Is bodily resurrection possible? Surely a strong atheist cannot entertain such an outlandish and wishful thought such as life after death. Read below to follow me through the maze of existential crisis as I wrestle with this possibility, and the unforeseen consequences of a teleportation and our consciousness.

Assumptions

I typically like to begin with a few assumptions I’m making. That way you can check out early or continue on with an open mind.

Our Identity is a stream of Consciousness. I am making an assumption that our stream of subjective consciousness is what makes us, well us. It is not the in individual atoms but rather an information pattern over time. Hypothetically if we snapshot that pattern at a given time we have effectively captured ourselves in that moment in an eternal timeless frame.

No Mind Body Dualism. I do not believe in a soul or that the conscious mind is separate from the physical body i.e. the brain. I believe consciousness is a process of the brain, remove the brain and remove consciousness.

Limits to subjective conscious experience. There are limits on the time fidelity to which we can consciously experience. Phenomena which fall below this subjective threshold are equivalent to the individual as them not have occurring at all within the world. E.g. the tree that falls in the wood, never happened from the subjective viewpoint of the conscious observer if they did not sense it. An extreme example involves the impact a super nova in another galaxy that is happening right now has zero impact on my subjective experience in the present moment. I’m willing to concede there may be some quantum entanglement with my consciousness with that far away phenomenon but will dismiss that idea for the sake of this discussion.

Limits of Consciousness

To begin let’s discuss the nature of the limits of consciousness. Originally when I began this thought experiment I was making an assumption that we experience the world subconsciously in chunks, which would comport with my conclusions even more. In spite of some scientific studies theorizing discrete chunked time processing (imagine our brain processing sensory data in 20ms intervals), I now believe there is no specific mechanism preventing us from experiencing time in a continuous fashion. With that said it is observed that we have limits to our conscious experience of the world. Specifically this is noted here http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness-temporal/empirical-findings.html with distinction of successive events being observed at 30ms. To give some breathing room for subconscious experience I will estimate this to be two orders of magnitude lower at 0.3ms. That is to say if two trees fell before you in an identical fashion within .3ms you would consciously observe them as a single tree falling.

Meet Bob, Our Test Subject

Throughout the rest of this discussion I’d like to focus on one thought experiment. Bob goes to sleep via a drug that renders him completely unconscious, no dreams, no conscious or subconscious thoughts – nothing. The only part of his bran that is active is that which is required to execute bodily function i.e. heart, lungs etc. The effect of the drug last one hour. Inside the room next to his bed is a teleportation device. The device can teleport any amount of matter at the speed of light and maintain the original properties of the matter (Estimated round trip of material is one billionth of a second). We can send a small part of Bob through the device e.g. an atom, cell or organ, or we could send Bob in his entirety.

Theseus’ Ship

Theseus’s ship is an ancient paradox. We can use it today to illustrate how we in fact should not identify ourselves with some particular matter, rather it is the arrangement of matter that is important. The paradox is introduced by asking whether the ship may still be called Theseus’ ship if throughout the journey planks and boards are replaced on the ship such that by the end of the journey no original pieces of the ship remain. Most of us would agree that it is still the same ship.

We observe the same phenomenon in our bodies. The material in our bodies are certainly not the same as ten years ago, or even yesterday. In fact current scientific models estimate that all cells in our bodies cycle within seven years. We are constantly ingesting, breathing, and absorbing new material from our environment and excrementing, sweating and urinating other material. Us humans however do not experience any conscious boundary as this change is occurring. Organic multicellular life is very akin to the problem introduced by Theseus’ ship.This is the foundation that will lay the groundwork for the consciousness teleportation thought experiments discussed below.

Progressive Teleportation

Now let us do a series of experiments on Bob while he is in his unconscious state. To begin we simply teleport a single atom through our device. We can likely agree Bob is still Bob in the morning. What about a single cell? Is Bob still Bob? I believe so, I believe ramping up to Bob’s entire Body would still make Bob the same person. But for the sake of argument let’s say teleporting anything over one milligram (mg) at a time compromises an individual’s identity. To solve this dilemma we would just need to create a teleportation stream of one mg chunks. If we sent one milligram of Bob round trip through the teleportation device every microsecond it would take around 70 seconds if Bob weighed 154lbs (70Kg). Now we can increase the rate at which these chunks are streamed such that the total time for the teleportation is below the subjective consciousness threshold (.3ms) and Bob would experience (if he were conscious) instantaneous teleportation.

