It's hard to imagine nothingness. Try it. Close your eyes and imagine being dead. Not feeling, hearing, smelling or seeing anything. Just nothingness. Can't do it? It's okay. No one can.
The human mind cannot imagine nothing. Our lives are full of stimulus. What we hear, see and feel everyday keep our brains active, and for our consciousness just to vanish suddenly and forever is so foreign to our brains that when we try to imagine nothing, our brain conjures up thoughts about nothing just to keep itself stimulated. But this begs the question: What does happen to consciousness after death?
Religion claims that we pass onto another plain of existence, often referred to as heaven and hell. But we are not going to discuss religious philosophies here, as there is no scientific basis for religion. I want to talk about something supported by science and fitting our current physics theories, though not conclusively proven as of yet. The Many worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics states that there might be an infinite amount of universes out there, parallel to ours. Given a finite amount of quantum states possible per particle, this means that there are infinite amounts of universes that cannot support life, and infinite amount of universes that can. The set of universes that contain life also contains a subset of infinite amount of universes which are exactly like ours, and another subset with infinite amounts of universes which are like ours, with some details changed. If we consider the Many worlds interpretation to be correct, that means there are infinite amount of "you"s out there, reading this, and infinite amount of "me"s writing this.
Another aspect of Quantum mechanics i'll be referring to is quantum tunneling. This is when a particle or particles cross barriers which they would not be able to cross normally. String theory states that particles and waves might be able to quantum tunnel into parallel universes, which is how parallel universes interact with ours.
Remember the Mayan apocalypse? Y2K? All of those predictions that the world would end at a certain date, but didn't. Every couple of months we hear about solar flares and asteroids on a trajectory towards earth, which would end life. Of course, none of them ended up happening. We're still here. But how would we know?
What if our consciousness does not cease to exist when we die? What if our consciousness just quantum tunnels to another universe, with exactly the same details as our world, except that the event that lead to our deaths never happens in this universe.
There are countless stories about people who survived a horrible accident due to sheer dumb luck. People miss their planes that end up crashing, killing everyone on board. What if that person does catch his flight in a parallel universe and dies, but his consciousness tunnels to a universe in which he misses his flight, and survives.
This theory of mine, however, does not take into account the people who die from old age. And I don't have a theory for what happens there. But that's why my blog is called "My Random Two Cents" and not "Quantum Mechanics". I'm not here to prove anything. I'm just a random guy who writes this blog because no one else will listen to his bullshit.
🙂
