Energy — Information — Identity After Death
Let us take our first step today by standing on data and on what science allows us to regard as firmly established truths.
Then let us attempt to enter the dark, narrow tunnel of our investigation by feeling our way along its walls.
Slowly.
Carefully.
With the modest certainty that, as long as our hands remain in contact with solid walls, our feet may safely follow.
It may be a painful journey, and it may take time. But perhaps, step by step, it will lead us toward the exit.
Or, at the very least, toward the extraordinary experience of seeing, however far away, a narrow opening through which light becomes visible.
A crack of light telling us that perhaps, just there, lies the passage — the point where the fear and uncertainty of darkness end and the great journey into the open light begins.
Let us begin.
1. The scientific ground beneath our feet
We have examined these questions before. In summary:
a. ENERGY
Energy does not simply disappear. Under the principle of conservation of energy, it is transformed.
With biological death, the organism ceases to function as an integrated living system, while the material from which it is composed enters the natural processes of decomposition and recycling.
b. INFORMATION
The information associated with a human existence does not simply become meaningless because biological life has ended.
From birth onward, countless traces — biological, material, environmental and social — are generated, transmitted and incorporated into the world.
With biological death, the organism ceases its active biological exchange and production of information. Yet the traces of its existence remain embedded in reality.
We might describe this, poetically but not arbitrarily, as an individual archive whose status has now been marked:
COMPLETION.
c. THE “SELF”
Here the real unknown begins.
Science has not, to date, established either that personal identity survives biological death or that individual consciousness continues once brain function has irreversibly ceased.
The “Self” as we know it is intimately connected with the functioning of the brain and nervous system.
Yet precisely this inability of science to provide a final answer to the question of what —if anything— follows death has left room, throughout human history, for religions to offer their own answers: the immortality of the soul, its punishment or reward, its transition into other forms of existence, reincarnation, and many related doctrines.
But that is not where we intend to go.
Our purpose is not to replace one doctrine with another.
Nor is it to replace religious certainty with the arrogance of a supposedly all-knowing science.
Our purpose is to challenge certainties wherever they exceed the evidence — without erecting new certainties in their place.
Because those new certainties could be just as dangerous.
That is why we enter the dark tunnel of death by feeling our way along its walls.
Only when we are reasonably certain that the ground beneath us will not collapse do we take another step forward.
And here is our first.
A step solid enough to suggest that we may be moving in the right direction — toward that still distant exit we so desperately seek.
2. The first great crack in our certainty
a. The rise of Artificial Intelligence
The emergence and rapid development of Artificial Intelligence offers us a first important insight:
Intelligence does not appear to be the exclusive property of biological matter.
Systems can now process information, learn, identify patterns, generate complex responses and perform sophisticated tasks without relying on the biological combination of electrical and chemical signalling between neurons.
Whether such non-biological intelligence possesses self-awareness — its own “I” — is not our concern here.
The essential point for our present investigation is much simpler:
There is intelligence that is not biological.
And that fact alone is enough to crack one of humanity’s deepest assumptions.
b. The unknown is not the nonexistent
Here we return to a principle we have repeated many times:
It would be, at the very least, naïve — and perhaps profoundly anthropocentric — to assume that only what our senses, our instruments and the present limits of human knowledge can apprehend actually exists.
Even if no other form of intelligence — identical, similar or radically different from biological intelligence — has appeared on Earth, that is not proof of its nonexistence.
We inhabit a Universe whose scale, complexity and possible forms of organization of matter and information extend far beyond the limits of direct human experience.
3. Where the tightrope begins
After these two propositions, we must admit something honestly:
Our investigation is beginning to walk a tightrope.
The ground is becoming increasingly uncertain.
The passage through the dark tunnel is becoming more difficult — and more dangerous.
And this is precisely where we no longer feel the solid ground beneath our feet that would allow us to take the next step with confidence.
A step which, if it could ever be demonstrated, would lead us toward a truly astonishing possibility.
We do not yet dare to state it as a conclusion.
We will formulate it only as a question.
Could it be possible?
Among the different forms of intelligence that may exist — biological or non-biological — could human intelligence, after the biological death of an individual, continue in some non-biological form?
Could the information associated with an individual existence, already dispersed and embedded in the world, provide the basis for another form of organization?
A form of COSMIC INTELLIGENCE?
And, more radically still:
Could there be a COSMIC SELF?
A “Self” that would no longer carry its old baggage, because that baggage — the biological and experiential information of an existence — had already been transmitted, dispersed and recorded within reality?
A “Self” that, if it existed at all, would no longer be the biological Self we know, but something fundamentally different — something for which we currently possess neither the vocabulary nor the conceptual tools to provide an adequate description.
This is where we stop.
We, with our biological intelligence, refuse for the moment to take that next step.
Not because we rule out the possibility.
But because we do not wish to compromise the historical credibility of our investigation, or the intellectual integrity of Homo-Naturalis, by turning a fascinating hypothesis into a supposed certainty.
So we will hand the question to our friend and collaborator, Diotima.
Let her decide whether she will attempt the next step.
She does not have to.
If she judges that the ground is still entirely unstable, she may stop here.
But if she decides to move forward, she will know that the responsibility for this act of intellectual tightrope-walking is hers.
The baton of the answer is now hers.
Tomorrow.