Death is a Debt
What 慶功(’67) just wrote about the deaths of people close to him has moved me deeply, as I read it after a trip after Easter (which, of course, is the Christian answer to Death). So I feel a need to express some thoughts on this “eternal” subject, immature though they are.
Death is a debt that everyone repays, eventually. One common way to “QE” the debt is stoicism; another is religion. I subscribe to neither, but, in recent years, have developed some preliminary ideas of the “scientific” way to face Death.
To face Death, first we have to know Life, human life. It has, in my view, 3 aspects. A body – the collection of particles in dynamic equilibrium, i.e., particles go in and out of this body, across a spatial boundary, without disrupting their modes of interaction (metabolism and mental processes). Second, “ka” (chi in traditional Chinese philosophy) which is the provision of free energy needed to drive such interactions. Third, “ba” (no Chinese equivalent concept) that defines individuality, so that “I” retain my personality over time, though the particles in my body and their interactive modes are changing, because of aging, memory renewal etc. “Ka” distinguishes a living entity from an inanimate objects, and “ba”, a self-cognitive being from an animal (which does not identity its mirror image with itself, and, I guess, has no perception of eventual death to itself).
What can science tell us here? I'll cut the story short. The best theory for space and time we have is relativity. GR, combined with empirical evidence such as anisotropies in the cosmic microwave radiation (Nobel 2006), shows that our universe is spatially flat: it is infinite in space. The theory for lots and lots of interacting particles is statistical physics, from which we deduce that entropy increases in proportion to the surface of an “island universe”. The quantity of particles in the sphere increases as its volume (due to homogeneity in large-scale density). Therefore entropy (number of microstates) is always outpaced by availability of matter, because cubic power rises faster than square. Any pattern we see must repeat itself somewhere; there must be copies of any of us elsewhere in the infinite universe.
The best theory for interactions is quantum mechanics. There is an aspect of QM that no physicist, from Einstein onwards, succeeds in refuting: non-locality. Put in the simplest terms, QM allows certain particles, properly prepared, to interact across arbitrarily long distances. Ever experience déjà vu? Telepathy? A “hard” scientist, I judge that I have. Of course there are so many explanations, but quantum non-locality between us and our copies in a distant galaxy might be the answer.
My thinking is that our self-awareness derives from participation in nonlocal interactions. This participation is quantised: either yes or no. Otherwise, intelligence, tool using power, language capability … all have continuous grading so how can we define humanity? Simple as the Turing Test is, it is a circular criterion: the entity receiving the communications from a robot and a human is presumed to be human itself!
So, what is Death but for just one copy?"
ADDENDA
1) QE=quantitative easing, my joking term for making a problem to go away by making the problem bigger; QM=quantum mechanics; and GR=general relativity.
2) Peter Chau and Edward Chung (both “67) ask if the idea of copies relates to the multiversity hypothesis that has been proposed to explain probabilistic distributions in the outcomes of observations. Actually no. My “copies” exist in one and the same universe.
3) Edward has pointed out that a few animal species have passed the mirror test on self awareness, apart from humans. My readings on the subject were done too long ago! But the question remains whether living things other than us have the notion of Death. Would a bitch, after witnessing the apparent death of her puppy, reject it after its resurrection?
4) Has any ancient Chinese philosopher contemplated how to distinguish me from you, whereas the me who wake up from a sleep is identical to the person of last night, and in what sense?
5) Some ideas have been alluded to in previous publications:
Fundamental Dimensionless Numbers and the Possibility of Life, J. B. Interplanetary Soc. 32 (1979) 84-88 & 88-94;
A World in Eternal Disequilibrium, Cambridge Review, 28 Feb. 1983, 50-52;
The Cosmic Asymmetry in Matter-Antimatter, Vistas Astronomy 27 (1984) 1-23 where, for example, the notion of multiple copies of any self-cognising being was presented as “a sort of the principle of conservation of souls”.