The Possibility of an Afterlife, from a Materialist Perspective

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If you accept the premise that souls don't exist and we instead consist only of the configuration of matter which makes up our bodies (and importantly, our brains) then there is some hope of an afterlife that does not rely on supernaturalism.

With a machine that can assemble atoms into any configuration it's instructed to, and a full description of a human being down an atomic level of detail, the machine could create a perfect copy of that person. This is the concept behind various science fiction teleporters.

It's also the concept behind brain uploading, the hope that if we can map the exact atomic configuration of a brain, we can then create a perfect atom-for-atom virtual copy of that brain in software. Know to neurologists as "whole brain emulation". This has actually already been done with worms and mice.

However, this would require that the person you want to resurrect had their brain scanned at some point. If they didn't, they are simply lost to time and can never be re-created, right? Wrong, actually.

The interactions of atoms are entirely predictable. If one atom interacts with another, given complete information about each atom beforehand (spin, charge, velocity, etc.) it can be predicted with perfect accuracy what the outcome of that interaction will be.

In theory, you can scale this up from two atoms to trillions. To quadrillions, to all the atoms in the universe. You'd just need an unfathomably powerful computer to do it.

This is significant because it means you could model the future. However far forward in time you care to dedicate computing power to. But, the same principle also works in reverse.

If you know what each of the two atoms in the thought experiment are doing now, and what they were doing a moment ago, you can extrapolate backwards. This can also be scaled up to as many atoms as you have computing power for. Of course you also have to simulate waves, spacetime, etc.

Let's not get into what it would take to scan and emulate the entire universe. That's probably impossible, logistically. But it probably is not impossible to do on the scale of one planet.

If you could completely scan the entire Earth down to every last atom, and accurately simulate outside interference (gravitational influence from the Moon, known meteorite impacts, etc.) then you could "rewind" your simulated Earth to any period in history you want.

You could then zoom in and isolate the atomic pattern of any individual ever to live, exactly as they were at that point in time.

All of this is much easier and less messy if instead of doing it to a real universe, you do it with a simulated one (that wasn't scanned from a real universe, but was a sim from the start). You then don't have to worry about variables you've not accounted for as there are no variables you don't know about (or cannot find out).

There's good reason to suppose we're already living in a simulated universe, too. Perhaps you've heard people like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking talk about that.

Namely, because it is possible to simulate physics in a computer (and in fact this is something physicists do all the time) as well as partial simulations of planets, stars, galaxies (something astrophysicists, astronomers and cosmologists commonly do) then there will some day exist sufficient computing power to simulate an entire universe with perfect accuracy.

This would mean all the way down to the subatomic level, making it indistinguishable from reality to anybody in the sim. If it's a simulation of our own universe, provided it's accurate enough, life would eventually arise and evolve on planets with the necessary conditions in the simulation for the same reasons that happened irl.

This would result in the evolution of intelligent species that would eventually develop their own simulated universes, for the same research related reasons that we did.

This means that so long as the number of simulated universes that have ever existed or ever will exist in each real universe (with the constants necessary for life) exceeds 1, the number of simulated universes will be exponentially greater than the number of real ones.

This is because if a real (root level) universe contains even just two sim universes, and each of those contains two sim universes (probably way more, but stay with me) then for simple mathematical reasons explored here, the number of simulated universes per every real universe in existence (with the necessary constants for life) is going to be massive.

This means there are almost certainly many, many, many, many times more simulated universes in existence than there are real ones. This, in turn, means that the odds of you and I being in a real universe rather than a simulated one are vanishingly small. It is overwhelmingly more likely that we're in a simulated universe right now than a real one.

Either way, without invoking anything supernatural it is not only possible but extremely likely that the technology will one day exist to re-create anybody that's ever lived.

Whether it's actually used for that purpose will depend on who is in control of that tech. That's something I cannot tell you, except that they probably won't be recognizably human (if they are descended from us at all). Maybe they will be nice, and give us all a second chance at life.

If we're in sim, it would cost next to no computational resources to create some kind of idealized habitat to support even such a staggering number of individuals, because their total mass would still be a drop in the bucket compared to that of an entire universe. The idealized habitat also doesn't need to convince us it's a real universe, so it can be much more computationally simple.

So if the sim finishes, and they've already gotten the data they need (whoever "they" are) it wouldn't cost them much time or energy (compared to what's necessarily at their disposal to have carried out such a project in the first place) to re-create us all in a paradise.

Or maybe they are assholes and the only afterlife is an eternal torture pit. I don't know. All I feel secure claiming to know is that the ability to re-create deceased persons is a foreseeable technological eventuality.

If you'd like to know more, click here.