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I don’t know why I do this, but my diary entries are numbered in days as well as dates, starting with my first dated comment referring to an actual date when my mother suggested starting one, which was “17th July, 1975 ¶ I saw two spaceships docking”, referring to the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. I choose to date it more precisely to the handshake between Thomas P. Stafford and Alexei Leonov at 2:17 pm, CDT. This was 8:17 pm BST, and I’ve rounded it off to the start of the minute. This numbering system is a little reminiscent of the Julian Date, which is the number of days elapsed since 1st January 4713 BCE, which was the last year the Indiction, Solar and Lunar years coincided. Two of those are self-evident but the first refers to a fifteen-year assessment for taxation in the Roman Empire, and I presume it’s in there because it used to be used as a proxy date. Obviously all three of these are proleptic, i.e. projected back before their real invention, because the year didn’t used to begin in January and the Roman Empire didn’t exist that far back. The point of the Julian Date is to provide a standard for the timing of astronomical events. It’s also used to calculate best before and sell by dates, batch tracking (for instance for product recalls), converting between calendars of different cultures and for dates in databases, since it’s less cumbersome than using the peculiar and fairly irregular numbers for the days of the month. However, in these situations it tends to be cut off and the date is recorded as the number of days since a more recent date, since otherwise the number would be needlessly large. The exact current Julian date is 2461006.828461, or actually it’s moved on since then. It actually begins at noon GMT, presumably because most astronomical events were recorded at night. It also, incidentally, provides decimal time, which makes things easier but is in the wrong base. My own dating system is based on days since a certain date, so in a way it is a real Julian Date. I have changed it several times. It used to be based on what was coincidentally my parents’ sixteenth wedding anniversary but I realised that prevented me from referring to dates before that, so I changed it to the first dated incident I wrote down. There is an earlier date in April 1975 but it just records the measurements of a staircase so it’s not about a temporal event and I ignore it. My sister once pointed out that I was recording historical events which were not appropriate for a personal diary, but in fact more than 99% of them are in fact personal.

It looks a bit odd to me that I’ve written out (18396) above, because I’ve almost always just used it in my diary and it feels like I’m revealing something intimate and personal by writing it out publicly. Another thing about it is that for me the day starts at 7:17 pm GMT, but I ignore that most of the time. If the Julian date had been used for computers there needn’t have been any Y2K problem. Incidentally, that wasn’t a panic about nothing, but I don’t want to get too distracted here. If it had been recorded as a 24-bit value, it wouldn’t have become an issue for tens of millennia. There are quite a few peculiar things about Y2K, not least the fact that software actually does use Julian Dates.

This has been on my mind recently for two reasons. One is that I’m writing an astronomical calendar for a client, so I should probably use Julian Dates for that for simplicity’s sake. That’s what they’re for of course. The other is that I couldn’t resist watching the current Vince Gilligan series ‘Pluribus’, which uses a similar day-based dating system for time before and since the Joining. I should point out that I have subscribed to Apple TV before, and no it isn’t ideal that I’ve had to do this again to watch it. I’m not going to try to defend that decision, but I will say that the quality of Vince Gilligan’s and his associated team’s work is so high that it’s hard to resist the temptation to do this. Just this moment, I’m wondering about whether I should introduce a spoiler warning, and I suppose I should but I’m not sure how important that is. At some point I will talk about the nature of spoilers and when they are and aren’t appropriate, but that’s for another monologue.

So here we go:

SPOILER WARNING

‘Pluribus’, styled as “PLUR1BUS”, has a title which can be analysed as “You Are 1: Be Us”, which makes me wonder if “PL” is also significant. It does constitute the first two letters of “please” I suppose. This sums up the premise of the series. The Very Large Array radio astronomy facility in New Mexico detects a signal repeating every seventy-eight seconds from the direction of the TRAPPIST-1 system around six hundred light years away, consisting of four different codes, and the scientists deduce that it’s an RNA sequence although I’m not sure why because DNA also has four bases. I should probably explain this although I think it may be common knowledge. DNA stores genetic code in most living things and RNA is the medium they use to transcribe that code into proteins. It does make sense that RNA would be used for this purpose, since it is actually being used to transmit information rather than store it. There are also some viruses which use RNA instead of DNA, and also some smaller things which I don’t fully understand which seem to be bare RNA molecules which behave like viruses which are candidates for the smallest life forms of all, assuming they are alive.

