Monday 10 April 2000

Pic of the day: Well, my best friend says that I am rather transparent, but I don't think it was meant like that.

OK, so I was tired last night when I wrote. Sorry folks.

Tonight I dreamt that I was a ghost. The dream started when I died, much to my surprise and somewhat to my chagrin. I was utterly confused as to my state as a ghost, but an older relative took care of explaining the basics to me. And after a while I got into it. The default mode was walking around like I was still alive. Actually, unless I actively thought about it, I felt alive until I noticed that people totally ignored me and I could not establish contact. I could, however, hear what people were thinking as well as what they said. And when I thought about it, I could fly or move with great speed from one place to another. Stuff like that. Now as for my older relative ghost, he lived on a closed-down sawmill. He was very strongly connected to the place, which surprised me. But he was quite serious about it. A younger relative still alive had plans to rebuild the sawmill completely. That would mean that the ghost could no longer bear to live there, and would move on.

Yes, I learned that ghosts eventually move on. Some did it at once, others hung around for centuries. (In a small, totally Piers-Anthony-like mini-event in the dream, I looked a the cover of a magazine and noticed it was labeled "mature >2c". I was puzzled for a moment until I understood that it meant mature readers, over two centuries old...) Moving on was not necessarily a good thing, if I understood my relative right. He liked living at the sawmill and enjoyed his capabilities as a ghost. He was disappointed that I had not signed a certain document before I died. I had indeed signed but had crumpled the document because my signature was so bad. It was so bad because of the oncoming stroke that killed me shortly after. So he had been only minutes from having his living, eh, haunting place secured for a long time into the future. Now we were looking for other ways to arrange this. I saw my brother, among others, and gleaned that my father had married again (hey, this is a dream) and that his second wife was trying to sink her claws into the heritage, and succeeding all too well so far. The dream ended rather unresolved.

I woke up to the clock radio playing that old Abba song:
"I believe in angels;
when I know the time is right for me
I'll cross the stream;
I have a dream."
-Thank you so very much for the timely comment, Abba.

Al Schroeder of Nova Notes had an entry on March 27 where he pondered the afterlife, if any. He admitted that his belief in an afterlife was just that, pure faith. Unlike his belief in a Creator, which he thinks is a viable scientific hypothesis. He also leans to the idea that the dead are already somewhere else, not just in stasis or whatever waiting for a possible resurrection. Anyway, as regular readers will know, I am also a scientifically inclined Christian; so you would expect my view to be vaguely similar to Mr Schroeder's. This is not the case here. I shall elaborate.

Time. To me, time is a dimension. Like the three spatial dimensions, it is bent by gravity, for instance. But unlike the other three, we cannot move across time at will. This stems from the very laws of cause and effect. Without cause and effect, no chemical reactions, and so no life. I can vaguely imagine a universe where time exists without its "timely" qualities; but such a universe would not support matter as we know it, much less complex structures such as life.

But my view of time as a dimension has another important implication. I believe that the past exists. It is preserved in time, exactly as it was, for the whole universe. This does not much help us, of course, since we cannot access it. If we could go there, it would no longer be safe from our machinations. But I believe that the past is fully preserved, and incidentally, so is the future.

Now I hear the outcry: "What about free will?" Yes, what about it? I firmly believe in free will, and use it with abandon, as if there was an endless supply of it. But if my future already exists, then it does not matter what I choose, right? Wrong. The future that exists, is the future after my choices. If I had chosen differently, then the future would be different. But I do not chose differently, because I have only one chance to choose. I cannot save and reload. I cannot back up and try again. Therefore there is only one future, namely the one I choose. Well, actually a combination of my choices and everybody elses, plus random events aplenty. But you know what I mean. To me this is clear as mountain air. The future really exists, but it exists only in the future (duh) so it does not force anyone to do anything in the present.

But there is no reason why our universe should be the only one. Quite the opposite: Many cosmologists now assume that universes may come into existence repeatedly and independently of each other, by the same type of event that brough our universe into being. One hypothesis actually supposes that universes can spawn new universes, so that our universe is contained within a greater universe. Universes can also intersect each other, depending on what dimensions and natural forces they share. And finally, there is no clear reason why another universe should have the same number of dimensions as we have, or the same distribution of spatial dimensions versus non-spatial ones. (Our universe is supposed to contain at least 10 dimensions, perhaps 13, but only 3 of these are defining space.)

This conveniently leaves the loophole that there may be universes intersecting ours that have a different time axis from ours, and to who our time axis is simply another spatial dimension, which they can traverse at will. This is a rather scary scenario, unless one blindly believes that such a dimension is populated by benevolent beings. Of course, time has held up quite well so far.

Now if I were an Intelligent Designer of universes and an overall nice guy, I would make sure that there was an alternate access to the time dimension; for instance from a separetly created "corridor universe" sharing some dimensions with the primary created universe. This way I would be able to easily click and drag my favorite creations from one point (in the past) to another (in the future). Voila, instant resurrection.

This is not just simpler than making software run without hardware, as in the case of the floating souls. It also does away with making alternate living quarters for the souls. Or, if one really wants to discard the Original Universe and make a new and slightly improved, it should be reasonably simple to just drag and drop from the old to the new. No save/restore feature needed ... that is, everybody is saved by default, but it's an open question who will be restored.

As an extra bonus point, this happens to be compatible with my favorite religion. Duh. I'm betting on the number of surprised readers here. But actually, this may not be commonly known: The Bible refutes the idea that humans have immortal souls. Only God has immortality, says the Bible. And the later so famous Jesus said that the dead were sleeping, which is a far cry from them running around like hyperactive kids knocking on the walls and scaring people in old dark manors.

That's not to say that ghosts don't make for good stories. But are they really dead people hanging around without bodies? Not a ghost of a chance, say I.