What happens to us after death?
This is the question that has plagued mankind for ages. Is there a heaven? Is there a hell? Do we come back? Or is it just a sleep of death, where dreams may come that must give us pause?
If you've tooled around this web page some, you know that I take it as a matter of faith that the universe is fractal in nature. We as humans are self-representational instantiations of God, who are the sum total of existing matter and energy in the universe.
So what can we derive about the afterlife based on these points of faith? Consider the self-representation evident in a fractal. As you zoom in on a fractal, you see the whole fractal represented in part of the fractal. As you zoom in on that part of the fractal, you will see yet another whole version of the fractal, again and again.
The conclusion must be that there are not just two levels, us and God. There are multiple levels in between. So what are those levels? What makes us what we are? Our minds make us what we are, our minds and the actions our minds make our bodies perform. I postulate that between us and God are multiple levels of minds, representing the self-similarity of the fractal universe.
While this is a pretty whacked out idea, certainly by the standards of U.S. academia, it is not wholly original. Think about it: what is a mind? Well, I've studied this in depth. If we look at the great science of the 20th century, that put a man on the moon and cured the cancer in my body, it gives us a definite answer: we don't know. No conclusive answer has been formed as to what a mind is.
One interesting idea was presented by Gregory Bateson, one of the founders of the field of Cognitive Science. He defines a mind as a collection of causal chains. The exact definition he gives is rather technical and not important at this time. What is important is that the definition not only fits human minds, but that it fits many other causal processes that we don't normally think of as minds. Not necessarily all of these minds are "conscious or capable of self-replication," but they bear functional similarities to our minds. Using Bateson's definition, we can see complex systems like ecosystems, economies, and whether systems as minds. Indeed, the whole world can be seen as a huge aggregate mind, made up of many smaller independent, overlapping, and interacting minds.
I postulate that when we die, if we have our lives correctly, we rise in the hierarchy of minds coming closer to God. If we live our lives incorrectly, our mind dies. Our only hope in that case is that the force of our actions and matter perpetrates ourselves in a lower level of minds. We ourselves may be made up of lower minds, that poke and prod into our dreams and subconscious.
All of that begs the question: how do we our lives correctly? Some of that should be obvious to you, but if you want more on that matter, I'll try to talk about it in my next missive.
Last Modified 6/7/99
Created 11/2/98