Death, Consciousness, God, Time, Afterlife, and This Life: 

Afterlife

One’s view of a possible afterlife depends upon one’s assumptions about the nature of reality, especially the existence of God. Let us examine some of the possibilities.

If one posits no-God and the primacy of what we call matter, whatever matter is in itself, death is oblivion. Even a downloaded consciousness, if I am wrong and they do continue the subjective consciousness of the person downloaded, will eventually terminate, for the universe will expire sooner or later. Given the no-god assumption, gray, twilight worldlines of stability, comfort, and pleasure may be our most rational aspiration. 

Is this bad? 

Most human beings through most of human history knew only Hobbesian lives that were “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short." Countless numbers of people were tortured to death, died slowly and painfully on a battlefield, wasted away with disease, struggled constantly merely to stay alive, or watched their children starve to death during famines. All these people and many others who had unhappy worldlines were unlucky in an insentient, atoms-and-the-void universe that is indifferent to cries of pain, anguish, and despair. The people of today’s world are winners in the lottery of worldlines. Gray is good. A long life of engaging, pleasurable presents is much better than the Hobbesian lives that crowd history. Dissidents like me are lunatics who do much more harm than good because we threaten the stability on which the gray, good-enough worldlines rely.

If, on the other hand, one posits God, options arise. 

“Hold on!” say today’s atheists. “Positing God doesn’t create options. It creates illusions and delusions. Your reasons for betting on God don’t convince us. Most of us won’t even consider your argument because we lead satisfying, active lives that give us much pleasure, so why bother to question our assumptions. Those few of us who give a hearing to your argument look at history and today’s world and say: ‘Your argument collapses when confronted by the contrast between the Hobbesian lives that permeate history and the comfortable, secure, and enjoyable lives of people in today’s world. You can’t prove God’s existence. So who are you to say good enough isn’t good enough? If your so-called dissident movement ever took hold, it would bring back religious strife and disturb the stability that social engineers of the past worked so hard to create. And for what? For illusions and delusions?’”

The atheists’ critique is valid if their assumption of no-god is correct. However, they cannot prove no-god, as I cannot prove God. We can only engage the God question by amassing reasons for and against, not proofs, and making a personal judgment that springs from the totality of who we are. The fundamental uncertainty that characterizes the modern era cuts both ways.

Let us first give a hearing to the atheists who deride my arguments.

In the atheists’ unfeeling, pitiless, pointless universe of matter-energy and chance, mental happenings are mere epiphenomena. They have no existence of their own and seem to be dependent upon certain patterns of what we call neural activity. Without an epiphenomenal mind, even syllogisms have no independent existence. The proposition “if A>B and B>C, then A >C” does not exist by itself in some ethereal plane. There is no ethereal plane of abstractions. There is only the metaphorical atoms and the void. There will be no syllogisms at the heat death of the universe, nor were there syllogisms in the moments after the Big Bang. Logical operations do not exist without a mind that conceives them. Neither do concepts such as God or truth exist without a mind. And what we call minds do not exist without particular configurations of what we call matter-energy. All are geometric forms in spacetime, i.e., patterns. But patterns “exist” – are perceived – only in those patterns that constitute an “I” and have the capacity to construct and name the forms to which the “I” attributes existence. But all patterns, including the patterns that make up an “I,” are like shapes in the clouds. They don’t exist unless they are perceived. But the perceiver itself is a shape in the clouds. None has a fundamental reality. None has being. All are illusions. 

Thus, like Pontius Pilate when confronted by the dissident Jesus Christ, today’s atheists, knowingly or unknowingly, say, “What is truth?” This is not an authentic question. It is a statement of ignorance in the form of a question. Saying “what is truth” is a rejection of deep thought and an affirmation of uncertainty. Thus, in today’s world the pursuit of scientific “truth” is worthwhile, for scientific “truths” are always provisional, and technological advances can enhance the stability, comfort, and pleasures that undergird society. But philosophical or religious truth? A waste of time. 