At this point it’s worth saying that conceptually the series is worth dividing into the setting and therefore science fictional stuff and the more conventional aspect of the story, which I will get to. Back to the science side then.

There are a number of whiteboards shown throughout the series so far. The first has equations on it referring to signal processing, the second is a plan for creating the virus and the third and fourth, unless I’ve missed some, are Carol’s whiteboards, one for planning her next mass-market romantic fantasy novel and the other detailing of what she’s determined about the Joined in an attempt to repeat them. I have no idea if this is significant or whether it’s just a good way to convey exposition and maybe conceal Easter Eggs. Possibly significant, I don’t know

A defence organisation in Annapolis, MD put together the genome and test it on rats. Unsurprisingly, it’s clear to neither the scientists nor the viewers at this point exactly what the RNA code does, but one interesting detail is that there is a gene in it which encodes for a receptor which responds to the scent of Convallaria majalis or lily of the valley and is also found in sperm cells and attracts them. This is possibly nothing, but it may be a reference to the lily of the valley storyline in ‘Breaking Bad’. It’s probably too obscure to be more than a passing reference. The astronomers also speculate that the dish or other antenna used to send the message must have been the size of Afrika.

One of the rats appears to have died and a scientist, suitably protected, picks them up and tries to feel for a pulse, but since she’s wearing gloves she can’t do so, takes one off and gives the rat cardiac massage, and they then wake up and bite her. Although she tries to wash it out and follow the emergency protocol, it doesn’t work and she’s infected. She then infects everyone else in the facility by kissing them, licking doughnuts on reception and pretty soon there are planes dropping the virus from the sky and infecting every human in the world. The result is that almost the whole human world becomes a single hive mind with the exception of thirteen people, including one in Paraguay who was undiscovered and appears to have avoided being infected. The other twelve are immune. Five of them speak English as a second language and one, Carol, is the focus of the series. She lives in New Mexico and her partner was killed by falling backwards when she, like almost everyone else, has a seizure on being infected.

Now there’s the larger, as it were Galactic, picture in the story and the smaller global one. The former is of course open to interpretation and on a galactic scale six hundred light years is practically next door. A fairly simple explanation for the developing scenario is that the Galaxy has a plague or a process which eliminates threats, like how the immune system eliminates cancer. At some point, civilisation becomes able to carry out genetic modification and decode messages from other star systems. When this happens, it detects a message, interprets it and out of curiosity turns it into a virus, which it is then infected by. This causes it to form a hive mind, build an enormous transmitter and send the genome signal to other star systems, and the cycle repeats. This could be a few things. It could simply be the next stage in the evolution of intelligence, a plague which is spreading through the Galaxy or a galactic defence system that renders potentially harmful species innocuous. Or, it could be pre-emptive action by another civilisation attempting to neutralise humanity, deliberately targetted at us. Scientifically, this makes more sense because the codes involved are RNA bases, suggesting that it’s designed for functioning among life on this planet unless RNA and DNA are the only basis for life.

To nitpick, it isn’t clear why adenine, uracil, cytosine and guanine were chosen for which of the four bases. There are presumably four types of signal and it does make sense that humans would interpret these as bases, but how do they know which is which and why did they see one as uracil rather than thymine? There are also other bases, such as flurouracil, used in cancer chemotherapy, and the synthetic pair known as P, Z, S and B, and some viruses use unusual bases to protect themselves from host defences.

All this, though, is about the science and very probably the point of the series is not connected to the wider Universe as such. Many fans of ‘The Walking Dead’ zombie series got very focussed on the idea of a cure or an explanation for the cause when in fact the point of the show was entirely unconnected to that, so far as I know – (<=en-dash – I am a real human) — I stopped watching it after I think the fourth series. It might not matter how it happened.

Possibly, heteronormativity prevented me from realising that Helen and Carol were a romantic item all the way through the first episode. However, I tend to do that with heterosexual couples too, so maybe not, but I don’t think it was very clear. I thought Helen was Carol’s agent who had become a friend. One important aspect of Carol being queer is that she’s estranged from her parents due to them sending her to conversion torture and has no children, which is not inevitable of course but probably is more likely. This puts her in a different position with regard to intimate relationships, particularly because Helen dies in the pilot. However, she becomes one of the joint in the final moments of her life and the hive mind therefore has access to all her experience, memories and personality, to a greater extent in fact than Carol ever had. She feels violated by this and she orders them to close Helen’s memories off and never to refer to them again, though on one occasion so far she’s caved into temptation when she wanted to know what Helen thought of her writing.

