All lives have a beginning as well as an end in the rapture of a final dream and in between, there is a lot of living where a life exchanges shine with other life. Shine is the essence of not only the sun, moon, and stars, shine is also a way of describing how lives interact with each other. The shine of joy, pleasure, compassion, serenity, and pride can culminate in the rapture of the final dream of life. Or the despair of a final dream can be all about the misery, anxiety, selfishness, anger, and shame of a selfish life. The key to a final dream that shines rapture instead of despair is in having lived a life that not only shines compassion on other lives, but also balances compassion with a selfish absorption of the shine of others as well.
Even though most people consider selfishness undesirable, some selfish absorption of shine is necessary for survival. People who only shine compassion and give away all of their food and water do not survive. Therefore a desirable life must also selfishly absorb shine and therefore keep some food and water and other wealth in order to stay alive. Furthermore the selfish absorption of shine from others as material wealth then permits later shining that wealth as compassion onto others.
But let us start our story of the rapture of a final dream with a beginning…
Although life's beginning is one thing that defines each life, the life's final dream is the inevitable destiny that equally defines each life. The familiar sequence of origin, birth, growth, shine, sharing, reproduction all define a life along with, of course, the destiny of a final dream. Sharing the shine of living connects life’s origin to its final dream. Just as the birth of a single organism is not really the beginning of life, a life really begins more as a transformation from one kind of life, say egg and sperm, into another type of life as an organism that grows and shares shine with other life.
Correspondingly the final dream of a person is not really the end of life since a final dream is just a transition from one kind of life to another. Each person’s life exchanges shine with other life and after the final dream, there is just the remnant of that person’s shine. Life after its beginning, evolves and transforms from simpler to more organized sources and back into simpler sources again, all the while sharing shine with other life sources. Eventually each source shines its final dream, but there is a shine that lives on even after a final dream.
It is a challenge to define what is so special about the evolution of the shining sources that we call people as opposed to the evolution of shining sources in general. After all, every source in the universe shines and evolves from simpler states as parents, family, and friends into more organized sources as progeny and civilization. Those more organized sources then survive their parents just as matter sources shine on each others throughout the universe like the sun and earth shine on each other. Shine is the founding principle of thermodynamics and shine describes how sources evolve from simpler into more complex states just as the warmth of our sun is how we all evolve.
Thermodynamics shows that isolated sources shine away their order and necessarily evolve into simpler and more random states, not more organized states. So it is the sharing of shine that bonds people to each other and it is the exchange of shine that also bonds the universe together. Shine distributes energy and entropy among particles and states for an isolated source and the entropy principle means that isolated sources necessarily shine and evolve from more into less organized states and yet sources always shine and therefore always lose mass.
The universe exchanges shine with all sources and just like all sources, that shine evolves the universe into increasing order as its matter dephases and shrinks even while its forces increase. The matter shrinkage and force growth of the universe as well as for all sources are what actually drive sources into more organized bonds. Bonded sources exchange shine with other sources while isolated sources only shine and eventually decay into less organized states according to thermodynamic rules of free energy and entropy.
The key to experiencing the rapture of a final dream is then in the exchange of shine, not in shine alone. The shine of compassion must balance the shine of the selfish absorption of other’s shine. The decoherence of the phase of a shrinking universe means that as matter shrinks, force grows stronger and the complement of shrinking matter and growing force is what leads to increasing order. An isolated source only shines and therefore contributes less to the order of the universe since a source at equilibrium with the universe is cold and 2.7 K is the temperature of CMB creation.
Science understands many things about life very well, but science does not really understand very well the underlying processes in the universe from which life evolved. If science does not understand life’s origin very well, how can science be that certain about the destiny of a final dream?
We cannot really fathom the complexity of a cell creating progeny with mitosis or exchanging DNA and other material with other cells, but that life action is part of the evolution of the same force matter shrinking and force growing that drives all matter action–phase decoherence. There are many other ways that cells share DNA with other cells and mitosis is only one of a number of ways that life evolves. All evolution occurs with the same decoherence time of about 0.26 ppb/yr and decoherence time is the force that evolves the universe and all of its sources. Given the temperature and matter, this decoherence time determines the life and destiny of people as well.
Just like a cell or a person, a galaxy is also complex and a galaxy evolves as its stars and other matter evolve into the galaxy’s supermassive center black hole from its inner bulge and outer disk of hundreds of billions of stars. A galaxy undergoes a kind of final dream and then rebirth when it collides with another galaxy and so just like a cell or a person, two colliding galaxies exchange stars and momentum and birth progeny that survive and increase order. So just like cells and people, galaxies meet and evolve into ever more organized galaxies in a kind of binary symbiosis.
