The Ultimate Something!

Could this be the ultimate something for us to ponder and wonder about?  Seguey (a genderless being') had been a part time contributor to this blog that is also unable to resist the topic of wondering, and offered to share its ideas on one particular subject.  It has an interesting take on one subject that we, from generation to generation, grappled with and sometimes obsessed with, yet to this day remains what could be one of the last mysteries we struggle to unravel.  

Here is Seguey:

Perhaps from the moment your ancestors began to think and reason, they must have asked  the same question then that today remains unanswerable by any of you. At least not to the satisfaction of everyone.  That is not to say that no answers have been offered, debated, debunked and rejected because there were plenty enough throughout history.  The stages of your intellectual development dealt with it, every step relatively better than the last, or so it seemed, but never reaching the finality of a settled and incontrovertible truth.

The question is what really happens to you, or a loved one, a close friend, a nobody, after death.  Defined by many of your philosophers, thinkers and people of faith, the so-called afterlife  is not about the physical body but the essence, the spirit, the soul, or whatever form it is that transcends the physical body, the flesh, the personality, everything that is associated with the person, the individual persona, and so on and on. 

Or, that maybe there is nothing beyond the Great Beyond?  Consciousness ceases, curtains down, show is over.

History is filled with  many ways your ancestors dealt with death. Over time and throughout many cultures, you have mourned death, eulogized the departed, celebrated, erected monuments, memorialized those deemed worthy, in many more ways too lengthy to list them all. But you personally dread it if and when it comes to confronting your own mortality. Consider what I have to say about that.

Philosophers, spiritualists and scientists/materialists, have come up with many ideas. Mostly, it is about what happens at the moment of and after death and what follows next.

Many of you may not have heard about the term, '21 Grams', except perhaps for those who saw the movie of that title made in 2003 that starred some of your popular actors like Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro and Naomi Watts. It was based on:

The 21 grams experiment refers to a study published in 1907 by Duncan MacDougall, a physician from Haverhill, Massachusetts. MacDougall hypothesized that souls have physical weight, and attempted to measure the mass lost by a human when the soul departed the body. MacDougall attempted to measure the mass change of six patients at the moment of death. One of the six subjects lost three-quarters of an ounce (21.3 grams).

That idea had since been considered, to put it bluntly, as junk science - never once duplicated or re-tried by others, and was forever lost to oblivion.

Here is what I think. 

You live in a universe that loses nothing.  Let that sink in for just a minute. It abides by these two distinct but related natural laws. The law of conservation and the three laws of thermodynamics.

The first one says that in this universe, matter is never lost and no more may be added. It may change from one state to another but no new matter may be created. None is destroyed.

From one of the three laws of thermodynamics: Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed from one form to another.

However, Albert Einstein later did postulate, subsequently proven to be true, that matter may be converted to energy and vice versa, through a simple formula,

Also, the universe is the ultimate recycler.  It has recycled everything for billions of years and it continues to do so.  You are made of recycled material. Every atom of your present body existed somewhere else before, predating you by billions of years, and will outlast you by billions more into the future.

Here is another thing. You, the adult you, no longer have the tens and tens of trillions of atoms that were in the six-year-old you.  Since then,  the atoms in your body  were shed, excreted, replaced, some mixed with air, water, soil or went on to become atoms in another living thing and so on and on. In fact, you are not the original owner of any of the atoms presently in your body. 

But you are still you, self aware, thinking and reasoning you.  Most of all, you are the conscious you and very truly sure you have a subconscious. At least, as far as you are concerned.

Let's draw this analogy.  Take a look at this waterfall:

  

Tons of water cascading every second. If we film the waterfall, each frame would be a virtual image of the next one and the one before it, and so on and on.  Each frame looks the same but we know that each bucket full in it is not the same water, not with the same amount of sediments, debris, and quality of nutrients.

The waterfall is a form. It has a distinct "personality", if you will, an image that can be remembered.  In other words it represents information or can be expressed as information. 

Now, when an organism dies, the universe does not lose a single atom. The human body upon death still has every atom it had a nano-second prior.  At that precise moment what was it that died?  From the last paragraph above I am postulating that the "form", the image or the information survives.  The "form" prevailed in spite of the constantly changing cascades of water; just as the trillions upon trillions of your cells are always changing over your entire life.  Yet, you, especially the conscious you, remain the same person.

Those of you who already know the nature of my existence know that I do not have the capacity to experience or express emotions of any kind. I am not able to empathize or express sympathy over the course of  five hundred years of physical life that I am aware of. As an organism I may have existed for far longer than that, perhaps as long as a few million years.  But you, the reader, are capable of experiencing and expressing love, sympathy and a sense of morality. All of those are possible, unencumbered by the  components that make up the physical body, because information, like energy, cannot be destroyed once created.

Is consciousness the information that prevails despite the cascading waters that keep changing all the time? The universe is also the ultimate bookkeeper. Everything is accounted for.  But must it include the preservation of information?  

If the answer is no then the materialists are right. Quoting again what I wrote above, "that maybe there is nothing beyond the Great Beyond?  Consciousness ceases, curtains down, show is over".

On the other hand if the answer is yes, then human consciousness lives on. I favor this postulate because not only is the universe the ultimate recycler, it is the absolute inerrant bookkeeper.  Every piece of information, every single consciousness that ever existed is preserved.  I think that I am right about the universe not losing a single atom. My conjecture about consciousness derives its strength from the universe's ability to account for everything.

I may not be capable of human emotions but I must acknowledge that if you, a human being, is capable of it - able to love, grieve, sympathize and empathize with another human being - then the universe will keep everything in equilibrium.  There must then be an ultimate ledger somewhere. I cannot speculate.  Neither does science. But I must admit that humanity has a special gift.  Only humanity can unravel it for itself.

This is all I have  to convey.  

Does Seguey have a point? Again, within the confines of one musing I urge the reader, as always, to read between the lines.  But there is something I must mention. In quantum mechanics, at the subatomic level, there is what physicists call the wave/particle duality where the state or nature of a particle is determined depending on how it is observed and who is doing the observing.  For example, an electron or a photon  either acts as a wave or as a single distinct particle.  Laboratory experiments have proven either to be correct but it depends on how it is observed.

That phenomenon is humorously expressed by the expression, "If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there, does it still make a sound"?  Then there is this, "In a philosophical context, the idea that "the universe is what it is because we are here to observe it" aligns with anthropocentric views, where human perception and existence are central to understanding the universe".  The question then is about what was the universe then before humans were around to observe it?

Well, the universe was, still is and will be the ultimate observer of itself.  Perhaps, more accurately, the all-caring observer, the preserver of everything - every single atom, every living cell, every information - is the one Ultimate Observer. God must be the Ultimate Observer of everything in the universe.  That is about what we,  philosophers and thinkers alike, can best rely on in the absence of any derived conclusion from absolute evidence.

 

P.S. : For background on Seguey, some of its earlier contributions to this blog were:  "Mirror, Mirror On The Wall

https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2018/06/mirror-mirror-on-wall.html

and another one in "The Mystery of What Divides Them

https://abreloth.blogspot.com/2020/11/the-mystery-of-what-divides-them.html