More than eight hundred million people died when the Joining took place. I presume this is due to things like people operating heavy machinery, driving passenger vehicles, crossing roads, being in the middle of surgery and so on when the virus hit, but some viewers have suggested that they deliberately killed some of those infected. I don’t think this is what’s happening though. It also emerges that if Helen expresses strong negative emotions towards them, they have seizures and on the one occasion when she did this so far, eleven million people were killed, meaning that she has to tread very carefully.

The hive mind is working towards assimilating all the people who have not been so far and they don’t know how long it’ll take. Most of the other people who are immune are entirely happy with the situation and at least one of the children wants to become part of the hive mind. Some of the others, notably an Indian woman called Laxmi, haven’t accepted that people close to them have had their identities dissolved into the collective. Carol has the Joined arrange a meeting of all the willing English speakers and they travel to Bilbao where she meets with them in Airforce One, which has been commandeered by a Mauritanian immune person called Koumba Diabaté, to whom I shall return. In this meeting, she comes across as a typically American White saviour and also to some extent a Karen, and in fact she has strong Karen energy throughout. She’s the only White person there and everyone else’s English is a second language, but she has insisted on English speakers rather than allowing interpreters. It’s understandable that she might not trust them, but – okay look, this is getting too involved. Right now I have a huge blizzard of thoughts about the show and I’m just going to jot down a few points.

• Event TV used to be something which united people in a particular country and in a sense, very occasionally, globally, as with the lunar landing with Apollo II, and maybe to a very limited extent the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project on (1), but with the advance of the internet and the advent of access to non-live video, among other things, there has been fragmentation. ‘Pluribus’ is in a sense a unifying factor although it isn’t easily accessible or on the main streaming services, which is a shame because it would be appropriate if it were.
• There’s a purple and green thing going on, which is interesting because those are the two main colours of aurora. I’m not sure what they mean, but there’s a pattern, as there was in ‘Breaking Bad’, of colour-coding. Purple was associated with Marie, whose clothing stays purple until almost the end of the series, green with Walter White more than anyone else and associated with money, greed and jealousy. Purple is the colour of the emperor, so it may be that purple in this signals those who rule, i.e. the Joined or the virus, which starts off in a purple solution. Green also symbolises growth and change. I don’t know what to do with this. Yellow also seems significant – Carol wears a yellow jacket at the start of the season.
• “Soylent Green Is People”. Right now, and this is why I’m rushing this out on (18402) because the next episode, ‘HDP’, is out on (18404) (again, this feels weird), Carol has found that the Joined are constantly drinking “milk”, which is however a plasma- or serum-like yellow fluid which we are at least led to believe from the final scene is partly made from something shocking, presumably human corpses. The issue, though, is that it probably either isn’t that simple or is misleading. Maybe the yellowness is also significant, I don’t know. My current presumption is that the 800 million deaths led to a surplus of corpses which are rendered down into nutrients or possibly some kind of culture medium for the virus or source of antibodies against a simple and relatively harmless pathogen which would enable them to become individual again.
• Things like serial numbers, licence plates and other sequences of characters may be significant. In ‘Breaking Bad’, these referred to colours as hex triplets. But there’s more going on than colour in this.
• There’s a suggestion that Carol’s unpublished novel ‘Bitter Chrysalis’ is connected to the outcome of the series in some way, for instance that its plot prefigures the arc of the show. There was a large butterfly on the wall of the ice hotel in Norway. It could simply be that Carol has to become the butterfly through the bitterness of her experience.
• Even if the viewers’ sympathy is meant to be with Carol as the product of capitalism against the Joined as communism, and of course my sympathy would be the opposite, it’s still interesting as a study of the American Way. Gilligan is in any event a genius at making us root for the bad guy.
• Speaking of which, maybe this is a mirror image of ‘Breaking Bad’, which is “Mr Chips becomes Scarface”. This is an unsympathetic character whom circumstances force to be a messiah.
• Speaking of which, obviously he gets us onto Team Carol, but actually there’s not a lot wrong with her. It’s more that women are rarely permitted to behave like that in popular culture. In real life it’s not quite so bad. She’s the opposite of a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
• Connections have been suggested with a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode. I personally perceive connections with David Brin’s ‘The Giving Plague‘ and possibly even Andy Weir’s ‘Project Hail Mary’ in the sense of an interstellar plague, which links to Olaf Stapledon too. There’s an episode of ‘The Twilight Zone’ called ‘Third From The Sun’ with a character in it called Will Sturka, based on a 1950 Richard Matheson story. It doesn’t seem to be otherwise connected. In ‘The Giving Plague’ a sociopathic scientist has to deal with a blood-borne virus which causes people to become more altruistic and therefore more likely to give blood, and ends up faking altruism out of necessity. ‘Project Hail Mary’ has an algal plague spreading between yellow dwarf star systems which dims their suns, which is more loosely connected, and Olaf Stapledon has two instances of interstellar plagues, one of which, the “Mad Star”, infects stars and ends up seeming to wipe out the human species in the distant future, and the other of which is spread by apparently very sane, virtuous and balanced civilisations on various planets which gradually, through interaction with beings in other star systems, would conclude that it would be in the other civilisation’s interest to have its culture destroyed or even the species exterminated.

