A strange thought occurred to me approximately a year ago. It seems completely plausible, yet the disturbing nature of it has haunted me ever since. It is not necessarily pleasant in its entirety, but still offers a decent theory of what happens when we die. I believe in an afterlife of some sort, but the variety of this experience is what is in question. I feel that one will experience infinity after life. The nature of this experience is based solely on how life was lived. Now the tricky part of this, is that the judge of one's goodness or quality of life lived is the actual participant in the afterlife. Any preconceived notions on whether you yourself deserve happiness, will ultimately determine your fate. My reasoning for such is that I believe that one's "afterlife" is the equivalent of a mathematical impulse. For those of you not familiar with the impulse, often used in signal processing, bear with me while I try my best to explain.
An impulse, in its most basic form, is simply the derivative of a step function. Okay, I'm hearing groans from my audience here. Please hang on while I continue to peel the layers off of this and simplify to the extent of my means. A step function is like turning on a switch at zero seconds. The value instantaneously goes to 1 and stays there for infinity. A derivative is simply a way to describe the rate of change of a function. So, taking the derivative of this so-called step function yields an infinite amount of change, at one single point. This point is infinitesimally small and nearly zero, but within that minuscule time segment, the impulse's value is infinite. An interesting note, albeit completely irrelevant to our current discussion, is that the area contained in an impulse is 1. Weird, huh?
Well, I hope that the concept of the impulse is somewhat understood. Imagine now, if you will, that as one passes into death, the brain creates an impulse. All outside senses become cut off, and the mind's eye (nose, mouth, ears, and rest too) takes control. In this impulse, I think that the infinite magnitude is actually time, inside this brain. That's right; the afterlife is simply an instantaneous dream! It is not too hard to imagine. Have you ever had a dream, while waking up that seemed to last hours yet you know that it probably happened in mere seconds? It is the same concept, except on a much larger scale.
I find this to get very disturbing. Imagine that your entire experience in "heaven" is totally created by you. You interact with people who you've known, and have passed before you. These are just creations in your own mind. These aren't individuals, but creations made by you. They aren't really there, in fact, they too experienced their own heaven at their moment of death. They imagined years down the road, countless relatives and descendants arriving. It is all fictitious. This infinite amount of time happens instantaneously to the alive, outside observers. In our realm of time (the living realm of which I'm still a member) we have no clue that this person just reached infinity. That now gets back to the assumption, based on this model of afterlife, which declares that how you view yourself plays a major role in shaping your afterlife. If you feel you are ultimately good, and deserve the best; you will have a wonderful life, after death. If you are full of bad thoughts, they will manifest themselves in your mind for infinity.
That is a brief introduction to the haunting theory that makes me unsettled. It is a definite motivator to be the best that one can be, though. Who's to say if this is the case? Not I. I value all suggestions, and my views change continually. I've been working hard on developing a plausible adaptation of afterlife that involves true infinity and a real connection with other individuals, but it is still a tricky one. I would much rather believe in something with more community, but the unfortunate fact is that my mind grabs on to the most plausible and allows that thought to flourish and move itself into the classification of truth.
