Resolving the ‘Natural Afterlife’ issue: It Seems There’s No Real 'Natural Afterlife' After All

 

Natural Afterlife proponent Bryon Ehlmann insists I have no clue about how the NA works, and that “there is no violation of the 2^nd law of thermodynamics”.  He writes:

“Because the natural afterlife involves absolutely nothing that is physically any different from what science assumes occurs at or after death, it cannot possibly violate any physical laws, including the 2nd law of thermodynamics. If it does violate these laws, then such laws are being violated every time someone dies.”

 

Let’s drop the semantics and just cut to the chase: whether we are talking about the dead person locked into an “ideation” or a “perception” it still requires ENERGY to sustain it.  This is irrespective of whether the person is actually DEAD and in a natural AFTER-life, or is "near" - dead, in which case remaining living processes ensure further energy inputs!

Meanwhile, you cannot have a perception for an already dead man, unless you are arguing for a non-physical existent, in which case your afterlife is little different from supernaturalism.

 Now, since energy at death has reached the ultimate disordered state, as I showed in my blog post of Feb. 10, it means there is no further capability to support any kind of an ordered state, i.e. bearing content or information. This includes a “perception” which, irrespective of being for dead man or living, must embody an energy content per bit. This informational energy per bit has been quantified as 0.693 kT where k is Boltzmann’s constant and T is the ambient temperature.

 As for “laws being violated every time someone dies” – yes – they seemingly are, by the natural afterlife brigade! Specifically the 2^nd law of thermodynamics is being violated. We are expected to believe that an entity in a state of maximal entropy, including its brain, can be expected to give rise to any kind of “perception”.

 
But wait! Hold strain! Evidently I got it all wrong and my presumption that the natural afterlife is really an AFTERLIFE, is totally mistaken! Evidently, according to a further comment from Mr. Ehlmann,  I have conflated a pre-death perception with a post –death “never ending dream” or dream state (never mind proponents refer to it as an NED, or “never ending dream”).   It’s time to really clean up the language here, especially the  murky semantics.

Fortunately, Mr. Ehlmann’s next comments help immensely:

“My bottom line: the natural afterlife DOES NOT “persist indefinitely” in any physical way following death and thus needs no energy to support it!”

 But again, the problem is in the semantics! If it “does not persist indefinitely in any physical way following death”, then what NON-physical way is left?   It is clear that we are being led into metaphysical territory here. The only alternative is the supernatural.  

Let’s lay this out in clear terms: There are only two defined possibilities for bracketing conditions of life and afterlife: the physical and non-physical. If then the conditions don’t meet the first, then the second are all that’s left, and the only non-physical realm which has been adequately elaborated (by theologians) is the supernatural.

 

Bryon could help us out here by providing the necessary and sufficient conditions for the natural “afterlife” to occur, but he has not yet done so. This shows me the NA concept isn’t clear in his own mind. It’s more a matter of words or rhetoric, with overtones of philosophy.

Fortunately, an additional, clarifying  comment by Mr. Ehlmann seems to clear the way for final resolution, making it feasible for us to not even have to ‘agree to disagree’:

Your blog posts of Feb. 9-10 clearly indicate that you mistakenly think that the natural afterlife requires a dream state that survives death. IT DOES NOT! A timeless, everlasting natural afterlife exists only as a perception in the mind of the dying person BEFORE death. The combination of matter and energy required to produce this perception does not survive death.

 

Okay, I guess I can be forgiven for taking too literally the natural afterlifers’ NED – or “Never ending dream”….or AFTER-life concept. So, okay it’s not a never-ending dream after all, it exists only as a “perception” in the mind of the dying person before death. So, in other words, the natural after life doesn’t exist at all!  There is NO  “after”  in any real, objective sense.

 What we have here then is a phenomenon of subjective time – experienced by the dying person before he shuffles his mortal coil.

 If this is so, then Ehlman is correct that the 2^nd law doesn’t apply. (However, if he objects to the subjective time format, he essentially contradicts himself).

 The downside is that then there is no genuine afterlife, only a semantics ploy based on a perception that erupted in the dying person’s mind before death. Nothing is carried on.

 Let’s now examine subjective time as represented in the graphic shown at top. Here I plot the subjective time t on the abscissa vs. the proper time (actual clock time) T, in the objective physical world.  We assume an inertial reference frame to measure T, and no relativistic motion.  In addition, we adopt the (Henry Stapp) version of the Copenhagen Interpretation and assume that the angle f is linked to the presence of an evolving wave function y so long as there is an objective passage of time.  (In which case the time -dependent Schrodinger equation applies).