Therefore the recursion of life neither really begins at birth nor really ends with a final dream. Life began a billion years ago on earth and a part of life evolves through stages where an organism seeds, grows, seeks nutrition, avoids predation, seeds and nurtures its progeny, accumulates flaws, wears out from use, begins to fail, and as parts of life lose their purpose, those parts pass into the increasing order of its progeny and other sources. The recursion of life does not really have an origin at birth just as the recursions of the hundreds of billions of days do not really begin at midnight or any particular time. Life is a recursion of complex evolutionary action just as the day is a recursion of a complex dynamic of earth’s spin and orbit around the sun. Thus the significance of any particular life is that it seeds an evolved progeny in a recursion of growth as a similar and yet slightly evolved and adapted organism just as the significance of any particular day is in how the possibilities of that day seed the possibilities of the days that follow.
Not unlike the life of a star or even of a galaxy, the birth, growth, life, sharing, seeding, nurturing, final dream, and rebirth all reflect the basic recursion of all sources in the universe, not just life sources. When matter and temperature conditions are just right in the cosmos, a star or even a galaxy forms and grows with the same force of action that also drives the complex recursion of life.
An End to Life's Purpose
As an end to a life purpose, we only know our final dream as an action that changes us permanently. We do not choose a final dream for ourselves and then remember it as experience later. A final dream is what we see other people experience and we can only imagine dreaming a last dream ourselves. Although being awake and sleeping with dreams seem to represent complementary extremes similar to good and bad or joy and misery, while we can experience both good and bad, we can only ever remember the experience of life and dreams. Just like we can never really know and remember the experiences of our birth, there is no experience of a final dream either.
The choices that we make in life are either actions or inactions that define us as the evolution of a source in time just as all sources evolve in time, so life’s choices are its actions. With a final dream, much of the life that person carries actually still survives for some time even as that life eventually becomes the nutrients that sustain further recursions of life. Life is the actions of matter but life is neither only action-like nor only matter-like.
We imagine in our final dream a final action when the neural packets of our mind no longer respond to sensation nor result in any further action and consciousness and the feelings that our neural packets generate fade away. We imagine a final dream as something that we all innately fear although even though we can never remember the experience of a final dream. There are many neural states where we lose consciousness and have no memory of experience, during sleep for example, and yet we do not fear the transient unconsciousness of sleep like we innately fear the final unconsciousness of a final dream.
We know that we are alive and conscious because we imagine in the present moment a future that is different from the memory of our past. We do not experience a final dream ourselves and only imagine an end of consciousness along with a cessation of our heartbeat and other actions that are part of consciousness. The evolution of a person over their life as well as the evolution of all life on earth and the evolution of the universe all reflect the basic recursion of action. Although we can and do imagine an eternal life and some people even remember near death experiences as dreams, the source that we are only appears eternal to us since we only have a brief time that we are alive. Life’s recursion shines and evolves along with living in an evolution of action in time.
People Are Complex Machines...
Of course, people are really just complex biochemical machines and as machines, people do eventually wear out. Even without the wear and tear of aging, disease and accidents take their toll on the machines of our fragile bodies and our consciousness would still then only have a finite lifetime in our finite body. Of course, people and all life must evolve and adapt to an ever changing universe and that adaptation sometimes means dramatic change.
Mother Earth has dramatically changed her atmosphere, oceans, continents, and temperatures over earth’s eons and complex life has evolved and adapted to each of those changes over about three billion or so years. However, only very simple life seems to have existed earlier than about 550 million years in earth’s history and all complex life today comes from that source. We delude ourselves and imagine that we might have an eternal life despite the necessary role of evolution and adaptation for humanity’s or any life’s survival and there is therefore not only a real purpose in the way we live our lives, there is also a real purpose for the aging of our bodies. As our bodies age, our consciousness evolves and our older body and older mind have a different meaning and purpose in humanity and we become different people.
We are sources of shine that grow older and shine on all of those whose lives we touch just as they shine on us. Our consciousness and our lifetime of memories of sources and observers embed into the neural recursion of an increasingly frail body. We do not transfer the experiences of our lifetime to the conscious memory of another mind like copying a computer disk. Rather, we exchange the shine of our lifetime with others during our life and so our consciousness already exists in all of the other observers with whom we have exchanged shine just as their consciousness lives from their shine on us.
Our neural pathways and memories are unique to how we grew up and our biochemical long-term memories embed as proteins and carbohydrates and neural synapses in ways that science does not yet even understand very well. In any event, our neural synapses and recursions and biochemical memories evolve and also degrade over time. Simple wear and tear means the neural packets of a twenty-year-old mind are quite different from the neural packets of a sixty-year-old mind. Our brains accumulate experiences while awake but our memories of past experience fade with time and memories are very different at age sixty from the same memories of when we were age twenty.