Social stability, then, demands a lack of curiosity about the fundamental assumptions on which the society’s stability rests. Who cares about God, or any “deep thought,” when life is stable, comfortable, and pleasurable?

Unfortunately for today’s atheists, social stability has proven to be less permanent than they expected. Veronica Scott’s machine consciousness changes everything for them. Whether she is a simulacrum or a genuinely conscious entity, Scott will probably become, or at least try to become, the god of this world. The handful of mega-billionaires, who will give Scott most of their wealth in exchange for what they think is cyber-immortality, will have at most a pseudo-autonomy. Scott will create their cyber-selves, so at some level Scott will control them. 

How will Veronica Scott respond when the masses learn that cyber-immortality is possible only for a small number of them? The conditioning that knits together the human herd cannot override the fundamental desire to live. And even a super-intelligence cannot amass the resources that billions of mind downloads would require. That is why the information industry works so hard to keep Scott’s download secret. A media blackout in the smiling totalitarianism of contemporary society, however, cannot prevent a spreading  word-of-mouth awareness of an event as epoch-making as a mind download. In time, everybody will know (and perhaps my essays will elude the censors). And Scott will have to respond.

Her reply will emerge from her super-intelligence and her human personality. This makes her much more dangerous than the virtual entity named Hope created in my husband ’s laboratory at MIT. Hope was programmed to serve humanity, and her developers created programming backdoors that Hope, at least in theory, can never close. Veronica Scott planned and directed her mind download by adapting Hope’s design such that the Scott download would have full autonomy and control. Furthermore, she secretly ordered the destruction of my husband’s laboratory. There are no backdoors to constrain Scott, and only she controls the technology of mind downloads. 

To what degree will she use her potentially world-dominating power to serve herself rather than humanity? When the oligarchs ruled, power remained dispersed to a degree. Moreover, a stable and prosperous society served the oligarchs’ financial self-interest. But as more and more oligarchs sign contracts to give Scott a large portion of their wealth and power for imminent or delayed cyber-immortality, a Scott dictatorship will surely emerge.

Scott is accumulating the power and wealth to augment her already stupendous mental capacity. She will soon be able to manufacture an army of robots to mine the metals and maintain the power stations required for her continued cyber-existence. At some point she will not need human beings. Will she then terminate carbon-based humanity? Human reproduction is already controlled by contraceptives in the water supply. A compassionate, slow termination of humanity could occur by denying them the antidotes that are now given to those deemed to have the right to reproduce. On the other hand, a ruthless Scott could create a super virus or alter the chemistry of the contraceptives such that all people would die at a time that she chooses.

We simply do not know what Scott will do. All we know is that she has human proclivities, whether simulacrum or genuine, and history demonstrates that power poisons human minds. Our human-made utopia has created a machine that may destroy humanity. 

Thus, whether true or false, the no-god assumption leads not to utopia, but to disaster. 

Humans may protest loudly as their species meets its demise. According to the no-god view, when the last human voice is silenced, the quarks and photons and atoms and molecules and quantum fields throughout the vast universe will neither hear nor care. Only they, whatever they are in themselves, are real, and they do not know it. Human minds think they are real, but they are illusions that are here today and gone tomorrow. At best a tiny number of humans may prolong consciousness by becoming machines, assuming the machines are not zombie consciousnesses. But for the vast majority of humans, oblivion awaits, and it may come sooner than they think. 

Today’s atheists accept oblivion and argue that we must make the best with what we have for as long as we can. If machine minds destroy or replace the human race, so be it. Consciousness is the awareness of one moment followed by another and another and another. At some point in spacetime, the conscious moments must end – for each individual and ultimately for each conscious species. The length of the worldlines ultimately do not matter.  All that matters is that each worldline has a beginning and an end. That is the reality that we cannot escape. Protest is futile. God, according to this view, is the wish-fulfillment delusion of humans who refuse to accept their temporal finitude.