 As shown, the peculiar nature of subjective time is that a psychological, internal state is able to “stretch” the experience of objective or proper time. In the case shown, 1 minute is stretched to roughly 4 mins. of subjective time, though it could also be 1 hour vs.4  hours, or 1 yr. vs, 4  years. The point is that given an appropriate psychological state to induce it, yes, the personal experience of time can be subjectively extended at the level of t, but despite that the actual clock time hasn’t changed.  (I.e. minutes are still minutes, hours are still hours, etc. Perception doesn't change the units of proper time, only internal or subjective time!)

 Now,  what if the extreme case occurs such that f = 0?    This logically means there is no further evolution of  y   in time.  (Hence, by the CI model, consciousness is no longer applicable since it requires y,  according to Stapp's CI variant).  If we are reluctant to identify definite states, i.e. death – then we might use an analog of the limit concept such that:

 lim  _{t ® ¥}    (T /t)  =   tan f = 0 

In other words, as the subjective time t tends toward infinity, the tangent of f  tends to 0, and of course so does the proper (clock) time T. (When T = 0 entropy ceases to enter into  further considerations. Bear in mind in our context here,  T is paired to the person's biological processes. Thus, at T= 0 there is full biological death)

 Bear in mind given the use of a limit here, we aren’t technically talking of a post death state, we are only approaching death as the time T  ® 0 (i.e. t ®  ¥).   But for all intents, to the person, it is a "timeless" state. In effect, we have finally come to agreement in what Ehlmann refers to as:

“A timeless, everlasting natural afterlife exists only as a perception in the mind of the dying person BEFORE death”

Indeed, in the subjective temporal context  the person would be in a timeless state, since for him the clock time T = 0 (i.e. “timeless”) but in his experience his perception is “ever lasting” given the subjective time t ®  ¥. (Again, bear in mind the limit concept!)

 My problem again, is the use of the term “after life” for this pre-death subjective, temporal anomaly  – experienced by the dying person. Indeed, given Ehlmann admits the NED isn’t a true post-death state then it bears some analogy to the NDE, which also isn’t a genuine post death state  - only “near” death. (I won’t get into all the technicalities of how NDEs differ from NEDs).

I am not sure what term (or acronym)  is better suited, but perhaps we might finally be able to agree on:

Ersatz afterlife, or NEAR Afterlife, e.g. NAL

Of course, this means that  the de Broglie wave option is the only true natural afterlife left – justified by the name!   That is, it is applicable to the post-death state, unlike the NED, which Ehlmann admits is only applicable to the pre-death state (irrespective of whatever “perceptions” the person has)

 

One more caveat. The Heisenberg energy- time uncertainty principle, e.g.

D E D t  ³  ħ  

Can certainly be applied to the case of a dying person’s synapses up to the point the proper clock time T = 0 (i.e. all biological 'clocks' cease). Hence, Ehlmann’s complaints that it’s “not applicable” are irrelevant. So long as any (biological) clock time is recorded, one can estimate energy in the dying person’s synapses using it.

In conclusion, it occurs to me – after seeing all these semantic contortions (in order to proffer an “afterlife” that’s not really an afterlife) - that the NAL proponents are more lost in their own rhetoric than they realize. It also brings to mind the old adage of Lord Kelvin: "Unless a man can quantify what he's talking about, he isn't saying anything."

But at least it appears we can finally end this debate if the NALs will at last acknowledge that what they have is no real afterlife but a facsimile of one- based on their insistence of a perception in the mind of the dying person BEFORE death.

Getting a Grip on "Temporal Illusions" and What They Mean

Ever since a 6 -year old video emerged of (then) Salk Institute intern James Holmes giving a 10 minute talk on "temporal illusions" - which can currently be viewed in toto at the website of the San Diego Union Tribune - the blogosphere has gone nuts with what this means. (Never mind Holmes' mentor at Salk, John Jacobson, told reporters that despite the presentation, Holmes' didn't appear to understand the basic science behind the work.)

Some bloggers have surmised the research meant that Holmes intended to "go back in time" and change the past so he could change the future or some such rot. Or, that he intended to alter his memory of what he intended to do in the future. When one watches the video one beholds Holmes waxing on about "subjective time" but in fact subjective time is a well known phenomenon not requiring peculiar neuro-science degrees, insights or computations. For example, G.J. Whittrow in his 'The Nature of Time' (Pelican Books, 1972, p. 103)gives a good account (with examples) of what is meant by "subjective time".

All it means is that the passage of interior time for a person, anchored in his particular consciousness, passes - or appears to pass - much more slowly depending on the event. If I am sitting in the dentist's chair and waiting for a crown to be fitted, this time will pass much more slowly, as compared to a delightful family occasion or party that appears to pass excessively fast. In more than one sense, then, subjective time is a psychological time for the person - but is not necessarily an "illusion", since by all accounts objective time (as recorded by the person's watch) still tells the true story. There is no contradiction or subversion of causality, in other words.