So there’s plenty more, and I realise this has broken down into disorder but I want to get this out now to beat the deadline of ‘HDP’ being released, which incidentally seems to stand for “Human Derived Protein”.

That’s it for now.

Would The Afterlife Be After Life?

Someone, who knows who they are I think, made a stimulating comment on here which I picked up on this morning and I thought it might be worth responding to, so here it is.

First of all, I should probably point out that when I say “afterlife” it could equally well apply to future reincarnation, and in fact I want to mention what’s on my mind regarding that too. I’ll start with an experience I had shortly after becoming Christian.

The high-control faith organisation I became part of at eighteen was very conventionally evangelically Christian, and people within it set out their own views regarding a Christian’s fate, and at this point a surprise might be in order because it wasn’t like the conventional views of Heaven and Hell. In fact, I’ll start with that. The “demotic” culturally Christian understanding of the fate of human beings is something like, if you have enough good deeds, when you die your soul leaves your body and goes to another realm immediately which we call Heaven, and if you’re bad enough, your soul leaves your body and goes to another realm immediately which we call Hell. Heaven is an eternal place of reward and Hell an eternal place of punishment. Human experience continues after death in this form.

The above is basically never what reflective evangelical Protestants believe. There may be recent converts who do believe that or perhaps people who don’t particularly involve themselves in Bible study, small groups, quiet times and the like, although it seems likely to me that people in their church are likely to pick up on that and encourage them. It’s also possible that since I’m of a more philosophical, and therefore perhaps surmised to be a more theological, bent than my born-again Christian peers at the time, the discussion may have led me in that direction and it’s actually very common for them not to have reconsidered this idea, but it seriously is not found, so far as I know, anywhere in evangelical fundamentalist Protestantism. There’s also the rather silly idea that Heaven is above the sky and Hell below the ground.

It’s more like this, as I understand it. Humans are widely considered to be new creations at conception and to persist until death as a combined living soul and body unit. They are once again new creations if they make a commitment to Christ, i.e. become Christian, and some believe that humans are soul and body before conversion and become soul, spirit and body afterward. On death, there is an interval during which individuals have no experience and are effectively asleep, a period referred to as “soul sleep”. At the Day of Judgement, humans receive a resurrection body which is perfect and incorruptible, which again is accompanied by their soul. They have memories of their life on Earth and proceed to be judged by God. If they have been saved, or would’ve been saved if they’d heard the Good News but didn’t, or had it distorted in some way, God conveys them to a non-Earthly realm where they live forever in bliss. If not, they are conveyed to another realm where they suffer forever. In either case, the soul is a new creation at conception which continues to be conscious, except when asleep, comatose or temporarily dead, experiencing time sequentially with a past, present and future whose quality does not change after death. In other words, they believe in an afterlife.

