So, as part of the thematic foundation for The Story I am working on, I keep rolling over the ideas of death, life, reincarnation and other various afterlife-related thoughts. Here’s the thing: Elyen, the story, focuses very heavily on multiple universes. That’s key. Couple that with my fascination for:
1) anything to do with FTL phenomena,
2) the impending technological Singularity/birth of smarter-than-human AI,
3) quantum computing,
4) evolution,
5) chaos/entropy vs order and control, and
6) the relative nature of time/eternal vs temporal phenomena
[Edit: 7) the wonder of biology]
…and we get an incredibly rich mixture of concepts from out of which can emerge any number of plausible philosophies, including those along the death-is-only-the-beginning line of reasoning.
To give a type of example — and just to be clear, as abstract, pseudo-technical and intellectual-sounding as these concepts and my particular take on them (including the following example) may sound, I have absolutely zero factual proof that any of what I have to conjecture is actually valid — think about the following event:
You’re walking down the street, on the sidewalk of course, and you come up to an intersection. It’s a busy and bustling city, so there are traffic lights and such to direct the flow of vehicles and pedestrians safely in turns. You wait for your right to proceed across the street. Once the light changes, you begin to do so. Suddenly, a vehicle approaches heading directly towards you from your left side on, moving dangerously fast and showing no signs of stopping.
In any number of universes, you could be distracted at that moment. You could be listening to your ipod with the headphone volume cranked up. You could have initiated your crossing a few seconds earlier or later (depending on your proclivity towards j-walking or not paying attention right away when the light changes, for example). Others could be crossing with you, walking faster or slower. Road conditions might be slippery. The exact conditions could have been anything. This is just one time that you happen to find yourself crossing one particular street out of potentially hundreds, maybe even thousands of times crossing the very same street.
What happens? Theoretically, everything. But only one possible outcome will ever actually be realized by you, personally. What that is remains utterly unknown until it happens. Obviously, certain possibilities appear to be incredibly more probable than others, but there’s still always a statistical chance of experiencing a fluke. More to the point, let me ask you something: Have you ever had a close call? Ever find yourself in a situation very much like this? Nearly struck by a vehicle who’s driver failed to slow down and come to a stop or swerve out of your path as you were about to cross? Ever actually been struck in a situation like that?
Ever die from a collision like that? Or at all?
What kind of question is that? I’ll tell you. In my view, I actually do seriously question how life and death works sometimes. I do believe death can visit us all, perhaps at any moment if it’s our time, but I do also acknowledge that I could be wrong about that. Yes, I see the graveyards filled with the bodies of those for whom death has inescapably brought about the end of their physical lives. Many countless people who once lived no longer do, but I don’t believe that things are nearly as cut and dry as they may appear to be.
A time or two, I have experienced a close call, as with the above example. In these moments, I feel a rush of fear and excitement, the tell tale fight-or-flight reactions brought about by a surge of adrenaline. Again, I have no proof of this, but I’ve come to suspect that there’s more, much more to that feeling than simple physical responses.
I believe in parallel universes, as stated already. In a vast number of those universes, I died. And in those brief moments, I believe that I’ve felt it. At least, other versions of me (including yours truly) did.
Here’s the thing: all matter can theoretically exist in a wave-particle duality. What we see around us are atoms and molecules that have been “collapsed”. As in, if a brick is a brick when we look at it now, it’s still going to be a brick if we look away, and still going to be a brick when we look back a short time later. There’s exceedingly little possibility that the brick might spontaneously become a puddle of water, or a small animal, or any other truly non-brick thing without some interacting conversion process affecting it first. The substance it’s made of is fixed, and once it is fixed, it won’t spontaneously unfix and refix as something else (presumably).
When it comes to the future, however, the unknown of events which are yet to be, it works kind of like this: In front of you is a picture. It’s really blurry. However, the longer you look at it for, the clearer it gets. If you look at the picture long enough, and if the clear picture is of something you recognize, then, in all likelihood, you will eventually identify it before long. However, while the picture is blurry and still of something as-of-yet unknown, it might as well be a blurry picture of anything.
So what if it really was a picture of anything? What if the blurry picture was a composite of thousands of differing, but perhaps similar, images, all morphed into one? However, as it becomes clearer, the number of pictures from which it is comprised begins to drop down from thousands, to hundreds, to tens, to a few, until eventually, finally, just one.
What if that is how the future works? Full of possibilities counter-weighted with probabilities, and as we near each successive, seemingly instantaneous moment, each new frame or slice of unfolding events, each new “now”, the picture unfolds revealing it’s singular clarity, but not without first having whittled down the possible other outcomes which might have been instead.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, in a multiverse where the unfolding events involve a street, a pedestrian, and a car failing to stop at their red light all brought together, the “pictures of the future” involve all the possibilities mentioned above (distraction, slippery conditions, loud music, etc.) and many, many more besides. However, the way that the entirety of the events actually plays out can only involve one fixed, final, irrevocable outcome for someone experiencing them.
Per universe.
My argument is that similar, nearby universes played out similar events and arrived at slightly — or perhaps greatly — differing outcomes. Perhaps countless numbers of them.
In any number of those outcomes, for those of us who are alive now and reading this and able to relate to the experience of a close call event like in the example above, is it really all that much of a stretch to believe that we’ve died in some of them? To press the point, the “closer the call” was (the more anxiety/fight-or-flight responses we felt, etc.), perhaps what really happened was that we felt the reverberations of our own deaths more acutely than in situations where the events leading to our deaths in other universes were much more remote.
I believe that universes abide by a proximity principle, and this may, perhaps, be one of the only ways we sub lightspeed-existent human beings have of interacting with other such otherwise unreachable places in the truly wide, fascinating and mysterious world that we may find ourselves in.
So, I’m not saying we’re all free to jump in front of cars, but I would hazard a guess that should a car strike us and kill us in one universe, we would instantaneously snap into awareness of ourselves in a universe where we did not die. This idea may rightfully be challenged by the idea of fate and whether or not we all, in fact, have our inescapable, predetermined time to die. At this time, I have no thoughts to weigh in on that matter, but I’m sure I’ll dream up something that seems sensible for the sake of The Story soon enough (I swear, I don’t purposely try to create alliteration in my phrases, but it does seem to happen a lot).
Also, it is an inescapable fact that universes in which we die, assuming they’re not also universes where it is routinely common to come back from being legally dead, are also universes in which we would leave behind loved ones. That’s never fun, for anyone involved. So, just to stress the point, don’t jump in front of cars. All I’m saying is, if it’s not your time (if there even is such a thing as “your time”), you won’t even realize how often you die on a regular basis in nearby universes anyways, so even if this idea infects you and blows your mind open a little, don’t fuss about it. Seriously. Why? ‘Cause you live in a universe where you’re too busy living, and that is honestly awesome. So go on, live and be, let whatever happens will happen. Just be sure look both ways when crossing the street.
[Edit: There’s much about these notions that have bothered me to think about in the years since initially musing about them. One example is the case of serious injuries. At what point can/does/should transference to a different, safer, but highly similar universe happen? I have no answers, only hopeful ideals]
Elyen Alive 