Higher mathematics suggests that maybe there is “no death.” Could it be an illusion?
Come on, now. Sounds cryptically new age-y… but there’s hard research behind it. It’s hard to accept, this — if there isn’t death, what’s going on during putrescence? What’s with all these skeletal remains?
That depends on what “death” really means.
‘Tis All About Me
Did you know that the way our vision cells, the rods and cones in our eyes, interpret sunlight is the only reason we see a blue sky? The sky, in fact, isn’t blue at all — space, you probably know, is black, and so is the sky.
But the way our cells work shows us a blue sky. The sky “is” blue (colorblindness and other conditions notwithstanding) only because of how human eyes do their job. It’s just what we’ve got.
This phenomenon of highly-curated experience, dependent in every nuance on physiology, is known as biocentrism. Biocentrism says that if you’re a biological life form, you can only see the part of reality touching your own (biological) nature. But that little part is not all of reality in toto.
We’ve understood for how long that we have (at least) five senses that interpret our surroundings? Long time, bro. That we experience things not as they are, but as we are is an old adage. We know our limits… or some of them.
But biocentrism posits that the balance of reality we don’t see or experience – the rest of the environment, that which is not biology-adjacent, the whole context of absolutely everything we know and don’t know – biocentrism says that this meta-reality which biological beings occupy and perceive minimally, in smidges, is barely scratched by biology-based concepts like “time” and “space.”
It’s still an incipient (ha!) field, researching the nature not only of human experience, but of what lies beyond it. It asks, What could be the raw material our senses draw from, which is beyond them and all of their sense-based concepts, including those we name “time” and “space”?
If time and space — central aspects of our idea of death — turn out to be structurally load-bearing ideas integral to our experience of life (and death) as we know them, that are, at base, nothing more than twee bio-cognitive sensory exercises, they’re not the profound parameters of truth we take them for.
They’re the human thought edition of a five-year old playing grown up in mommy’s high heels. They’re just another of our biology’s ways of seeing, a “bio-logic” woven from the willy-nilly bits and bobs our senses collect.
“Time” and “space” are valid as a “blue” sky.
AITA?
So based on human experience of time as a sense of things happening in consequence of each other, in order, in a line marching ever forward, death appears to us an ending.
We’ve come up with an explanation of what looks like events happening one after another… meeting, dating, wedding; an event like disease or trauma, then a human’s state of non-responsiveness, then a state of putrescence. All rely on our (human) sense of time.
To get to the idea of death as an illusion, we need a reality with flexible requirements of time.
It’s hard to conceptualize being outside of time. How does one do that?
Physics Defending the Soul?
Quantum physics, with its reputation for weirdness, has the mathematical chops to redefine spacetime’s role in the equation, so to speak. This is the hard science’s equivalent of Alice’s Wonderland, ever so unexpectedly dreamlike. When you bite on quantum physics and shrink to its Drink Me scale of bitty molecular pieces of atoms, we find marvelous things, oddities and wonders, a fantastical place where matter behaves in what should be impossible ways. Things which should not be, according to the Eat Me proportions where most of us plod around, where stuff makes the dull, pedestrian, workaday, full-size mortal sense we accept for the final word on the matter.
We’re living with this view of a single reality like Americans who speak only English in a polyglot world, forgoing the richness of human views of the features of things like snow, psychology, morality, emotion, even diety, that different languages of different cultures in different geological contexts view different environments in ultimately unique ways. Speaking only a single language limits exposure to a range of human interpretations of the elements of the world we all know, or can know, and how we might know it.
And biocentrism is, clearly, a lot bigger than idiom or lexicon.
If death’s ending is an event not limited to linear time (because, remember, biology), then what we perceive and call death isn’t actually the end it seems to be.
It’s a bit spectral and diffuse, this idea, the implications are interesting. Those with religious tendencies may find the idea easy, second nature, to accept, as it’s suggestive of a sort of elemental eternity, which is already a concept long held central to multiple belief systems (an immortal soul is foundational to Christianity in all its forms, Judaism, Islam, as well as many of the less mainstream systems including many Native American spiritual traditions, Witchcraft in various formats, Taoism, and Hinduism, for example).
Deathlessness, in this sense, may (in its own expression of duality) simultaneously be a nice and profoundly distressing idea, depending on which way your sense of eternity leans.
As to the ultimate nature of the unguessable reality, only “time” or Heisenberg will tell.
