How to have a soul and an afterlife without magic
An ontology based upon nuclear physics and our biochemical awareness of Time.
Most of my friends are atheists. Considering the topics I like to discuss, this is no surprise. Further, considering the beliefs of people who might think they share my religion because of time and place and background (but who are shocked and offended by what I actually believe), it makes even more sense. Most of my atheist friends consider discussion of religion an imposition. Since they are certain that it has no bearing on facts, they seem to think it is a waste of their precious time, of which they only have a limited amount. I can certainly understand their position.
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Drink up!
But that is not why I write today. I present this description of some known properties of the Universe for the sole purpose of comforting myself. I want to feel that my friends among the atheists will somehow survive this life, and that we can have some awareness of each other afterwards. Because good friends are hard to find.
tl;dr :
we remember the past and anticipate the future because the chemicals in our brains work better in that direction.So, eternal life, what a concept.
Obviously we all die, and we have zero evidence of something coming after it in the perceived stream of time. And that is what I would like to discuss today, the perception of time, the concept of eternity, and the relationship between them. If you want the reasoning behind why we perceive time as we do, you might read this, but under no circumstances should you read this!
So, according to the reading assignment you may have just skipped over, our perception of time is a property of our smoothly functioning brains. As long as our brains are alive, time seems (to us), to tick forward. But, as C.S. Lewis once pointed out the present is the point at which time touches eternity, meaning that all our awareness is seemingly contained in this moment, carried along with us, and only leaving phantoms in our memory.
So what happens when our brains stop working?
The forward march of time is an illusion created by the stirring of entropic brain chemicals which can never become unstirred, but otherwise the calculations for events in physics are pretty much the same, forward or backward thought time, at least on the atomic level. This means we have no evidence that time is a moving arrow, it seems more like a 4D grid. In a very real fashion, everything that has or will ever happened exists as a sort of four dimensional matrix, a series of chronon length Universes, pinned on the fourth dimension of time like images on the pages of a flip book.
If there is no magic soul, if everything we are is our molecules, and if our molecules persist like the drawings in the flipbook, then our awareness exists in that flipbook, even though our thumb has stopped riffling the pages. This is the crux, pay attention here! Just like our brains still exist in that cast aside flipbook, our consciousness must still reside there as well!
wriggles up from the Compost of Time
Because, for instance, our great great grandfather's time was no more real than ours. That inaccessible past century is no more accessible than our flipbook yesterday. We are not wriggling worms of time following each other through the endless compost heap of time, the sequentiality of our lives is just as illusory as the sequentiality of our days. Our unborn great grandchild's time is no more distant than right now.
When I was a child I used to read magazines articles that proposed to tell us how the way we ate pizza told us what kind of employee we were, or how we organized our sock drawer shows what kind of spouse we are. I determined after a while that everything we do describes everything we are. In this description of "personhood beyond chemically entropic time awareness" we can see that everything we do really is everything we are. All this without a God, without spiritual notions, without myths and hymns.
I hope that helps. I know I feel better. When I first proposed this about a year ago, it was mostly a joke, now I feel certain it is defensible using the physics of the day. That makes a huge difference.
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All I can think about after reading this article in Billy Pilgrim becoming unstuck from time. It's interesting to consider if we could shift our consciousness forward and backwards. There could be an (highly speculative) argument that meditative and psychedelic states touch on this realization about time and existence.
Whether or not this version of four dimensional reality is true, it's a great framework for thinking about being in time.
I enjoyed your piece and included it in today’s #philosophy-review. Keep up the great posts!
https://steemit.com/philosophy/@aaanderson/the-philosophy-review-12-6-2016
I appreciate the line of reasoning, but do not see it that way. Upvoted whilst not agreeing, in line with yr recipe.
I present it as a hypothesis, which could be seen as:
Obviously, if there is a spiritual aspect of the Universe, and it's different than this, my hypothesis is proven false.
Hi, friend @baerdric,
This is quite the fascinating article.
As one of your "minority" non-atheist friends, I can understand your sentiment. And, while I am not a "bible-thumping proselytizer," I appreciate that you understand my interest (as a believer that Jesus is the Creator/God of the universe) in communicating that belief to all of my friends.
One problem I see you facing with even a mechanistic, "flip-book" implementation of consciousness was touched on in at least one of the articles you referenced. That problem is, of course, entropy. Even if I were to stipulate that you are correct, and that there would be someone around to "flip the pages," our "awareness of each other afterwards" would come to an end with the entropic heat death of the universe.
And so I'll simply close my comment by extending an invitation to you, my friend, as well as to all of your readers and following, to consider what I.M.H.O. is a far better offer of a truly endless life in a restored and perfected universe. Here is an article that generally describes my beliefs, and I welcome anyone who cares to read it to interact with me should you have any sincere questions or wish to investigate the possibility of following Jesus.
Then I must not have made myself completely clear. Even if the Universe reaches heat death, all that time still exists. Because time is not the ticking clock our brains make us see it as, it is a broad multidimensional matrix which we are only aware of single points in, while alive, but which we can mostly likely apprehend more widely once the filter of our entropy based perception is removed.
"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 Cor 13:12"Further, I don't believe this description contradicts any Biblical or Christian tenets of the afterlife except the most child-like idea of an actual place in the clouds. In fact, for God to be eternal, what I describe must almost certainly be true. Just as we exist across our time, He exists across all times.
Lastly, I consider myself a Christian and follow the Bible, just not blindly. It's the other Christians who judge me as not really Christian, because I don't believe the unBiblical and edited for children Christianity they were taught in kindergarten Bible Class.
The afterlife you probably envision is eternal, so is this, it probably includes a fully human and undecaying body and so does this, it probably is in God's perfected and eternal Kingdom and so is this. All I have done is make it possible within the laws of nature and physics. God's nature and physics.
Thanks for responding to my observations, and for your additional clarifying comments. ;)
I obviously need to "munch on this" some more, and probably ask some more questions. I do understand God to have access to the entire "timeline" if you will, and (much as I love time-travel stories) I do view history as immutable. So, here's a question (and probably indicative of my simplistic understanding of what you've had to say):
Supposing we've fast-forwarded into an eternal afterlife. With the "flip-book" "non-directional-time" physics-based view of eternity, wouldn't the afterlife of atheists be nothing more than an ability to replay particular sequences of their historical life? Or am I still misunderstanding your concept? ;)
And, I hope that my prior comment didn't imply judgement of you or your position? If so I apologize, not what I meant at all, just want to dialog here with you a bit. :)
BTW, I decry the cartoonish "floating on clouds" views of eternity and expect far more. And also BTW, I did read the "Don't You Dare Read This One" article... which (if true) would support a view of uni-directional time... ;)
None of what I hypothesize says anything about how someone might enjoy the eternal awareness of all things.
The probable existence of multiple nonspatial dimensions implies that even without time, some things might happen in another direction. After the action of K and B Mesons are fully understood, I hope they will fit more reasonably within my ideas. Perhaps:
Oh, I misunderstood your question.
No, if true, all persons would be eternally aware of every moment of their life at all times as a whole. As well as every part of the Universe that has e er affected them in the slightest. The eternal awareness of Now, this instant, would encompass all time.