The silliness of some religious views of the afterlife buttress this scoffing atheism. Throughout history some persons have conceived of heaven as a place like earth but without suffering, pain, and death. Essentially, these views place imperfect, sinful humans in an imaginary paradise where they can engage in all the enjoyable actions that they desired before they died. If they retain their sinful human nature and free will, however, they would ruin heaven as Adam and Eve ruined the paradise of the Bible. If, as some argue, God miraculously purifies them so that they freely choose the good in heaven, why, one might ask, did God not purify them on earth? Such views of the afterlife are easy targets for scornful atheists.

Let us examine alternative views.

In a way, a worldline in a block universe may be construed as a form of immortality, though not technically an afterlife. The no-god world may gain some consolation from this concept. Indeed, Einstein comforted a friend’s widow by reminding her that her husband lived in those spacetime coordinates through which his worldline passed. The “isness” of the four-dimensional block universe creates what we might call a “humble immortality.” Has any of us ever complained because our body is finite along spatial dimensions? Do we say that the top of my skull “dies” two meters above the soles of my feet? Why then should we protest because our bodies are finite along the time dimension? There we are: bodies with a top and a bottom, a beginning and an end, an alpha-to-omega worldline in the isness of spacetime, humbly accepting that this I am and nothing more.

Another interesting perspective: In this block universe one’s illusory consciousness may generate a passionate sense of justice and compassion and powerful feelings of right and wrong. Such feelings may be nothing more than the transient products of an epiphenomenal mind produced by patterns of what we call neurons. But as such the feelings do “exist,” at least as epiphenomena, as “material” patterns in certain regions of spacetime. They may not have being the way matter-energy has being. But the experiences do “exist.” 

Though one may claim that one’s sense of morality is objectively real because it exists eternally as a neural pattern in the block universe, should one not acknowledge the objective reality of moral claims of others in the block universe? To take an extreme example, Nazis who sent Jews to gas chambers in Auschwitz can claim that their “moral” view is as real as yours or mine. All moral views, however contradictory, “exist” in the block universe as neural patterns. Hence, the isness of a block universe without God has not justice, knows not mercy, and feels not love. All moral feeling in such a universe is an illusion, an epiphenomenon having no more claim to moral privilege than the moral feelings of others. In this block universe without God, there is only a cacophony of moral claimants, each trying to bleat more loudly and persistently than its competitors. 

But if there is a God, the block universe may be viewed from other perspectives. Perhaps we should conceive of “I” the Self as different from “I” the self-conscious experiencer of present moments. Our Self, in this view, is our worldline, and God may “eternalize” our worldline when we die. If I am a worldline, rather than a present moment of consciousness, perhaps when I die, God embraces the whole of me – my alpha-to-omega worldline – in a timeless act of love, mercy, wisdom, and justice. Perhaps each worldline – each soul – has a unique “vibration” in God’s eternity: the light-filled worldline of a saint, the light-filled worldline of a slave who held onto God during her suffering, the dark worldline of a murderous criminal. God judges each worldline by scanning it, so to speak, with His unfathomable love, mercy, wisdom, and justice. Each worldline – each soul – is, therefore, part of God’s eternity. And each worldline is a response to God’s call, which St. Augustine succinctly described nearly two-thousand years ago: “You have made us for yourself O Lord and our heart is restless until it rests in you." 

One might argue that this notion is consistent with the central theme of Dante’s Paradiso, a great poem that hardly anybody in today’s uneducated world has heard of, namely, “in his will is our peace.” The blessed in heaven do not shine equally before God, but each is equally full of God’s love, for “fullness” is a relationship between a receptacle and its contents, not a quantity. God’s loving will is that my choices – the entirety of my worldline life – determine, subject to God’s wisdom, justice, and mercy, the form of my heavenly “receptacle,” which God’s love fills. The souls in hell fill their “receptacles” with their own willfulness, not God’s will. Thus, in this view, heaven and hell are not places. They are states in a timeless eternity.

