t's sometimes said that after a person dies, they go toward the light, as
if we turned into gigantic moths after death.
This is disputed by scientists who, lacking any imagination, say that human and moth DNA are totally incompatible and in order for anyone to remember anything at all, their brains have to be functioning. This makes sense based on what we know about the brain, which quite frankly is not a whole lot.
Dirac sea theory
In 2023, Resuscitation Journal had a big article about near-death experiences in patients undergoing CPR. They reported that measurable brain activity can persist for up to 60 minutes after cardiac arrest. Even in a clinical setting, only about nine percent of patients undergoing CPR recover. Those who do often have severe mental impairment. The authors say a better way of resuscitating people is urgently needed.
Most of the REDs (recalled experiences of death) they reported were “dreamlike phenomena” or misinterpretations of events around them. For example, a person receiving a potassium IV drip may interpret the burning sensation as descending into hell.
According to science, the most likely scenario is that your personality and all your memories are obliterated and your subjectivity merges back into a sort of Dirac sea of the mind of the universe, or whatever you want to call it, or else disappears altogether. But what if the stories are true? In this article we'll look at the theories of what life after death might be like and where the existing theories have problems.
Reincarnation
The two main tenets in reincarnation, as expressed in Hinduism and Buddhism, are that after you die you see your friends and relatives, who give you a guided tour of the afterlife. After that, your soul goes into a fertilized embryo and you get reincarnated.
These two ideas are contradictory. If it takes, say, a year before you get reincarnated, how could you meet your relatives, who may have passed away decades earlier, and thus would have gotten reincarnated a long time ago? Perhaps your friends sit around in a netherworld for years waiting for you to show up. Or maybe they can travel forward and backward in time.
Let's suppose somehow that contradiction is overcome. In that case, as soon as you die, your parents are still recognizable, meaning they have the same memories and personality traits. So your mother shows up to finish that sentence she was saying right before that unfortunate encounter with a transit bus: “. . . amount to anything, and I never could stand to look at you.” In self-defense, maybe you retort that it's just because you looked like your late dad, with whom she didn't get along for some reason. Then, as if by magic, your dad shows up to remind you about how he should have put you up for adoption because he knew all along you weren't his.
Then they start throwing things at each other, just as they did when you were alive. Then all your former girlfriends show up so they can dump you all over again and tell you your penis was too short and make up stories about you and laugh at you behind your back. In this theory, then, the afterlife turns into a screaming match.
Then the guy from the IRS shows up and tells you your tax bill is way overdue and that being dead is not an excuse. Out of the goodness of his heart, he somehow managed to bring a Form 1310 and Form 706 with him to the afterlife for your convenience. By this time the idea of being thrown into a lake of burning sulfur sounds pretty good.
Maybe that's the goal: to encourage you not to stick around, but to get reincarnated as soon as possible, preferably with someone else as your new parents. Otherwise, you might start saying things like, “Where the hell is that god damn light?”
Door #1: the next life
Okay, so you're in a new body and your memories are all erased. You have to learn how to parallel park all over again, learn the latest fairy tale about how the current generation is the smartest ever, and laugh at those dumb jokes you invented that somehow went viral the last time. And you find yourself in a world where women think nose rings are sexy and doctors have to tell people not to throw their kids in the air if they've got a ceiling fan.
Interesting Fact: 2,300 children are treated in emergency rooms each year for head injuries stemming from ceiling fans.
Door #2: Strategic ambiguity
According to Christianity, God has a policy of strategic ambiguity about who gets into heaven and who is cast into hell, which is a polite way of saying, “fat chance, sinner!”
Your tombstone
Being in a giant lake of burning fire for all eternity might sound unpleasant, but look at the bright side: you're never cold and you still feel pain, unlike while you're alive, where pain means that some part of your body is about to fall off. Hell, then, is like a giant hot tub where you remain in one piece and you're warm all over, but with molten sulfur. And, of course, you're reunited with all the people who treated you like crap, so you get the satisfaction of watching them suffer.
Or maybe it's as the existentialists thought: you wander for all eternity surrounded by books but are unable to find your glasses. Or you discover that the reason no one ever did what you wanted was that they were “other people,” whatever that means.
Then you discover that heaven is a propaganda ploy that God invented to trick you into moving on. Because you know five minutes after you get there you'll go mad from all the barking dogs. Or that the reason nobody is there is that heaven is only for good people.
On the other hand, what if it's almost like West Virginia as that scary tune suggests? Being dead, according to the great philosopher John Denver, is just like being in West Virginia. You find yourself screaming “Noooo, noooo! Get me out of here!” for all eternity.
Simulation
So, having dispensed with all that metaphysical speculation about heaven and hell, what if it was all a computer game and you could have escaped at any time if only you had found the hidden exit button? The whole time you've been playing it, a thousand other people were watching you and laughing as you fail to find it again and again.
The problem with this theory is that it's a bottomless pit of nihilism. Once you discover you're in a simulation, you're forced to concede that (according to Bayes rule, which a reading of Nick Bostrom tells you is a formula that says the worst outcome is always the most likely one) it's likely to be simulations all the way down.
Is a linear progression of simulations really necessary? Maybe there could be a circle of simulations, where somebody in world A simulates world B, somebody in world B simulates world C, and somebody in world C simulates world A. For this to happen, the amount of information in each simulation would have to be greater than or equal to the amount in the world itself. It seems impossible.
We also don't know whether it's possible for a simulation to have subjective awareness. This means there's no guarantee that you would become aware of the fact that you were in a simulation when it ends. Even so, a simulation implies the existence of a Programmer. It's ironic that those most likely to ridicule creationism would theorize that the world is a simulation: it is just an updated version of religious creationism.
Maybe you were programmed to think those people were just inanimate walls and trees and clouds when in fact they were unimaginably evil creatures and now you're back among them and the waiting line to get into a new sim is five miles long. Unfortunately, there are only two sims available. The one that's considered the most fun is the one where you have to watch helplessly as your civilization collapses and the people have a nuclear war and then slaughter each other by the million. The other one is too horrible to conceive.
Or maybe all life has been extinct for 13½ trillion years. The stars and planets are all gone and 99% of the protons have decayed. You discover you're nothing but a subroutine—written in BASIC—in a computer floating in a vast empty universe and your only escape from an eternity of agonizing boredom is to create simulations within simulations.
The computer is excruciatingly slow, even for interpreted BASIC, with one tick every million years. Then you realize that this too is a simulation, and you are an insane computer doomed to drift through an ocean of black nothingness for the next 386 quadrillion years. Or, maybe, just a simulation of one.
feb 12 2024, 7:30 am. last updated feb 18 2024, 8:08 am