I can’t guarantee that I’ve got this right and there’s likely to be a fair bit of variation between views within evangelical Biblically literalist Protestant Christians. Some of them probably believe exactly this, others don’t. Another set of beliefs about this is arguably more Biblical, and it’s what the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe. This is that humans are created, possibly from conception, as physical conscious beings who continue in consciousness until death. After death they cease to be conscious until God chooses to resurrect them if they have died before the Day of Judgement, then they are recreated as physical conscious beings in perfected bodies. After being judged, if they are not saved in the JW sense, and I’m not sure what that is incidentally, they simply cease to exist. If they are saved, they inherit the Earth as an earthly paradise and as physical conscious beings. There are some other complications, but that’s basically it as I understand it, and again it involves sequential consciousness. After being resurrected, we will recall our former lives as having happened already and our experience will continue after the gap which began with our deaths, providing we’re saved of course. Jehovah’s Witnesses give the impression of being fundamentalist and conservative nowadays, but back in the day they were, as conservative evangelicals in the late 20th century CE have pointed out, actually liberal Christians, or rather descended from them. They don’t believe in a place of eternal conscious torment, that Jesus was divine or in a different heavenly realm. The Kingdom of God is on Earth for them. This is also reflected in their cosmopolitanism: JW Kingdom Halls are notable for their very representative congregations in ethnic terms, you can expect the same proportionof Blacks, Whites, South and East Asians among them as in the communities they’re in, and they are also truly global rather than being restricted to the English-speaking developed world. They are of course also wrong and a high-control spiritual organisation. Many would call them a cult. They’re sexist and homophobic. In my years-long discussion with JWs, the longer I conversed with them, the more convinced I became that they were wrong, both in terms of how they interpreted the Bible and in more general terms. There is also much to admire in them, for instance their pacifism.

Getting back to my involvement in the high-control religious group when I was eighteen, I found myself encountering recurrent major problems with their beliefs. I may write about this elsewhere, but it’s not important here. In terms of the way justice was served, I had a couple of major problems. One is that I felt, and still feel, that saving souls for Jesus becomes a substitute for actually doing good in the world. Another is that too much emphasis was placed on repentance, to the extent that Hitler could repent and be saved but some paragon of virtue could go to Hell for not being Christian. Consequently, I decided to revive my old belief in reincarnation. I had a model of the spiritual universe like this: space-time extends infinitely, or at least vastly, in all dimensions, in this case meaning the three of space and the one of time. Outside that realm are souls, which for the purposes of the model are points. From these points radiate lines to every incarnation each soul ever experiences, a bit like a spider with a colossal number of legs. From each of these lives, they learn important lessons and their position outside space and time is informed by the sum total of their experiences. That’s how I saw spiritual reality at the start of my adulthood.

There are problems with this model. The most important one I perceived at the time was the problem of why we don’t seem to have experienced previous lives as aliens or remember our future lives. If the enlightened oversoul to whom we are connected in our incarnate lives doesn’t experience time the way we do, and if we live in such a vast Universe the chances of being reincarnated in the immediate future or past as a human on this planet are extremely close to zero, yet we don’t seem to remember lives spent on different worlds. Moreover, since our eternal oversouls are not within time and reincarnation is not consecutive, there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping us from remembering future lives unless we are in general blocked from remembering other lives. Although there are said to be cases of people remembering former lives, I’m not aware of anyone claiming to remember their own future lives, although there do seem to be cases of premonition.

I stopped believing in that model fairly early on. It was mainly an attempt to make sense of life and the world spiritually in a hostile environment, so when I left that I was able to let go of that belief. For a while I was dualist, i.e. I believed in a soul and a body which existed in the same sense, i.e. two concrete, equally real entities which interact. The problem with that view may be that it’s “not even wrong” – it can’t be discussed rigorously because it falls apart under the most cursory examination. I don’t object to the idea of a soul, but I don’t think it’s a ghost in the machine, and it’s worthwhile digressing here into what I find a fascinating set of views held by some Christians.

