hypothesizing about the afterlife
Note: this piece is a companion to: playing with the afterlife.
I wonder what happens after we die, but because no one can know for sure, it may be wisest to make peace with mystery. Yet something inside finds value in speculating, using the facts and ideas at hand in creative synthesis. What follows is a musing on some possibilities. Please forgive the inevitable errors and distortions, as I am rather out of my depth in writing about this topic, whether from spiritual or scientific perspectives. I plunge ahead anyway, because even those with more expertise must admit our ultimate ignorance about what happens after death.
Human traditions offer vastly different visions or our post-mortem fate. Some say the departed stay near the living as ancestor spirits. Others believe they reincarnate into a new body. Still others think individual consciousness dissolves into cosmic consciousness. And in academic science, the mainstream believes there is no fate at all; the body and its brain die, so there is nothing to continue and hence no continuation.
There's been a lot of debate about these contradictory options, often held as dogma. In the companion piece to this one, I play with the possibility that they might all be true. Here, I take a different, quasi-scientific approach: If an afterlife does exist, what is the mechanism that sustains it?
Human consciousness is an incredibly complex, dynamic pattern of thoughts, sensations, perceptions, and memories. Each of these is also complex in its own right. For instance, memory isn't one thing; it's several. There is memory for facts, memory for bodily skills, unconscious memories of early life, embodied memories of major trauma, etc. Yet despite the complexity, there is a sense in which all these many aspects of human consciousness are alike: they are all patterns that arise and change, interract and propagate.
In the physical world, complex patterns require a mechanism to sustain them. Ocean waves move through water as molecules bump against one another. The vibrations we hear as sound move through air as waves of slightly higher and lower pressures. These waves move through a medium, and the mechanics are well-understood. Light differs in that it doesn't oscillate in a medium; a photon is a self-sustaining dance of electrical and magnetic fields that is simultaneously wavy and pointlike. Yet its mechanisms are also understood, via the theories of electromagnetism and quantum mechanics.
What about human consciousness? During life, its wave-like patterns are supported by the brain, of course. Interactions of brain cells are often modeled using the equations of wave dynamics, and somehow that wavy activity supports our human experiences during bodily living. If our experience persists after the brain dies, if the waves propagate beyond the grave, what is the mechanism?
A religious person may insist that the soul is divine or supernatural, so using material terms to describe it makes no sense. To try might even be blasphemous. I don't deny divine and supernatural possibilities; my personal experiences have forced me to conclude that current science fails to account for some profound experiences that definitely happen. For our purposes, most relevant are reports about what happens around the time of death, both by those who are brought back to life after clinically dying, and by loved ones who get premonitions or messages. Such reports are so numerous, it's hard to discount them. And anyway, I personally can't, because I've had them myself. Why not apply scientific reasoning to them? There must be something, some matrix, process or system that supports these experiences. I don't see a way around this issue beyond blunt insistence that either they don't happen or we shouldn't question ultimate mysteries. But because I and many others can't help but question, it seems worth looking at the possibilities with a scientific eye.
Let's begin with how skeptics insist that all ideas about an "afterlife" are purely imaginary. For them, death is just the end. Sure, people report strange experiences, but they are either lying, mentally ill, temporarily overwrought, suffering from deranged brain function, victims of wishful thinking, or something else equally dismissible. Why bother discussing the afterlife scientifically, when it doesn't exist? Well, no matter how strongly believed, the skeptical opinion is just that: an opinion. It's not proof of anything. Maybe the skeptics are right, but there's plenty of evidence to suggest they might be wrong.
In what follows, I might be wrong too. But let's explore some possibilities...
1. The Distributed Consciousness Hypothesis
If we look at consciousness through the lens of quantum mechanics, information theory and biology, we can envision some plausible mechanisms for how a soul-pattern might survive physical decay.
The Akashic Field
Proposed by thinkers like Ervin László, this theory suggests that quantum processes throughout the fabric of spacetime hold vast amounts of organized information. There is no doubt the possibility for information storage exists; from some perspectives, the entire universe is made of information. But even if that's going too far, the universe stores information moment-by-moment: the structure of this instant is the basis for the structure of the next. The question for us is whether the system can store information from brains in a way that is separable from them.
Ervin László and many others suggest the brain acts as a receiver rather than a generator of consciousness—much like a television set receiving a broadcast. The human consciousness, or "soul-signal" can thus propagate without a brain, safe in the field after the physical, bodily hardware is destroyed.
