(December 21, 2010 at 9:50 pm)Darwinian Wrote: What has always fascinated me is not the question "Is there life after death?" as this is obviously a simple yes or no thing but instead, if there actually is then how can it be explained? What mechanisms could be in play to allow such a thing to happen and what does that say about the way we perceive what we think of as reality?
What are the mechanisms at play? I can't say for sure, but one of the crazy ideas that I have is that the soul (which includes our actions, thoughts, and memories) probably escapes into a higher dimension when it goes to Heaven. You could also say that it gets "uploaded" into Heaven after we die. Well, this is possible because the universe itself is like a giant quantum computer which is processing information.
In a book titled "Programming the Universe," by Seth Lloyd, the author explains how the the universe acts like a powerful cosmological computer, or a quantum computer:
"The universe is made of bits. Every molecule, atom, and elementary particle registers bits of information. Every interaction between those pieces of the universe processes that information by altering those bits. That is, the universe computes, and because the universe is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, it computes in an intrinsically quantum-mechanical fashion; its bits are quantum bits. The history of the universe is, in effect, a huge and ongoing quantum computation. The universe is a quantum computer" (Lloyd, 3).
In this sense, the universe is processing our own behavior as well since our actions are producing new information, and those information gets registered by the computational nature of the universe. And according to information theory, information can never be destroyed, and that's why our deeds will not disappear either but will be stored and recorded for us in the afterlife.
Also, remember that the computational power of Heaven is probably much greater than that of the universe.
This is just a philosophical musing on the afterlife in respect to my knowledge of digital physics. I don't know if this is how it really works or not. But, interesting stuff nonetheless.