Hopefully by now we are on the same page and agree Bob did not die in the process and is still the same person. The next question that presents itself is what happens if we introduce a delay during the teleportation process. Instead of completing the round trip the information is stored in an intermediate buffer for an indeterminate amount of time 1 second or 100 years and then the teleportation is completed. In many ways we can think of this as time-travelling into the future, at least from a subjective consciousness point of view.

The Big Leap – Teleportation Clones

So far Bob has only been teleporting a short distance through time. We have been conducting our experiments by sending Bob in a round trip through the teleportation device to establish that he does not die in the process and in fact maintains his stream of consciousness and identity throughout the ordeal. We can now begin to explore teleportation through four-dimensional space-time. This shouldn’t change anything, instead of teleporting Bob back to his same bed, let’s teleport him to a bed next to the original bed, or a bed located on another planet. From Bob’s perspective when he awakes it would be as if someone had transported him while he was unconscious, as a conscious observer it would be similar to being transported during blinking your eyes.

Now let’s consider the possibility that the teleportation device teleports Bob to two separate space-time coordinates. From the perspective of Bob (1) and (2) he would have a continuous and identical stream of consciousness leading up to the completion of the teleportation. However, after the teleportation is complete Bob (1) and (2) become separate and distinct individuals because they now represent two separate streams of consciousness. They are receiving sensory data from two separate environments and those stimulus are building a separate stream of consciousness from each of their subjective experiences.

Here is where it starts to get hairy… We create an experiment that teleports the unconscious Bob to two separate rooms. Creating Bob clones (1) and (2). Immediately after the teleportation is complete we kill Bob (1). We must conclude that Bob never died. Bob (1) never had an opportunity to materialize as a conscious being and Bob (2) is a continuation of the original Bob consciousness. And here we begin to reframe what death means. It is one possible end to a stream of consciousness .

Endpoints in an individual’s stream of consciousness are not just limited to death. Drugs, sleep, sudden head trauma can all lead to a state of unconsciousness. Anyone who has been knocked out can attest to the sudden disorientation and memory loss that accompanies coming to after such an event. Humans have given very special attention to death because from what we can observe it is the final end of consciousness . Interesting things begin to happen though when we define death as simply an endpoint in a stream of consciousness , equivalent to being knocked out or in an unconscious state.

The first interesting conclusion we can make is the teleportation device now has more appeal as a save device for our consciousness. Consider a new thought experiment with the device in that capacity. Bob is driving to work one day and is in a car accident in which he loses consciousness. He awakes in the hospital and can’t remember anything that happened after the morning of the crash. The doctor informs him it is due to the head trauma he has suffered Bob has short-term memory loss. In a second scenario, Bob uploads his consciousness to the teleportation device in the morning and heads to work, on his way to work he is in a similar crash and dies. The following day his body and consciousness is restored. An argument can easily be made that these two scenarios are identical.

Possible Brain Configurations

What about resurrection and the people who have not scanned their consciousness prior to death? This is more a question of being able to quantify the total number of possible streams of human consciousness and then creating continuations of those streams. Consider a breakdown of the diagram on the right.

A. All possible configurations of 1.4 Kg (weight of human brain) of material

1. 1.4 Kg Rock

2. 1.4 Kg of Ocean Water

B. Set of all possible 1.4 Kg human brain configurations

3. Alice’s Brain at age 24

4. Jim’s Brain at age 98

C. Set of all of Bob’s brain configurations during his lifetime

5. Bob’s final brain configuration before death

We never delved to deep into the fact that consciousness likely only resides in a subset of the brain. It is likely that the set of brain configuration necessary to provide a continuous stream of consciousness is a subset of the 1.4 Kg brain set. For this discussion let’s just continue with the belief the entire brain is required. The one thing we can say for certain is the set is finite.

With this finite set it is not difficult to imagine that a super intelligent being in the future could reconstruct these consciousness streams from their death points. And thus we finally arrive at resurrection. This super intelligent entity does not appear to exist today and would likely be some natural evolution of our current species. Naturally we would want this super intelligent entity to value human values so that we don’t find our consciousness reconstituted into some hellish nightmare.

So I guess that’s it. Time to get to work on building a super intelligence so that I can be bodily resurrected sometime in the future.