The Multi-Server Soul
Perhaps consciousness relies on biology rather than (or in addition to) pure physics, operating as a distributed network. Just as large websites run simultaneously across multiple servers, an individual’s consciousness might run primarily on their own brain, but also partially on the brains of acquaintances, loved ones, and the broader biosphere.
Psychic and paranormal phenomena suggest brains can share information across space and time. Granted, not everyone believes in these phenomena (the above paragraph about skeptics applies here, too). But if they do, then the individual self may not be so individual. It may be distributed in a way analogous to computing systems, no matter how isolated we feel in our struggling individual selves. If so, your unique pattern doesn't vanish at death. It continues to resonate through the living web that knew you.
The Akashic Field and connected brain possibilities are worth considering as explanations for the profound experiences that occur around the time of bodily death. And, no doubt, there are other possibilities, including some we can't conceive of because we lack the needed information. The point is, there are plausible hypothetical mechanisms for an afterlife, plausible ways the deceased might remain near loved ones, reincarnate to new bodies, or exist in a realm beyond the individual body.
2. The Uncontested Afterlives
Even if the skeptics are entirely correct and personal awareness ends the moment cerebral blood flow stops, life beyond death remains an undeniable reality in three distinct ways:
Even if we discount individual selfhood being supported by a network of brains, it surely is remembered by a network of them. My father is very real to me today, even though he died in 2003. My relationship with him seems to evolve, as the old hurts fade away, while forgiveness and gratitude grow stronger. This is a common experience that gets less attention than it deserves. Personally, it seems like more than an empty platitude; it's a valid source of solace. My father, though deceased, continues to shape me. Which, in a way, is a type of afterlife.
In a similar vein, everyone leaves a karmic footprint. Every action ripples forward. A single act of structural kindness can alter generations, cascading through time via the butterfly effect. We live on through our consequences, contributing to the biosphere's wellbeing (or dysfunction, depending on our behavior) long after our names are forgotten.
And consider how Einstein famously comforted a bereaved friend by insisting his wife was still alive in the space-time matrix. In General Relativity, time is a static dimension on equal footing with space. Just as a mountain doesn't cease to exist when you drive past it, the moments of your life do not vanish simply because you have lived them. They remain eternally fixed in the four-dimensional fabric of spacetime.
3. Dissolution into the Unstructured Sea
What happens when the dynamic structures of consciousness finally wind down? Cosmologists note that the early universe was highly dynamic but lacked structure, and the distant future may possess structure but lack dynamism. Our localized, patterned human experience cannot exist at either extreme. No matter in what way or ways we persist after death, this fact suggests we may eventually cease to be.
When the entire cosmos—or our personal information-eddies—eventually relax and dissipate, we may return to what Hindu philosophy calls Satcitananda (Being-Consciousness-Bliss). This is an unstructured sea of sentience. It is not a heaven of individual egos and angels, but a spacious, timeless state of pure being, pure knowing, and pure love. After all the rapids and cascades of active experience, there is peace.
Yet the cosmic cycle inevitably turns, structuring new universes and new streams of life. But for this cycle, this universe, this soul, there is sweet, vibrating emptiness.
Maybe dissolution after death happens right away, or maybe it happens over time, after a rich afterlife experience of being an ancestor spirit, or inhabiting many bodies and lifetimes, or spending eons in a heavenly realm. Whenever it happens, it doesn't sound so bad, and it amounts to a sort of afterlife of its own, albeit not an individual one. And, of course, it's not all that different from what happens to the molecules of our bodies: they dissolve into the biosphere, while many go on to enter new living beings.
The Present Urgency
Whether through a quantum field, a distributed biological network, the timeless blocks of spacetime, or simple human interactions, we are fundamentally interwoven. The mystics and ecologists agree: we are not separate units. And there are a number of scientifically plausible ways that individual consciousness may continue after death.
These realizations redefine karma. When we look at history—slavery, genocide, and ecological destruction—we see that the "organism of Life" feels all pains collectively, if not at first, then eventually. This is true no matter the mechanisms of interconnection and continuance. The perpetrators of cruelty ultimately isolate themselves from the true source of joy, which is intimate connection to the Whole. That, to me, sounds like hell.
There are solid reasons to believe in some sort of continuance, even if we can't know for sure. But if this single earthly life is all the conscious pattern we get, then that provides another form of spiritual reassurance: it becomes infinitely more valuable, and the importance of savoring it all the more urgent.
Whether we continue or not, then, the wisest choice is to love and support the living, breathing web of Life right now, as deeply as we are able.