Some Christians are physicalist, and I’d venture to say that some of them don’t realise they are but would if they thought about it. The problem with soul sleep after death followed by resurrection and consciousness with memory of a former life is that there’s apparently nothing connecting the resurrected person to the historical figure they are supposed to be the same as, and therefore that there’s no justice in either rewarding or punishing them, or saving or damning them which is unfortunately not the same thing. God creates someone and they live out their life, alternatively either being a good or bad person or becoming Christian or refusing to do so. Then they die, and eventually nothing physical remains of them. At some point in the future, God recreates a seemingly identical person with a perfected body, the same personality as before and with accurate memories of a former life. But this is, in a way, just God playing a game. This new identical creation has not committed the sins or done the good deeds of the previous person because there’s nothing linking them and they’re not the same person. They don’t deserve either good or bad treatment based on that previous person’s life and no justice is served. Without a soul of some kind, there can be no justice because it means death is the end. Therefore, most Christians would probably say there is such a thing as a soul, and they’d probably tend to think of it as a kind of phantom reflecting the person as they are in life, or perhaps a brilliant point of light or something. To their credit, my main interlocutor in the high-control group would not be drawn on defining the soul despite some suggestions I gave him, and with hindsight that could be the right attitude, although it might also mean he was worried that close examination would disintegrate his ideas. But as I said, Christian physicalism exists. Such Christians argue that Christian anthropology, i.e. its view of the nature of humans, has been inordinately influenced by Plato with his idea of the separation of the soul and body. They further see the Bible itself as supporting the view that we are living souls, i.e. that the references to us being “living souls” in the Bible actually refers to our embodied, living selves rather than something our bodies contain or are in some way connected to while we’re alive. Many would also claim that at no point is a disembodied human soul depicted in the Bible. Demons are of course, and I’d also raise the question of Saul attempting to talk to Samuel’s soul via a medium, that soul being identified as Samuel rather than a deceptive demon pretending to be him. They also see all this as being more aligned with the findings of modern science and medicine. I don’t personally think they’ve succeeded in making any connection between the original body and the resurrection body, which if I were to try that myself I’d probably say is the same person created from something like a Platonic form, so it’s like there’s the number 2, the word “two”, the digit “2” and the Roman numeral “II”, all of which refer to the objectively existing and unique number 2, but it’s not up to me to defend really.

I do not believe in the human experience of sequential time except in waking life. I see our experience of time as one moment following another in order to be confined to the sequence of days we live through awake, starting with our birth or perhaps before and ending with our death or an irreversible loss of any kind of consciousness at the ends of our lives. However, it isn’t that simple and you’ve probably noticed that I’m obliquely referring to other states of consciousness, where matters are entirely different. The anti-theistic philosopher Daniel Dennett, of whom I’m not generally much of a fan, did make an interesting observation regarding sleep, which is that we don’t know that we’re experiencing dreams. It could just be that dreams are messes in our sleeping brains which our waking brains try to make sense of, although I don’t think that can be true because of the existence of lucid dreams and things like people talking in their sleep, sleepwalking and so forth, apparently acting out their dreams as they occur. Nonetheless, I have had an experience which suggested to me that dreams are not as they seem, which is that I dozed off with the radio on, woke up a few minutes later and my dream began with radio sounds when I woke up and ended with sounds from it as I dropped off. The only way I can make sense of this in conventional terms is that my dream consisted of assembled and confused information present in my brain resulting from sleep when I woke up, and that was my brain assembling that in the wrong order.

However, I don’t think it’s either/or, and I’m not the only person to believe this. Dennett’s belief that lucid dreams, i.e. dreams where the dreamer becomes aware they’re dreaming and takes control of it, are not experiences strikes me as the result of his dogma about the nature of consciousness forcing him to absurd conclusions and probably also reflects on how he accounts for all consciousness, i.e. very badly. All that said, I think you can have it both ways, and here’s why: wakefulness has one attitude to reality and dreaming has another. It’s also feasible that all states of consciousness have their own unique attitudes. In particular, time doesn’t operate the same way in dreaming as it does in everyday life. I don’t want to go into too much depth here, but I once had an extremely detailed dream in which I see places and people whom I had no idea existed at the time, and this is a single and particularly notable incident of many such. Dreams, I think, actually do sometimes foretell the future, and the only way I can make sense of this is to understand them as presenting temporal events in a different way to how they occur to the waking mind. This is certainly true in the case of past events, but my more extraordinary claim is that they also present events which haven’t yet occurred. All that said, judging by how our thinking and consciousness as waking people operates, dreams are indeed not temporal events at all but just arbitrary patterns in our minds which we make sense of when we awake, but that presentation and understanding is that of a wakeful, living brain and is not more true or more valid than the experience one has in another state of consciousness such as dreaming. It’s more like a three-dimensional cube being projected onto a flat surface and looking like a square or a hexagon. Our minds when awake simply can’t do anything else with the experience. For that reason, I also think that dreams don’t occur while we’re asleep, which is one reason I narrate them in the present tense. What actually happens is that a conduit opens to experiences which are no less valid or real, in their own terms, at a particular point in our waking lives. There was never a time when the dream someone has at the age of forty wasn’t there: it exists outside sequential time.

