Linear Non-abrupt Mortality Theory

This is a paper I did for my Religious Philosophy class but I have a feeling the teacher is going to hate on it, so might as well share it with people who might actually like to read it. So this isn't really what I believe but it's where I went to try to describe my thoughts on the afterlife. Enjoy!

Is there life after death? What is the basis for believing? When I saw this question I thought introspectively on what actually defines life after death, is there a place where our soul goes while our bodies are left behind? I’m not sure, I constantly mull this over nearly every idle moment I have. One thing I can say with near certainty is that death isn’t the end for anything but mortal consciousness. Our bodies are buried into the ground and provide food for bacteria, scavengers, worms and the like and this gives them the energy to till the soil which allows plants to grow, and so on through the “circle of life.” This is the transfer of energy; almost literally, there is a small electrical charge that triggers cellular mitosis (Gagliardi, 2002). Absence of an electrical current in the brain is considered “brain death” (Martin, 2010) and for the purpose of this paper, irreversible brain death will be considered death without making any ethical or theological implications. So let’s call the circle of life “true kinetic transfer”; worms eat you and get the energy to live, birds eat them to get the energy to fly, etc. You can, if you know how, actually measure energy this way, so let’s call this energy “measurable energy.” But consider this, you come into work and someone makes a comment on your appearance, you are flattered and you dive into your work confident and much more enthusiastically than you normally would. There was no direct transfer of energy, and yet it actually did produce a reaction. This obeys Newton’s 3rd Law; an action of speech produced a reaction of confidence in the person it was directed towards. You can’t measure this sort of reaction though, you couldn’t say, “Thanks, what you said improved my day by 50 milliamps” so let’s call this “perceived energy.” It is this perceived energy that I believe is one of the closest things that I could use explain the classical interpretations of the soul. Think of the soul as a capacitor holding currents of both positive and negative energy. It can be affected positively or negatively by its environment, situations, and interactions and of course sometimes it’s a complete mystery as to why someone is good or evil.

Some might disagree that these interactions carry any sort of energy at all and say that they hear things all the time that don’t really affect them one way or another. Well some comments or things said carry such little gravity they most certainly aren’t even going to impact you for more than a few moments. I could also make the case that sometimes this energy can be deflected. For instance, suppose a woman is preparing to tell her boyfriend she loves him for the first time. It means a lot to her so it carries a lot of kinetic weight. If she says it and her boyfriend just says, “Okay” then the girl would probably feel rejected by this. I call this a “telekinetic exchange,” and when I say telekinetic, I don’t mean bending spoons with your mind; I mean “using energy to affect something at a distance.” The catalyst doesn’t even have to be speech, it could even be a book you read, or a song you hear. So let’s call an exchange with something animate a “dynamic exchange” and one with something inanimate a “static exchange.” I think it’s important to differentiate the two because it’s almost common sense why someone can call you a “jerk” and make you feel bad, because it’s personal and directed at you; however, why are we able to empathize with characters in fictional book, or even nonconcurrent people in a non-fictional book for that matter? How does one create a personal bond with something that isn’t personal?

So I threw out a glossary of terms but they so far don’t have a lot to do with life after death. I tend to use sort of a constructivist epistemology, so it is important to conduct the framework of my idea. So I’ve already explained what happens to the measurable energy, it goes on and completes the food chain; but what happens to this perceived energy? Even skeptical people must agree that some places of profound negative energy leave lasting scars on the terrain themselves. We interpret these as being haunted houses or simply as having a bad feeling about a place. But I think that these places are “anchor points” for this perceived energy. So imagine your parents are two cables composed of many tinier strands intertwined. When you are born you are created by taking some strands from each of your parent’s cables and then interwoven to create your cable. Naturally for a long time these cables run parallel, and as your parents impart lessons, wisdom, memories, or any other exchanges they break off strands of their own and create a thicker, more solid cable in you, just as these same things can be imparted on them as well. I call these off-chutes “tangents” and every day with every exchange, with every person, we are constantly exchanging strands of our cable both positively and negatively. Some of these strands are thicker and more profound and stick with the effected person for longer; some of them are so insignificant they simply wear away after time. Once we die the cable frays and all of the pieces bond to those closest to us and we continue to live on through them. Some people live more reclusively and the lack of any profound interaction with people causes their cable to gradually wear away and once their cable frays, there are less of the tangents to go around, thusly we are less impacted when they pass on. A loving father leaves profound tangents that become very large pieces in the lives of their family members; where as a famous person would leave several smaller strands which have less of an impact to much more people. So it is with this perceived energy that our spirits live on long after our mortal consciousness ceases.

This expansive network of all perceived energy that ever was and ever will be I call the “cosmic tapestry.” Not all the energy in the tapestry is created from dynamic interactions between living things. Some of these transfers can come from static sources which when used in the tapestry I call “static anchors.” Things like gravestones, monuments, statues and photographs would be “tangible anchors,” even things such as haunted houses can be explained as an anchor of high amounts of positive or negative energy linked to a former resident or denizen of that anchor point. Sometimes even things like a person’s name or a story of them could carry almost as much weight as the tangible anchors but I would call these “intangible anchors.” So just as a monument in a park would carry on a legacy, the same would occur for conductors of profoundly negative energy. For instance the very name Adolph Hitler can inspire a wide range of emotions many years after his death. But for the most part we all continue to live through the memories of our kin, and so I believe there is truly a life after death, however whether it’s in the traditional sense of eternal divine euphoria, I can’t begin to answer. But this is the framework for my hypothesis on the “Linear Non-abrupt Mortality Theory.”

Bibliography
Gagliardi, L. J. (2002, February 15). Journal of Electrostatics: Microscale electrostatics in mitosi. Retrieved February 21, 2010, from ScienceDirect: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V02-4555PDN-2&_user=10&_coverDate=03%2F31%2F2002&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1216279730&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_us
Martin, A. R. (2010). Brain Death. Retrieved February 22, 2010, from Encyclopedia of Death and Dying: http://www.deathreference.com/Bl-Ce/Brain-Death.html