In a previous blog  I cited Alex Rosenberg's book The Atheist's Guide to Reality and pointed out that perceptual systems are defective in the sense of being hindsight-biased: due to the finite speed of signal transmission, and delays due to neural processing,  so changes in our immediate environments do not register in our experience instantaneously.  Rosenberg bases all these on documented experiments, such as those by Lüder Deecke and Hans Helmut Kornhuber in 1964, showing that all human actions precede conscious decisions to perform them. For example, Rosenberg observes (p. 152) that: "On average it takes 200 milliseconds from conscious willing to wrist flexing and finger pressing".

Thus, to the ordinary (sensory deluded) human it appears as if he's willed and initiated the action, but he really hasn't. It's all an illusion. As Rosenberg goes on:


"But the cortical processes responsible for wrist flexing started 500 ms earlier. "

In other words, 500 ms before a test subject depressed a button to indicate when he felt the actual conscious act of willing was initiated. As Rosenberg concludes (ibid.):

"In other words, wrist flexing is already set in motion, and everything needed to complete it has already taken place 300 ms before the subjects are conscious of deciding to flex the wrist and press the button"

Rosenberg then goes on to argue the basis for "free will' is destroyed if the causality presumptively underlying it is a fiction. If the outcome has occurred before your actual intended action to effect it, there is no "free will" involved, the action was essentially done for you.  Rosenberg then adopts this as a grounding for his notion that we are beings entirely governed by "blind sight". (I.e. p. 155, `Driving Through Life with Both Eyes Fixed on the Rearview Mirror').In other words, all our sensory outputs are based on ex post facto- conducted neural process corrections to much earlier sensory inputs that, for lack of a better term, need to be transduced.

The point is we aren't equipped to gain real time access to anything in our world.

The obvious implication? "Consciously deciding to do something is not the cause of doing it"

Cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett in his paper : "Temporal anomalies of consciousness: implications of the uncentered brain" provides a more technical cognitive analysis of how subjective time can be a victim of the sort of delayed neural processes discussed by Rosenberg and others. Dennett begins by focusing on “macroscopic time intervals” as he writes:

“This picture of how conscious experience must sit in the brain is a natural extrapolation of the familiar and undeniable fact that for macroscopic time intervals, we can indeed order events into the categories "not yet observed" and "already observed" by locating the observer and plotting the motions of the vehicles of information relative to that point. But when we try to extend this method to explain phenomena involving very short time intervals, we encounter a logical difficulty: If the "point" of view of the observer is spread over a rather large volume in the observer's brain, the observer's own subjective sense of sequence and simultaneity must be determined by something other than "order of arrival" since order of arrival is incompletely defined until we specify the relevant destination. If A beats B to one finish line but B beats A to another, which result fixes subjective sequence in consciousness? (cf. Minsky, 1986, p.61) Which point or points of "central availability" would "count" as a determiner of experienced order, and why? "


This, of course, is based on Dennett's model of consciousness explicated in his book, Consciousness Explained. in which he uses the concept of "multiple drafts". That is, a given conscious manifestation, of word or action, is the end product of editing and selection from amongst a raft of  potential "drafts". Just as writers go through dozens of drafts before a final product emerges, so the individual consciousness edits and refines many drafts before its product is released to the external world of perception. The Multiple Drafts model thereby avoids the tempting mistake of supposing that there must be a single narrative (the "final" or "published" draft) that is canonical--that is the actual stream of consciousness of the subject. There is scope for perceptual as well as temporal variation....and illusion.

In the case of the latter, retroactive “editing” can occur that removes at various points of the “memory arcade” those incidents, verbal outbursts and confrontations the self may not wish to recall, or "own".  Voila! One gets a temporal re-constitution of events, or what may be called a “temporal illusion” .  The author describes  the process thusly:

“Consider… a Stalinesque mechanism: in the brain's editing room, located before consciousness, so there is a delay, a loop of slack, as it were, like the "tape delay" used in broadcasts of "live" programs which gives the censors in the control room a few seconds to bleep out obscenities before broadcasting the signal.  . In the editing room, first frame A, of the red spot, arrives, and then, when frame B, of the green spot, arrives, some interstitial frames (C and D) can be created and then spliced  into the film (in the order A,C,D,B) on its way to projection in the theater of consciousness. By the time the "finished product" arrives at consciousness, it already has its illusory insertion. “

So, for example, if  I am aware of the visual delay effect for most humans and insert an altered image or action in the delay space, I can essentially game the subject's reality and incept a temporal illusion. "Wait a minute! I could have sworn that lady had dark glasses on! Now she doesn't!"

This is the actual meaning and context for temporal illusions. So no, we need not worry that at any time Holmes will suddenly materialize into the past - and escape the not so nice future that awaits him!