The Death Conjecture

We've all heard the NDE (Near Death Experience) stories. If you haven't a brief synopsis follows; you become clinically dead, you hear a rather unpleasant whooshing noise, you see your body as you're seemingly floating above it, you become engulfed in a bright light that seems Good and then, depending on your belief system you see relatives, religious figures, or you're just really happy to be....uhhhh....dead. But, realizing you have unfinished business on earth you reluctantly return to the pain and misery of terrestrial existence, which according to some is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". Hobbes obviously didn't have on his happy face the day he penned this phrase.

This has been documented thousands of times and studied by both scientists and pseudo-scientists alike. The phenomenon has been experienced by everyone from Bible toting Christians to died in the wool atheists. Extra points if you caught the homo-phonetic pun in the previous sentence. That the phenomenon happens is not what's in question, the nature of it is. Google NDE and you can spend the next 12 weeks reading about it. I didn't. Instead I came up with a crack-pot hypothesis that could possibly make everyone happy, though it won't.

The hard-nosed scientists say this is caused by the shutting down of the brain during the process of becoming completely dead, vs. the present state of mostly dead. Or "Near Death" as non-pythonesq aficionados' seem to prefer. It would be so much cooler if they could be referred to as "Mostly Dead Experiences" or MDEs. Anyway, Monty Python references aside, these stick in the mud scientists claim that this state only lasts a few seconds and then it's either you get resuscitated or it's lights out forever. The religious folks of course claim that it's proof of an afterlife.

I think it's both. Well I don't really think that but I think it's a fun idea to think it's both. Here's the deal. When you die, a CDE (a Completely Dead Experience vs. a Mostly Dead Experience) all of the aforementioned stuff happens, you float away from your body, see a Good light, possibly shake Jesus's hand, see old friends and family and are pretty much just happy as a clam. So far everybody agrees, white coated party-poopers say it's a hallucination and white robed optimists think it's the gates of heaven. I tend to fall into the camp of the white coated party pooper hard nosed scientists. I've been hit or kicked in the nose hard a number of times but it's never broken. And I'm not so sure clams are all that happy.

So it is a hallucination of sorts but with a twist. The twist is that the hallucination goes on for eternity. Now before the Theists have a feces laden fit let me point something out. Einstein pointed out that time was relative to one's speed vs another one's speed. Time is different (slows down) for someone on a speeding train than for the stationary observer who's going to die 10^-10000 seconds sooner than the guy on the train. But that's not the kind of time morphing experience I'm talking about although this could have something to do with it. Hell, Elvis "could" have something to do with it, remember this a crackpot hypothesis. Ever heard the phrase "time flies when you're having fun", well just take this to it's ultimate extreme. You are in such an incredible state of bliss that it lasts forever.

And why wouldn't this be Heaven? Everything that you experience on earth actually happens inside your skull as far as you're concerned (light, sound, touch, etc. are translated into electro-chemical signals that your brain interprets and places some meaning on). So maybe the afterlife is the same way. You're still living inside your brain but it lasts forever and with drugs (drugs naturally produced from the pineal gland inside your brain, after all this is Heaven, tsk tsk). From the the white lab coat guy's point of view you are only in the "Mostly Dead" state for mere seconds, but for you the "Mostly Dead" state lasts forever.

So if this is all true, which I really doubt, then the real question is; can we really communicate with others while in the MDE state or can we only communicate with representations of others stored in our memory? Alas, that question will have to tackled another time with another bottle of NyQuil.