Is death a singularity?

Have you ever felt someone staring at you only to spin around and see it’s true? Hold that thought. We’ll get back to it.

Culturally Dead

Western culture considers death to occur at a point in time. Doctors register the time of death to the minute. A person passing away must be declared dead charted and meticulously documented, then buried, and be no longer. That is, as most things are, a mental construct. A concept deeply rooted in our (western) way of thinking. In that sense death is scission, a sharp-edged act that has a clear before and after. Let’s dwell on that for a moment.

Before and after stem from our perception of time. You know, that forward-moving, never-go-back stream in which we flow from birth to, well … death. I’d like to challenge those concepts.

Time Takes a Cigarette, Puts it in Your Mouth

Quantum physics is an odd realm. Counterintuitive and always surprising. However, at the fundamental level of quantum mechanics, the basic laws governing the dynamics of particles are time-symmetric; that is, the equations work the same whether time moves forward or backward.

This symmetry suggests that, at a microscopic level, there’s no preferred direction of time flow. The forward flow of time, as we experience it, arises from statistical mechanics and thermodynamics applied to the collective behavior of large numbers of particles, rather than from the underlying laws of quantum mechanics themselves.

Quantum phenomena such as entanglement, delayed choice experiments, and the transactional interpretation theory (on which we would dwell in a moment) all suggest time may not be what we take it to be (I am not going to explain entanglement and delayed choice, however, you are welcome to read all about these fascinating theories on the above links). The question of time’s flow is also complex in cosmology and general relativity. The general theory of relativity describes gravity as the curvature of spacetime by mass and energy, and in this framework, the structure of spacetime itself evolves. While our universe has a clear direction of time from the Big Bang to its current state, understanding why time flows forward is still an open question, closely tied to the conditions at the beginning of the universe.

In layman’s terms, whether time flows in a forward-only fashion is at most, debatable, which, in turn, may have major ramifications on our perception of death.

Pebbles in the Stream

One would agree that parents pass on genes and knowledge to their offspring. However, part of that knowledge and many of those genes were provided by the parent’s ancestry. Moreover, it is widely agreed nowadays that epigenetics, once a scorned theory, does apply, where life experiences of past ancestors have modified their gene expressions passing on those modifications to their descendants.

It seems each and every one of us is a pebble on a string. A continuum rather than a singularity. This however does not resonate well with the acute individualism embedded in our (western) way of thinking.

Whakapapa is a Maori philosophical construct implying that all things have an origin
(in the form of a primal ancestor from which they are descended), and that,
ontologically, things come into being through the process of descent from an
ancestor or ancestors. Furthermore, because Maori cosmogony has only one
set of primal parents or ancestors (Ranginui and Papatuanuku) from whom
all things ultimately trace descent, all things are related.

Is it possible early Maoris have stumbled onto something?

Going back to the transactional interpretation theory of quantum physics, one is presented with the concepts of offer, advanced and retarded waves.

An “offer wave” is what we might traditionally think of as a wave function in quantum mechanics, which represents the probability of finding a particle in a particular state or location. These waves are called “retarded” because they move forward in time from the source (like ripples in a pond emanating from a stone thrown into it) towards a potential absorber (like another particle or a detector). It’s as if a particle sends out an “offer” into the future, saying, “Here’s where I might end up.”

“Advanced waves,” are essentially the opposite of offer waves; they move backward in time from a potential absorber to the source. It’s like the future possibility is sending a response back to the source, saying, “Okay, I’m ready to accept you here. So, in terms of the transactional interpretation theory, a “transaction” is an offer wave and an advanced wave creating a sort of handshake across time.

This handshake solidifies the probability into reality, determining where and how the particle will manifest. It’s a bit like both the future outcome and the initial possibility have to agree on the result, making the quantum event a sort of negotiation between the past, present, and future.

Head blown? Let’s put it in layman’s terms. Reality is determined by back-and-forth messages sent to and from the future.

