Making saints of us all
On Halloween, Pascal's wager, and why there might be a reason for good behavior embedded deep in quantum physics
The ghosts and skeletons of Halloween decorations are fairly far removed from the religious connotations of All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. Yet the connection between Halloween as a vigil and the religious observance acknowledging the dead is still in place. It’s hard to name any religion that doesn’t have at least some ritualized commemoration of the departed, and for good reason: We have in common everywhere that we don’t know with intellectual certainty what happens after death.
■ Pascal’s wager famously invites the reader to wager on the existence of God, using the consequences of the afterlife as the measurement of whether one wins or loses. But it’s possible to approach the afterlife in a much more straightforward way without requiring any wager over the matter of a deity.
■ Step one is to assume that there is a chance greater than zero that there is some form of consciousness that exists apart from what we can confidently explain through the known physical mechanisms alone. Trees are alive and rocks are not. Animals, like trees, are alive, but are conscious in a way that trees are not (at least as far as we can tell). Humans, among the animals, have a particularly complex form of consciousness that exceeds what we see in a goldfish.
■ Something led from a world of rocks and minerals and gases to one in which humans are sentient. Whatever caused that consciousness to emerge still lies outside the obvious, and if we don’t know exactly where it comes from, then we should at least maintain some modesty about claiming to know where it goes. A bit like dark matter, we only have a vague understanding of why or how consciousness even exists, so we certainly don’t know enough to say with confidence how (or even whether) it is created or destroyed.
■ Step two is to consider the possibility that certain types of information seem to have no limitations or boundaries in space or time. The law of gravity is always in force, everywhere, and doesn’t change.
■ What causes that law to be enforced everywhere? For that matter, what forces 2 + 2 to equal 4, everywhere and always within the universe? Does information itself, in a sense, travel without limitations? It’s a question for philosophical speculation as much as science.
■ When those two steps are considered together, one possibility emerges that says some form of consciousness (call it a soul or a spirit) might survive even after physical death. If we don’t know how sentience got into any of us individually or into humans as a species, then we don’t really know if or how it might leave. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not only strange that we’re here, it’s strange that we know we’re here.
■ Moreover, quantum physics holds that information is neither created nor destroyed. If that’s the case, then it’s possible to hypothesize that consciousness just might go on to exist after the death of a physical body -- and that it might have no knowable boundaries in either space or time.
■ While none of this stands as anything close to proof, it does admit the possibility that something like an afterlife could not only occur, but could be fully and indefinitely aware of the consequences of choices made during life. Forget any religious picture of Heaven or Hell; imagine the possibility of infinite awareness of the consequences of all of your actions. If taken seriously, it’s enough to make one think more than twice about doing wrong.
