n.11.19.What Happens When You Die - v1.1

What Happens When You Die and other Questions of Consciousness

What happens when you die you ask:
Not that much. If your head were to blow up, and then all the atoms came crashing back together, right to where they were, there would be a hiccup in consciousness, but things would go on the same after that. If that process took 10^-10,000 seconds, then this obviously would not cause a problem. At that time scale, everything is fuzzy, or uncertain, and continuous. Particles can no longer be approximated by describing them as points in space, they need to be represented according to their true nature, which is that of continuous functions from space-time to the complex plane. The often seen picture of a spherical electron cloud around a hydrogen nucleus is really a drawing of a 3-dimensional shape for which 99.999% of the magnitude of the electron is inside. Meaning, if you took the integral of the magnitude of the electron function over the ball, and then over space-time, the ratio would be 0.99999. This is usually stated as there being a 99.999% probability of “finding the electron” inside the sphere. The surface of the sphere is like an equa-probability surface. If for any given level of probability an electron can be represented by a ball (s-orbital electrons at least), then the explosion-implosion would be like a spike appearing and then disappearing on the surface of the ball. It would be a small disturbance in the radial symmetry. A 10^-10,000 second blip on an electron would be like an extra grain of sand on a desert. Does it make the Earth any less smooth? So, consciousness does not cease under a micro-time-scale explosion-implosion, therefore, it will not cease under a macro-time length explosion-implosion. The same would be true if after a nuclear explosion, all of the atoms in your head floated into space, and then after 10^100 years became some convoluted nebula such that cognition waves could propagate with the exact same dynamics. This would be like a super long delay between explosion and implosion. If nothing is happening in the interim, then this increase in orders of magnitude of delay is meaningless. What if thoughts do happen in the interim? What would that be like?
Suppose one of your neurons goes offline, or dies, it happens. You are pretty much the same. Now, lose a chunk of brain matter and things could be different. Again, nothing much could happen, you could have trouble regulating your emotions, being able to think of words but not speak them, go blind, have amnesia, not be able to form new memories, or have trouble with mathematical reasoning (among other things). Which boils down to: nothing, trouble with system regulation software, difficulty with input, difficulty with output, memory problems, and difficulty with symbol manipulation. So, when you are dead, you don’t have senses, can’t speak, can’t reason, and can’t get yourself to concentrate. Even if you could, you don’t have any memory. Which means you can’t remember what it was like to be any other way, or your life, what emotions are, what type of person you are, what ethics even are, or what language is. So that sucks, infinite confusion, total entropy. But, subjective time can only be measured in terms of instances of thoughts, so you may not experience discomfort very often.
Do you still exist then? Yes. There exists some probability that for any given moment, a thought erupts. Well, thoughts happen all the time, they are just indecipherable by the virtually non-existent conscious mind (just as most of our thoughts are indecipherable to the conscious mind now while we live in our brains). There also exists the probability that coherent thought will happen at any given moment. Of course I get the feeling that cumulative probability of ever having coherent thought again is like 10^-100, not accounting for my misunderstandings of the laws of physics or God. Which brings me to my next point, does God exist? Yes. If you say that any consciousness that encompasses the whole universe is God. This is the proof of the existence of God. The electron functions of electrons “in the Alpha Centauri system” have non-zero amplitude inside your skull, so they interact with your thoughts. Technically then, everyone is God, it is just that our subsets of God are a little less omniscient and omnipotent than advertised. Can there be a more impressive God? Sure. Who knows how the universe ends, except maybe pmf. In the event of a Gnabgib or an entropy death, the universe may become more consciousness friendly. But maybe God exists outside the laws of physics you say? Well, the laws of physics are by definition a set of laws that describe how the universe works, so if there is a significantly powerful God (consciousness encompassing the whole universe), then the laws of physics will reflect that (i.e. we may need to tweak them a little). So, that’s what happens when you die, why there is a God, and why God is not supernatural.

Are ants conscious? Yes. Your brain could be trimmed down and re-wired to be an ant’s, right? Human-you is conscious, ant-you is conscious, therefore, ants are conscious. And since you could become a puddle of water, those are conscious too. Any collection of particles capable of propagating cognition waves is conscious. Because cognition waves are just currents, pretty much any system, or set of particles, that has a fluidic element is conscious. Which means, your brain has a consciousness, your hand has a consciousness, your head has a consciousness, and your whole body has a consciousness. All distinct. Overlapping, but distinct. And the collection of all particles/forms of matter/the entire universe satisfies the fluidic conditions, so there’s your God. Hi God!

What about cryogenics? A consciousness is composed of cognition waves, in fact, it is defined by it. Once a brain is frozen, do the cognition wave dynamics resemble those of when the brain was active? When the brain was active, the propagating medium was neurons and synapses, and the propagators where electric currents and neurotransmitters. In a frozen brain, the only propagators available are sound waves. If the neurons conduct sound much more efficiently that the surrounding tissue, the notion of direction of information flow is the same, inhibitory and excitatory waves exist, and threshold potential concept remains in effect, cognition wave dynamics (of sound waves) *might* resemble those of thoughts when the brain was active. If they were very close, you would experience total entropy at, I dunno, 10^-8 the rate of thinking while alive. If the brain was re-activated, would you reconstitute? It would be a process of flocculation vs overwriting. As brain tissue re-activates, it has its own consciousness. The dead brain exerts cognitive pressure on the active tissue and vice versa. Suppose you had a chunk of active neurons in the middle of a dead brain. When they fire, they send a signal into a bunch of dead neurons. Upstream there are dead neurons. Now, the cognition waves coming in to the live neurons are in the form of sound, and don’t really do anything to the live tissue. However, as the dead neurons downstream come to life, they are immediately controlled by the active neurons. Therefore, that part of the consciousness is overwritten. The brain needs to be re-animated in such a way that the initial activity of the active neurons is controlled by the cognition waves of the dead brain. This is like starting a jack hammer in the middle of a hurricane and expecting it to go up and down with respect to the wind and not oscillate at the designed frequency. To transfer consciousness, you need a cognition wave mapping function. More specifically, you need a system that can translate cognition waves from one “brain” to another “brain”. The “brain” that is being written from is expanding its consciousness, that is how a transfer happens. It expands in to new territory, and then the old territory is removed. With no “write” function from the dead brain consciousness to the re-animated tissue consciousness, no transfer/expansion takes place. It is about as difficult as getting the bullet passing through your brain to be integrated in to your consciousness.

But since there won’t be excitatory and inhibitory forces in the dead brain, information flow will be reversed (dendrites should vibrate easier than axons), and there would be no threshold potential notion, cognition waves in a dead brain would probably not resemble those of a living brain. In fact, because of the ability for sound to come in through the skull, the fraction of consciousness that is outside the skull is quite large. In a very short time, seconds maybe, the radius that houses 90% of the domain of the consciousness would probably be several miles. Maybe in that radius there is a fetus getting its first neurons. There is probably a better chance of your consciousness overtaking the fetal brain then than your own brain during re-animation many years from now. So in short, when you freeze yourself, you have a better chance of re-incarnation than actually ever waking up in your own brain.

I find it interesting that so many people pursue cryogenics in the face of the question “Is it really you when the brain wakes up, or do you just die and a new consciousness sets up shop”. Pretty basic question, yet somehow side stepped as not material. I mean, you are building this great contraption to kill yourself with a hunch that you won’t really die. That’s about as sensible as spending tens of millions of dollars to build a space station, only to fly up in to it just to play Russian Roulette. And apparently the gun is fully loaded.

KimWearsKim

v.1.1