RE: Afterlife - I was asked my speculations on this subject... also a little on reality as a simulation
Also... what you wrote COULD be possible. This is why I call it speculation. We can't really prove it. I am really good at speculating. I'm fairly confident that if I put my mind to it I could over time come up with a hundred or more different ideas for the after life. They'd be me just wildly speculating. My friends and I used to do a game like this where we'd make up completely fictitious religions on the spot. Kind of like Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster stuff before that existed. Yet our goal was to come up with plausible religions that seemed like they made sense, but were very difficult to prove or disprove. It was a fun mental exercise.
I don't think we'll truly know the afterlife and its details until one of two things happen:
- You die and get to find out firsthand.
- We come up with a replicable way to speak with the afterlife, observe the afterlife, etc.
If I'm right, we won't have to do either.
If a sort of storage facility for the soul is there, there should be some sort of signature and it's really more a matter of peeking inside and living to tell about it.
Interestingly enough I didn't arrive at my idea alone. The ancient Maya had a tradition that said upon death that the soul inexorably followed a pathway to Xibalba. Some traditions held that this pathway was in the stars across what we know now to be the milkyway.
If you follow their directions you end up at Sagittarius A the super massive blackhole at the center of the Milky Way. http://www2.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/white-roads.html
This thing is an enormous radio source that makes one wonder..
Is this is actually the screams of the dead?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wow!_signal
:D Sorry couldn't resist.
Eitherway, entangled material where one partner crosses the event horizon and the other is collected outside the horizon, could at least in theory, be used to extract information from it.
We just don't have the ability to do that yet, but perhaps we could detect it somehow.
Is it actually replicable? Not simply by some priest or special person, but can we reproduce it?
Sorry the humor didn't actually come across in my post.
The signal I linked came from the region of Sagittarius, but not really Sag A.
As for the rest it's just harmless speculation. An alternative narrative meant to challenge people to think. The information paradox implies we cannot extract information from a blackhole at all. Whatever is inside is disconnected from causality as we know it. The most we could ever hope for is to try and get something from the hawking radiation, which would be maximally entropic by definition and thus impossible to reassemble.
For the method of extracting information I described, the math to handle it is beyond my ken, so I rely on people like @lemouth to tell me what would happen if we sent one half of an entangled pair across the event horizon. I'm certain he'd say we have no clue right now absent a quantum theory of Gravity.
It seems logical to me, that if all matter was at one time entangled and the effects of "time" are due to quantum decoherence, that somewhere every particle has/had an entangled twin.
The thought of a backup copy of myself is something I toy with from time to time, and having the entangled twin particles somewhere across the event horizon of a blackhole in a hopefully coherent state, just makes a sort of sense to me that's hard to convey. Especially if something like Sag A is primordial, i.e. from the earliest stages of the universe.
It's not testable with current instruments, but if I were looking for what is after this universe, after death, what have you, a blackhole is the first place I would look. This is at least physically realizable.
Oh one other thing. Mormons profess a sort of belief in a place called Kolob, and the song and story about it seem to indicate it is a real place that you could eventually reach if you traveled far enough, fast enough. The interesting thing about it, is I hear a strong verbal link between Kolob and Xibalba every time I hear the song. It makes me question if there isn't some link we're all ignoring.
I've always imagined Kolob as a blackhole since hearing that song for the first time. Problem is that song was written in 1842 which is long before we ever had concepts such as Galaxies. And yet...
If the entire Galaxy orbiting this one object doesn't fit that definition I don't know what else would.
I have a couple of Mormons (My mother and father in-law) that live with me. They are both elderly and we take care of them. We don't mind the Mormons visiting them, but we ourselves have nothing to do with it.
The TV Series The Expanse does some amusing things related to The Mormons and space ships in the future. :)
Replying over here due to comment depth limits.
Agreed, but my point was more to do with the fact that different religions have different beliefs and the convergence of the Maya /milkyway/xibalba and the Mormon Kolob thing is just something people don't really talk or think about. (say kolob backwards it gets even more strange).
I don't really have anything for or against any religion in particular. They're all equally valid in my eyes. You should find truth wherever you can, no matter who the author is. But to do that you need to swim through an ocean of untruth to land on a vast beach full of stories to find even a single grain of truth.
I have no problem with religions. As long as they are not forced upon others, laws are not made based upon them, etc. If they are voluntary and their results are voluntary I have zero problem with them.
I did however define Deism as it is not like other religions and it is not known by most people.
Any religion that expects you to believe a person had a vision, or encountered aliens, or an angel with golden plates, etc and simply expects the rest of the world to agree with them and TRUST them that it is true. This is what it refers to as REVEALED religions.
Deism does not believe that is anything more than man. They believe you should observe and use reason. Basically they believe that some catalyst which you can call God, a creator, etc created this by design, by accident, etc they do not care on the specifics. Other than that they pretty much use science. Hypothesis are fine. They are great, but you gotta prove them to make them more than that.
I've studied a lot of religions... those images of books in my post were actually all books I've read and a small fraction. I actually own a good number of them and some are signed by the author, whom I had some cool intellectual debates with.
I'm pretty open to people believing anything as long as it is voluntary. :)
Yet I wrote about Deism in the first post for a reason, and in the comments @dreemit asked me my opinion on the Afterlife. I hadn't actually spent much time thinking about the afterlife for awhile. So I waited until today and posted this.
I'm aware of a great many beliefs in the afterlife. I can make up a lot myself.
Yet I do not believe in revealed religions. Thus, until we have a replicable way to somehow communicate with the afterlife then I treat it all as speculation/hypothesis. For how can we know, without dying or somehow communicating with the afterlife.
Furthermore, when I say replicable I mean by anyone who wishes to follow whatever technique/device that can be replicated by anyone. If it is a secret that only a select few (aka priests) know and we must simply trust them then that once again makes it a REVEALED religion, and I don't believe in such things other than to consider them the works of man.
Could they be true? Sure. Yet I can't prove them so I'm not going to give them the weight of something that can be replicated. I'm not going to order my life around speculation. I'll listen with great interest, I'll debate, and I might even learn some cool things. I'll consider them possibilities, but nothing more. This includes my own wild speculations as well. ;)
EDIT: I didn't say I don't believe in an afterlife. I simply treat people telling me what the afterlife is as speculation. For how can they know?