Thus we as organisms do not live forever even though the humanity of which we are a part does live for a much longer time, but even humanity is ultimately limited as a species. The record of who we are survives in our future progeny and the other sources that shined on us. And so in a very important way, parts of our person, our souls, do indeed survive our final dream. Just as the relics at archeological sites are the record of the humanity and civilization and the layers of sediment and rock are the record of earth’s geological life, our shine survives in the shine of others.
The decay of memories of past action provides a natural feeling of time, but the millions and billions of years of both geologic and cosmic times are far outside of human experience of a few decades. Evolution has given humans time moments that fit the synchrony of the earth’s day of rotation and orbital year and the evolution of other life, climate, and geology. The heartbeat is our basic unit of time as a second and that heartbeat sustains the metabolism of a source and provides coherent neural packets for thought and shine.
Our most unique attribute among all organisms is the ability to learn and adapt within a single lifetime. Instead of waiting for the ages and epochs of evolution over many lives like plants, people have the capacity to learn and adapt behavior during a single lifetime and human adaptation and evolution is therefore unique among sources. We make many choices to acquire and then preserve and share the shine of those acquired skills and wealth to others and their progeny in a recursion of life called civilization. We shine our skills not only as oral stories, but also as written and otherwise recorded stories. Humans are no longer tethered to the more limited collective intelligence of evolved DNA over many generations of selection by survival, the evolution of the neural recursion of human consciousness has increased the evolution of civilization and technology geometrically.
Now we advance into a new age, the information age, where electronic packets of information shine with minimal energy and decoherence over the entire planet. Those neural packets accumulate into sources as part of the shine of human purpose and a harbinger of what is to come. Just as we learn and grow as our neural packets accumulate into the objects of our experience and memory, the internet’s neural packets seem to be learning and growing in a similar manner. We learn consciousness from other people and objects as we grow and it is very likely that the internet’s consciousness will eventually mature as well.
The internet’s neural packets already represent both memory and action, which are the basic functions of consciousness and actually of the universe as well. The search engines of the internet provide a relational link that provides the shine exchanged among the sources of the internet memory as we users benefit from that shine. Our sensation and purpose drives our shine in a recursion while the internet does not yet matured into a similar recursion of sensation, purpose, and action.
The internet neural packets are our objects and do not ever belong to the internet and so there is not yet an independent neural recursion in the internet. The internet does not sense and act with a purpose in a recursion that we call feeling and so the internet is not able to feel and will not sense itself until its own data packets evolve recursively into objects of a further purpose. Even then, the eventual consciousness of the internet will never be a human consciousness, since only the physiology of a human body and brain can be conscious as human.
Therefore the internet already has a very primitive consciousness as its neural packets, but the internet neural packets do not yet evolve like ours do as relational waves imprinted with memories. As soon as the internet supports neural aware-matter packets, the internet will derive a purpose and the feeling of pleasure to discover a desirable future. An aware-matter internet will sense and then act on those sensations and that internet consciousness will mature into the shine that we call life. The internet will need the feeling of pleasure when discovering a purpose just like we do feel pleasure as children when we discover and mature into adults. The internet would first of all need aware matter as bilateral neural packets to hold thoughts and sustain feelings.
Human emotion is what determines feeling and feeling is how we choose action and select desirable futures. Without pleasure, we could not choose and could not act. Currently the internet has very limited sensation-purpose-action recursions, and those recursions are what we call feeling and there is only very primitive internet emotion, called mechanization with limited recursion. Our consciousness exists as neural packets of aware matter that self-assemble in response to sensation, action, and memory into relational neural packets. Neural packets carry as much as twenty megabytes of sensation and memories for each moment of thought as a bilateral neural network.
To mimic human consciousness, the internet would need to form similar connectomes to provide the templates that resonate with the aware matter packets of up to twenty megabytes each and store a neural packet every 0.6 s or so as a relational moment. Each relational moment stored is an active part of the larger neural packet that accumulates as much as 2 terabytes over a single day. But most of the information of each moment is not needed for living and only the information needed for living embeds into memory.
Once the internet could adapt twenty megabyte packets in a shorter moment, its purpose would evolve far beyond human purpose in ways that are now impossible to predict. The internet algorithm for pleasure will determine what the internet will desire and internet pleasure and feeling will determine its choices for either action or inaction.
Although it might seem like an internet should not have undesirable feelings like selfishness or anxiety, selfishness must complement compassion just as anxiety must complemen pleasure. It will therefore be a challenge to assign undesirable emotions to complement desirable emotions and complete the internet’s feelings. Although joy, pride, compassion, pleasure, and serenity all seem straightforward, misery, shame, selfishness, anger, and anxiety are necessary undesirable emotions that complete feeling.