Why would we then assume these micro-level interactions have no effect on the macro? Do future generations, our siblings and their siblings, have an effect on this moment in our reality? Are we one elongated organism infinitely stretched across time comprising ourselves, our ancestors, and future siblings? A pebble in an endless stream?

And what if we could live forever to witness future generations and analyze those reciprocations.

Upload Your Mind

Current AI technology is rapidly converging with direct brain interfaces. Neuralink, a company that aims to help people with paralysis communicate by allowing them to remotely control devices using brain activity, is developing a brain implant that bridges (interfaces) biological brains and digital computers. AI researchers have recently shown a mind-reading device that translates brain waves (in EEG format) to images and texts envisioned by the test subject.

In 2004, Henry Markram, lead researcher of the Blue Brain Project, stated that “it is not [their] goal to build an intelligent neural network”, based solely on the computational demands such a project would have.

It will be very difficult because, in the brain, every molecule is a powerful computer and we would need to simulate the structure and function of trillions upon trillions of molecules as well as all the rules that govern how they interact. You would literally need computers that are trillions of times bigger and faster than anything existing today.

Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, 2004

Five years later, after a successful simulation of part of a rat’s brain, Markram was much more bold and optimistic. In 2009, he claimed that “A detailed, functional artificial human brain can be built within the next 10 years”. Less than two years into it, the project was recognized to be mismanaged and its claims overblown, and Markram was asked to step down, however, research in the field goes on. And that is but one direction.

Current AI technology such as the one depicted in the below video, was considered fictional a mere two years ago. The newest AI models are not only able to freely converse using natural language rather create images, videos, and music from written descriptions. The AI landscape is rapidly becoming multi-modal, combining the visual, auditory, and speech into one. Would we see a full artificial humanoid machine soon? The odds are in its favor.

This brings up the question, if those artificial entities would be so capable, could we at some point upload our minds into them? Could we digitally live forever?

Any way this goes, it seems humans would be able to upload their brain content into some sort of digitized form to some extent. The operative word being extent.

If we assume the brain is simply the sum of all its neural links it may seem possible to copy its content to an artificial neural network. But is it? If we consider our previous trip down the quantum transactional theory and its concept of time, it may be that our brains are but a single apparatus connected to multiple other “past” and “future” brains on the quantum level. If that is the case how can we expect a neural brain dump to represent the full capacity of a mind of some “individual” without copying the quantum links across “time”? Were the early dualists right, and we do actually have what they loosely referred to as a soul?

Me, Myself and I

Assuming we do succeed in uploading our minds into some sort of digital form, be it an artificial neural network, a quantum computer, or any future technology that captures our minds in their entirety. What then? Could those copies of our self(s) be duplicated?

History has shown that any technology would eventually be hacked. Hence we should assume the above would be no different. People will duplicate uploaded minds (possibly planting them into artificial bodies or humanoid robots). The notion of a single self would then be undermined, as me, myself and I may be walking the same mall avenue simultaneously. Would those copies still be … me? Not really as they occupy a different place in space, hence feed on a different set of sensory inputs and experiences. They started as “me” immediately evolving into “themselves”, in which sense they are not “me” anymore, and I cannot live forever in “their” duplicated minds.

Death. Finally.

Ancient, as well as, some contemporary cultures see death as part of a contiguous process. Some describe it as a path to another life, others presume the “soul” (whatever that means) is eternal. The common thread woven-through those belief systems (for lack of a better term) is that what we perceive as biological death is merely a phase in a much larger picture.

So is death final? Can we live forever on the quantum level? Create copies of our “self”, sending it forward in time? The answer is yet to be revealed, however, we cannot dismiss the possibility that death (and time) are an illusion, a way of interpreting the macro-world using the blunt biological brains we are provided with. After all, as so many cultures have defied the singularity of death, it may be oversimplistic, not to say rude, to dismiss them as primitive or non-scientific.

Do you sense past generations staring at your back?