J W Dunne took this approach, which went on to influence J B Priestley and Olaf Stapledon among others. In his ‘An Experiment With Time’, published in 1927, Dunne claimed on the basis of prophetic dreams that there are two time dimensions, only one of which governs our lives. Another level of consciousness occupies the other time dimension, and there is an infinite regress into higher and higher time dimensions. This is interesting but not quite how I see things. I think that when we’re both alive and awake, we experience time sequentially, but that only makes sense within that state. Beyond that state, time is different and possibly indescribable and incomprehensible to us as we are now. Dreams are clues to this, but there’s a lot more to reality which they only hint at. Hence the question “what happens after we die?” is based on false assumptions about time. Death only occurs to our waking selves, and in fact it doesn’t even do that because as far as that mode of our consciousness is concerned, we always have a past, present or future. Death is not something we experience. I also find it entertaining, though maybe meaningless, to think of my life as an endless loop, which is however only operating in a general sea of consciousness and not limited to it, so maybe we live through our lives and go on to experience amnesia combined with death and rebirth into the same life repeated infinitely. As well as the other people I’ve mentioned, the author Ian Watson has expressed the idea that the “afterlife” is a dream state in which Hell is the inability to dream lucidly and Heaven is lucid dreaming, which can however be induced in the damned, liberating them from Hell by doing so.

Now for reincarnation. There seem to be two views of this. In one, we progress or regress in each life and are reincarnated accordingly. In another, we simply reincarnate without any particular plan or direction. The former is the southern and eastern Asian view on the matter, and it’s possible that their view of reincarnation is more valid because of the Valeriepieris Circle:

This circle represents half the population of the world. More people live inside this circle than outside it. Interestingly, to me anyway, it includes the main area where people take the existence of reincarnation for granted. The reason this is interesting is that this area is also the one where people are most likely to be reincarnated if it is true, so if there’s any evidence that people have lived before, for instance memories of former lives, that’s the area where they could be most easily verified or supported. If reincarnation is true, the most likely places religions or other belief systems which accept that are to arise is within that circle, and that is in fact what’s happened. It doesn’t prove anything of course. People would be less likely to experience it in large areas of tundra, desert or on oceanic islands, and of course the Abrahamic religions did arise in desert areas. It doesn’t mean people wouldn’t believe in it elsewhere but it could be seen as evidence for it.

I’m not going to question the reality of people being able to remember things they “couldn’t” because they appear to have happened in someone else’s life. I’m prepared to accept that as at least a theoretical possibility and I’m more interested in what it might imply. The most common interpretation of this taking place is that someone’s soul lived out a life in one body which then died and they’re now in another body, often that of a small child, who can remember some events which occurred in the previous life. However, that isn’t the only explanation and it depends on the existence of a soul or persistent self which may not be real. David Hume, some other Western philosophers and of course Buddhists have the idea that there is nothing you can point to which is “I”. Instead, there are simply experiences in a stream linked by memories and anticipation. I don’t agree with this for two reasons. One is that I believe that total loss of memory which didn’t otherwise injure a person, or if you like cloning or duplication, would still be followed by a person with a very similar personality. There are cases of identical twins separated at birth who have ended up almost duplicating each other’s lives unwittingly, even to the extent of getting a dog of the same breed and calling him the same name. The other is that you are the person others relate to or see you as, for instance their parent, sibling, boss, mentor or favourite musician. These kinds of identity are real. However, they’re not the same as having a soul, and for that reason I think it makes as much sense to suppose that it isn’t the soul who is reincarnated but their various memories and experiences are reassembled, probably as a collage from many lives, in a new person. However, there is one proviso here: those experiences might only exist as part of someone’s whole life, and if that’s lived with integrity that would lead to a larger chunk of someone being reincarnated, and perhaps ultimately as the whole person undergoing that process. This is odd because it kind of means that the better life one leads, the more likely one is to be reincarnated rather than the other way round.

So to conclude, there have been two themes in this post.  One is the nature of identity and time, and the other is what can be said to happen beyond this life.  In that, I’ve committed myself to discussing only religious views, but it’s also possble that these thoughts can be adapted to more non-religious views. Some of them are inspired by Heidegger and existentialism, after all. Let me know what you think. It really isn’t that deep.