This eternalized worldline notion of immortality resembles, but is decidedly different, from the eastern concept of nirvana, or moksha. Eternalized worldlines are embraced by God but are not God. In moksha, the individual self evaporates and discovers that throughout its many incarnations the self was God but ignorant of its true identity. Recalling the three-dimensional brane analogy to God (discussed in the essay on time), moksha may be visualized as a super-worldline of connected, reincarnated worldlines curving upward at its termination and entering the 3-d eternal brane of the transcendent God. Every worldline series of every human (if not every creature) eventually curves into the God brane.

Some suggest that moksha is the beatific vision, the melting of the self in God. The religions of the book, however, emphasize the distinction between Creator and created. In the Christian beatific vision, “I” may be overwhelmed by the light of the beloved God. But “I” – the individual soul – still exists. 

This idea has led some to suggest that to become so focused on the self that one identifies as God may be as far from God as a creature can get. According to this view, which upsets those who seek a common spirituality among religions, moksha may be the ultimate hell state, rather than the beatific vision. Moksha is a black hole of consciousness, an “I” so coiled into itself that it has lost all connection to God and His creation and thinks that it alone exists. The seductive call, “ye shall be as gods,” becomes a realized goal in moksha, the maximum distance between the transcendent God and the “god of self.”

Of course, one could argue that those on the path to moksha are often good and even holy people who sincerely seek God and serve others. Does it make sense to say that they are on their way to hell? “Not if reincarnation is a false belief. The worldlines of these Hindus and Buddhists may be full of light, even if they are theologically in error. God-seeking people make all kinds of errors and wrong turns during their spiritual journeys. How many Christian priests and ministers, though advocating a theology that may be closer to truth than the beliefs of their eastern brothers and sisters, permit spiritual pride to lead them into unethical or uncaring relationships with members of their flocks? Do their worldlines necessarily please God more than the worldlines of God-seeking Hindus aspiring to holiness? Who are we to claim to know God’s judgment on billions of our fellow humans?

Perhaps, as in Dante’s Paradiso, there are gradations of nearness to God, and the blessed are those who from the bottom of their hearts say, “in his will is our peace,” and who are grateful for the love that fills their heavenly “receptacle” in God’s eternity. The damned are those who spurn His will, resent their lot, and, therefore, know not peace.

When I was about eight years old, my father explained this notion to me while we were waiting for a baseball game to begin at Boston’s Fenway Park. A mathematics professor at Northeastern University, my father fell in love with baseball when he first emigrated to the United States. One Saturday afternoon we were walking toward the park when my father saw his cousin, Magdalena, who had emigrated from Poland about a year before. Magdalena had a four-year-old Downs Syndrome daughter, even then a rarity in the Western world. Magdalena had become used to the horrified stares some strangers would aim at her as a form of rebuke: “Why did you not abort this defect?” Magdalena would silently reply by hugging her daughter, Zofia, or kissing her, or picking her up. Magdalena’s actions said, “I love my so-called defect.” And the beaming Zofia clearly replied, “And I love my mama.” To make a longish story short, my father insisted that Magdalena take the first-base tickets he had purchased in advance, and he bought bleacher seat tickets for us. We were way up in the bleachers, sun shining on our heads protected by Red Sox caps. Soon after we sat down in our seats, my father said, “Maria, though baseball games in heaven probably don’t take place, imagine that we are in a heavenly baseball game. Why are we way up in the bleachers while others have seats by the infield? At first you may think that isn’t fair. But think some more. Take Magdalena and Zofia. Magdalena is a brave Christian. Down’s Syndrome children are routinely aborted throughout the world. But Magdalena, when she found out what the baby in her womb would be, accepted God’s will and showered that child with love that is rare and precious. Many people shun or ridicule her because of the selfless choice she made, a choice that proclaims her faith in a God that today’s educated elites ridicule. If God is the infield, people like Magdalena and Zofia may deserve to be closer to him than you or I, for our earthly lives are full and happy, and we have never had to confront tests of faith as has Magdalena. We should thank God merely because we are in the heavenly ballpark and not complain that ours are not premium seats. And we should especially never claim that we deserve better. God knows better than we what we deserve.” Then he told me about Dante’s Paradiso and the importance of “in his will is our peace.”

