Yesterday we said goodbye to my new daughter’s mother. She had died the previous week, not unexpectedly, and my son’s new wife was understandably distraught.
It was a sweet and gentle service, largely informal, an old church pal of mine officiating with a tender and empathetic tone. My daughter followed his eulogy with an attempt to share some memories, but she couldn’t hold it together; she broke down several times. She wasn’t the only one.
I had only met her mom a couple of times, and on the latter of those occasions, the dementia that ultimately claimed her had begun. She wasn’t fully herself, at least not the woman I distantly remembered. But that was of no consequence; among those who rose to speak of her were myriad recollections of the fun, vibrant woman who had infused the world with joy and humor and kindness for 72 years.
And, of course, there were the comforting offerings of the heaven she now inhabited, and the second life she had now commenced.
At least one other person in the room felt as I do about such matters, but nodded anyway.
I grew up Fundamentalist, but am a staunch humanist. And a scientist. The universe is what it is, and we know a great deal about it. We know how life works. We know how matter and energy work. We know how the stars work. We know far, far more than most people realize we know, and our knowledge is doubling every five years.
We know how consciousness works. We know how the human “heart”, or “spirit”, works. And we know wishful thinking when we hear it.
And this isn’t a matter of ‘belief’, though wishful thinkers struggle to make it so; it’s a matter of the universe is what it is: there is one life, and it is here.
There is a heaven – and it is here.
We can now see and study other worlds – planets circling our neighbor stars, dozens and even hundreds of light-years out. Both our telescopes and our image processing power are rapidly escalating, and this growing profiling of our stellar kin will continue to blossom, decade by decade. Within a generation, we’ll have sharp eyes in the Oort Cloud, and the stories will grow richer still.
They are very unlikely, however, to grow deeper. Lately we’ve begun to understand that our planet is more unique than we ever dreamed – not just because of Goldilocks and water, but for far more reasons: our over-sized moon, which churns the oceans; a natural radiation shield, that keeps our atmosphere in place; an axial tilt that gives us seasons; two complementary versions of life that nourish one another in endless oscillation; techtonic plates that regularly shift our ecospheres. And much more.
And we’ve begun to understand more about the relationship between matter and energy – which are, of course, ultimately the same thing in different forms. In our emerging new understanding, matter is condensed energy (per Einstein) and wants to become energy again. This key piece of new information, offered by physicist Jeremy England, changes everything.
It explains the complexities we find here on Earth that so far do not present on the worlds we’re observing: why tides matter; why the atmosphere itself “breathes”; and, most importantly, why life happened here.
The Earth is, put simply, an energy trap – the most convoluted energy trap imaginable. If matter wants to become energy again, to promote entropy, it counterintuitively self-organizes into configurations that optimally disburse energy.
The structure of a snowflake. The structure of quartz. The behavior of tornados. The shift of ocean tides. All optimal energy dissipation patterns, made necessary by the constant capture-recycle that is far more intricate here than anywhere else.
And the most complex energy dissipation system of all? Life.
England’s dissipative adaptation models explain why life exists here and nowhere else. It is a consequence of the unimaginably complex interaction between energy traps on a planet more distinct than can possibly be commonplace.
In a nutshell, we are all living in the most energy-rich, abundant, life-friendly spot in the known universe. Life doesn’t just flourish here, it emanates. It bursts forth in every corner, every nook and cranny of the planet; it defines the Earth.
We and millions of other species thrive here because this quirky, complicated world embraces energy, nurtures it and absorbs it, and radiates life in the process.
This is the best place in the universe. If there is a heaven... we’re there already.
The day of my daughter’s mother’s funeral was, coincidentally, her birthday – and the officiating pastor actually led the mourners in a bittersweet chorus of the song.
And it dawned on me, as all sang, that she was in heaven – because heaven is here.
And she is here.
By “here”, I don’t mean that the consciousness that she once possessed persists as our myths would have it. Her remains sat nearby in an urn, and we understand deeply and in detail how the body they once defined, with its intricate mind, gave rise to her essence. The I in us is enabled by our brains; when they are gone, so are we.
Except... per the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, no, we aren’t.
Hofstadter, whose expertise extends to philosophy and neuroscience, has proposed the strange loop, a structure in thought and art and science and human experience in general (as well as nature itself) which nestles snugly into England’s dissipative adaptation. There are endless cyclings to be observed in the interplay of matter and energy, including those cycles that occur within the mind. Strange loops – recursive, self-referential bursts of thought and awareness and recognition and memory and invention – accumulate within our consciousness, defining our consciousness, accounting for the richness of our self-awareness and our inner lives.
And after Hofstadter’s wife Carol died suddenly on a vacation in Italy – an event which devastated him, as he loved her dearly – he realized just how powerful important strange loops are.
Though long gone, Hofstadter still experiences Carol’s strange loops – those bits of consciousness and perception and awareness that he did not possess until he met her, knew her, loved her, and shared endless experiences with her. Carol was still alive, to a meaningful degree, within him. And their children. And her friends.
It’s a cliché, of course, to say that someone lives on within us after they die; but Hofstadter has begun filling in the actual scientific pieces of that puzzle. We really do live on within others.
My daughter’s mother lives on within her, and she said so, through her tears, to her family. And they all knew what she meant.
She will live on and on and on. And if/when my son and daughter bless me with a grandchild, they will raise that child with her departed grandmother’s strange loops – meaning she hasn’t departed, after all.
After the service, one of my son’s best friends came up to me and mask-chatted. I asked about his new son, and he told stories of how he seems to be unwittingly raising his little boy in much the same way his own father raised him. “All my life I wanted to be as different from him as possible,” he said, “and yet it turns out I’m just like him.”
Strange loops. Not just habits, not just teachings, not just memories – but pieces of actual consciousness, perception, awareness – living on beyond death.
And so it turns out that despite my humanist rhetoric, and despite the cold equations of science, the old myths do come full circle in the end: my daughter’s mother did go to heaven, and she’s living there as we speak.
We’re in heaven. And I can expect, if I’ve lived well, that I’ll one day move to an afterlife, within my children’s hearts...
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