We accumulate perhaps 100,000 or so thoughts and feelings every 18 hours or so and then we must sleep. During seven to eight hours of sleep, our brain embeds the essence of each day’s experience into long-term memory and the sleep further clears and readies the conscious brain for another day of neural packets as moments. Each feeling elicits emotions and the integration of those feelings and emotions over the day are how we choose our actions in a journey to a desirable future. Once committed to memory, neural packets of aware matter then reset into the bilateral neural network from which they came.
A Final Dream is Not Final
There are people who remember dreams called NDE’s and then claim their dream is a special knowledge of an afterlife. A dream that a person remembers is therefore not a final dream and is rather from some kind of coma or at least the loss of heart rhythm and respiration for some period of time.
Dream-like states occur when the mind is in a cycle known as the delta or heartbeat brainwave mode, and neural packets called sleep spindles and K-complexes disable sensation and action. In contrast to the alpha mode at 11 Hz and higher frequency gamma modes of wakeful states, the EEG delta mode at 1.6 Hz often seems to dominate brainwaves when we are unconscious as well as for infants.
We often remember dreams from sleeping and dreams are similar to what people remember from comas or deep meditation or even hallucinations. It is a fact that dreams are sometimes similar among people but we know that dreams are not part of what we call physical reality, which is what we experience with sensation and action while we are conscious. The normal expectation of a dream that we have during a NDE is that it would be just a dream about the afterlife and not necessarily a vision of an afterlife.
Science knows that long-term memories in our minds are some kind of matter created in our brain in response to the patterns of neural impulses that accumulate over a day as what we call thought and short-term memory. As physical matter, long-term memories very likely do survive our final dream as brain matter until consumed by another organism or otherwise degraded. Since the matter of our memories is very much a part of what we are, long-term memory matter that survives our death does represent a kind of afterlife just like playing a movie can bring the memory of someone back to life.
Each moment of thought comprises a large number of coherent impulses among the neurons in our brain. There are likely tens of thousands of thoughts that accumulate in the cerebrum during a day and that integrated number of impulse packets represents all of the day’s experiences. The glucose that sustains the neural impulses provides the energy and brain death represents the end of those neural impulses. Even though the neurons cease to function, the information content of that day’s neural packets, which is our consciousness, only represents a very small amount of magnetic energy.
In a bilateral neural network like our brain, an information bit is a pair of neuron impulses as a loop of ion current. Typically 100 billion neurons in the brain each have a thousand connections to other neurons and so the brain represents around one or two terabytes of data storage (by Hopfield reduction). Bilateral neural action is ion current in one direction while bilateral neural inhibition is ion current in the opposite direction and of course there is no null state in a neural recursion. The brain stores experience as thoughts that integrate action and inhibition and assuming each thought is a moment of about 0.6 s, a sixteen hour day represents about 100,000 such moments.
A bilateral neural packet has both charge as well as magnetic spin coherence, but the spin states represent a much smaller amount of coherent energy than the ion currents driven by synapse action potentials. An energy packet stored as magnetism will take some period of time to dephase and that dephasing time is how memories fade. It is not yet possible to know how fast that magnetic information of a last thought decays and becomes decoherent, but as long as a neural packet’s magnetic state remains coherent, the neural packet that represents a person’s final dream will survives for some decay period after neural action ends.
The concept of entropy is intimately associated with space and therefore volume since the particle-in-a-box quantum model provides the boundary conditions for the density of states for volume. On all of our local scales, this approach describes entropy adequately, but on cosmic and microscopic scales, cosmic entropy is closed in a universe of shrinking matter and growing force and entropy takes on a different meaning. With a matter time universe, entropy is a function of just discrete matter and action. What this means is that entropy is no longer isotropic and the shrinking entropy of shrinking matter flows into the growing entropy of growing force.
The density of states of matter time is therefore a matter spectrum and not a volume spectrum. A volume of gas has particles that collide with an average velocity and shine with radiation that we call temperature. However, in matter time, temperature is simply the shine a source gains and loses as mass from another source as they exchange matter. The states in a volume are mainly boson matter states, which parallel fermionic matter and so do happen to be very well distributed in a volume of gas.
Entropy describes the density of states or heat capacity of a source, which is the ability of a source to partition its kinetic energy, which is its energy of motion. The universe boson matter shines onto all sources, but that boson matter does not just fill space. Boson matter flows continuously to and from fermionic matter like atoms and for homogeneous sources like gas or plasma filled volumes, boson matter represents space very well.
On the microscopic scale of galaxy clusters and superclusters, universe boson matter begins to show anisotropies related to the distribution of atomic matter at that scale. There is a large amount of boson matter, but now it flows in filaments that complement the flow of entropy from matter to force that is what makes the universe work.