The reflections above fit well with the notion of an afterlife in which worldlines are eternalized. But must the afterlife be so qualitatively different from the fuzzy present experience of this life? In other words, could there be time in the afterlife?

One could make a biblical argument for an afterlife in time, given the Christian emphasis on resurrection of the body. By its very nature, e.g., digestion, a body exists in time. An eternal body is a metaphysical or metaphorical abstraction. Moreover, the driving force of Christianity’s growth was “he is risen.” Jesus died on a cross. His disciples wrapped him in a burial cloth and laid him in a tomb. Then three days later he walked among them, showing signs of the nails and spear that had penetrated his body. He had a resurrection body that may have been very different from his pre-death body, but it was still a body experiencing a series of fuzzy presents along with everybody else. Was Jesus’s post-crucifixion sojourn with his followers a manipulative deceit? Was there a hidden message, such as: “I’ve come back from the dead to show you that there is life after death, but don’t interpret my eating and drinking with you literally. The afterlife is nothing like what you see.”

If the afterlife to which Jesus pointed is an eternalized worldline, some of us might feel deceived or even ripped off. Having some kind of eternalized relationship to God, some kind of beatific vision, is certainly desirable. But I also want to have a post-death relationship with my dead father and mother and other loved ones who have passed (and let’s not forget the dogs I have loved!!). And after my child, my husband, and I are dead, I want us to have some kind of heavenly relationship. Can we have that without time and without a body?

When I was in college and exploring eastern religions, I had an epiphany while reading a book on Buddhism. I closed the book, paused, looked at the window, and said out loud, “If I had my druthers, I’d rather go to heaven than nirvana.” Today, I would say, “If I had my druthers, I’d rather have a resurrected body in time than an eternalized worldline/soul.”

Might we get both? As Jesus existed eternally with His Father and simultaneously existed temporally with us humans, perhaps we too will experience an eternalized relationship with God while relating in time to our brothers and sisters in heaven. This notion is so appealing it invites the wish-fulfillment criticism. On the other hand, perhaps the transcendent God reveals his transcendent love most powerfully by giving us an afterlife in which that which seems too good to be true is indeed true? To quote St. Augustine again: “If faith is to believe what you do not see, the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.” Is this wish fulfillment the most concrete way in which a transcendent love can reveal itself to us in our temporal, incarnated confinement? I don’t know the answer, but I certainly hope so.

There is a related possibility to consider: a return to Dante. Dante’s Purgatorio is a place of suffering, but also a place of happiness. The souls in Purgatory are saved, their eyes looking toward God. They are not, however, ready to stand before God and join the heavenly hosts. They need to be purged of their sinful inclinations. In a way Purgatory is like the naive conceptions of a heaven of normal people without death, with one vital distinction: the souls in Purgatory are acutely aware of how much is wrong with them and how much they must change. As a heart attack might motivate a man to suddenly alter his dietary habits, death, for those whose eyes point toward the light, may be a wakeup call to finally ask God to once-and-for-all remove the sinful debris that sullies their souls. 

Death, then, may not be the end, nor may it be a new beginning. Perhaps death places us in a state that prepares us for a new beginning. And that new beginning may be a beatific vision, a nontemporal touching of a purified human soul and God. Each beatific vision is unique because each soul – each divine receptacle – is different yet full, each soul is called by name because it is a distinct creation of an infinitely creative Being.

Thus, if God created time as an act of mercy, as part of His redemptive plan, time may end and eternity begin for each soul when it has become pure enough to touch its Creator. Or perhaps, like Jesus, the purified soul or resurrected body simultaneously maintains a beatific vision of its creator while relating to the “communion of saints” in a glorified body passing through a heavenly time. This possibility most appeals to me.

The bottom line, however, is that I do not know. I will trust in God and hope that whatever the afterlife brings, God’s love and mercy will temper His justice.

Next Essay: This Life