Choose your afterlife

[Christa]

What if God is a microbe, and we're just the hosts for the creatures made in Its image? A neuroscientist and self-described "possibilian" offers 40 thought-provoking possibilities for the afterlife in a slim book called "Sum."

The questions that David Eagleman deals with at his day job at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston are already pretty far-out: How do our brains construct reality? Why does our perception of time's flow change? Why do some people "see" music or associate numbers with colors?

For example, consider how the data in your brain determines your identity. "For a long time, there's been this open question of what it would be like to be someone else - or to be something else," he said. "Once you're John Malkovich, you wouldn't remember what it's like not to be John Malkovich."

That spawned Eagleman's little story about cross-species reincarnation, titled "Descent of Species": Suppose you admired the strength and beauty of horses, and you got the chance to become a horse in your next life. Once you become a horse, would you have enough wits to appreciate that life, or even enough wits to choose the life after that? And if that's the case, what unwitting demigods might we humans have been in our past lives?

Other stories play off the fact that existential meaning doesn't scale well. "What would happen if we showed Shakespeare to a dog or a bacterium?" Eagleman asked. "It's pointless, because what's meaningful to you changes by spatial scale."

For example, a microbial God might reserve the afterlife strictly for microbes, with humans merely serving as part of the scenery. Or the universe might be ruled by a cosmic Giantess who is as indifferent to our fate as we are to the fate of an amoeba.

/snip

When it comes to his personal views on the afterlife, Eagleman shies away from calling himself an atheist, or a deist or theist. Instead, he prefers the term "possibilian."

Full article here:

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/09/10/2063070.aspx

♫

[Warpy]

1. Microscopic wildlife outnumbers our own cells

Most of it is either benign or beneficial and we couldn't live without some of it.

There have been a few microbiologists who have described the human purpose as a way for bacteria to travel and spread. Looking at ourselves as sacks of bacteria is highly uncomplimentary, but it might just be our true purpose in the ecosystem.

Bacteria are probably the predominant life form in the universe, able to exist here on earth in the most impossible niches from radioactive waste at Hanford, to the Antarctic, to salt deposits on the Atacama, to volcanic vents in the deep sea.

Eagleman's speculations are not completely out of line.

[rrneck]

2. Thanks. I heard him interviewed

on NPR a while back and one of the stories made me laugh out loud. A nead trick since I was digging post holes at the time. But I couldn't remember the author or title.

[Jim__]

3. "What if God is a microbe, and we're just the hosts for the creatures made in Its image?"

Humans tend to look on the earth and everything on it as our "hosts", here only to be exploited by us. There'd be a sort of poetic justice if microbes were just keeping us around as long as they saw us as useful, and will discard us the instant we are no longer useful.

[tinrobot]

4. You are everything that came before you.

Every molecule in your body came from something else. There's a calculation out there that proves at least one molecule of water in your body passed through the bladder of Benjamin Franklin (or whoever) and I'm sure there's a few molecules in you that were once part of a dinosaur.

So, in some respects, you're the reincarnation of Benjamin Franklin, a dinosaur, and a whole lot of other things.

And when you're done with your molecules, those molecules will reincarnate as many other things, including other creatures, and other humans.