acts of goodness, introspection, the capacity to appreciate music, the arts, etc. Where do all these go upon death?
The Universe/God does not waste anything. Nothing is ever lost. Not even information! Physics and a very complex mathematics which we will not get into here, speaks to the conservation of information. Suffice it to say that it is at that level of complexity that for the moment is beyond our capacity to understand. But it is also true that just from the principle of the conservation of matter and energy we may gather confidence that perhaps the preservation of information is what the afterlife is all about. We will admit ignorance to what it is exactly that awaits us beyond this physical life but to believe that there is better than 50-50 chance that information is carried over in the form of a stream of consciousness is and should be a safe bet.
We may not know until we know it but what is certain is that the universe does not waste anything. If God is an all knowing God then God must be the Universe.
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