“Oh, I certainly see what you’re getting at here. But the fact remains, medical science knows a great deal about the human body, and, based upon what they know so far, there is no immortal soul tucked away anywhere. So here, it seems to me, we have a case where religion, which is about magic, and science, which is about observable and clearly understandable physical processes, do not in any way, shape, or form agree. No matter how much you might wish this to be so.”

“As you say, based upon what we know so far, no one could argue with you. But, let me point out that in these last two hours we’ve talked about how physicists, and mathematicians, and biologists, and philosophers might be very close to a much clearer understanding of the universe, and everything in it, than they know. Now I’m not saying that all these ideas about elasticity and helical wave motion proposed here are exactly correct. But I want to point out that if, just a few hours ago I had told you that sometime within this century scholars would have a fairly clear understanding of the universe, you probably would have said, and with complete confidence, that based upon what we know so far, we may never achieve such an understanding of the world. And now, while clearly, the proof of the thoughts I’ve laid on you must be left to the pros, I think I may have shaken your confidence just a bit. Right?”

“While I’m still not convinced that all you’ve been saying is true, yes, I guess you could say that.”

“Good! Now, getting back to the question of the existence of an immortal soul within every human being, do you remember my pointing out that because of increasing complexity and organization humans have certain capabilities unknown to the rest of the universe? Including the capabilities of what I called awareness and choice? And how these are directly attributable to the superior brains of humans? And in particular to our enormous memory banks?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Good again. Then what I’m going to do right now is lay on you the possibility of a third capability unique to humans which is also primarily attributable to our brain, and in particular to our memory banks. And that is immortality. However, I ought to point out that while I think the general considerations about awareness and choice for human beings are largely non-negotiable, the ideas I’m going to propose to you right now do not fall into that category. Rather, I’d say the confidence I have in them is about on the same level as the confidence I have in the ideas I proposed earlier about the origin and nature of gravity. In other words, I recognize these ideas to be purely hypothetical; with little evidence, if any, to back them up. I only propose them here because I want you to think twice before you insist that there can never, under any circumstances, exist within each one of our purely physical mortal bodies an also purely physical, but immortal soul capable of achieving a life after this one.

To begin with, let’s look more closely at our human memory banks, which, remember, are quite unique. At least in our known corner of the universe. It is strongly suspected that most, if not all, memories are permanently recorded in our memory banks. Certainly, the most important ones are. And that the main reason we can’t recall our memories as well as we’d like is not because the memories aren’t there anymore, but because our recall circuitry is not working as well as it should.

More specifically, the storage process begins when the information contained in an idea is somehow communicated electrically to a suitable portion of the cerebral cortex where the memory banks are located. Once there these electrical signals in some way cause certain adjacent groups of the fundamental cells of the memory--I think they’re called neurons--to be permanently electrically connected in such a way that the resultant pattern of these connections represents the information encoded in the original idea. As a result, when our central information processing circuits return to this area at some later date because they know this area of the brain is where this type of information is stored, and access or read out, so to speak, this information, the hard-wired neuronal pattern faithfully reproduces the information encoded in the original idea. And, if all the brain’s circuitry is working right, we can recall this information whenever we like.

Now you’re an antenna man. At least you’re working in that area right now. We know that all antennas are designed to transmit and receive information serially. By that I mean we design antennas to generate and receive an electromagnetic carrier wave of a single frequency which is serially encoded with information. Right?”

“Right.”

“Well, what if there were a way to transmit information all at once? By that I mean, what if an antenna could be constructed such that, by exciting it with a pulse of energy, it would not transmit information serially but all at once, or in parallel?”

“I can’t imagine how you could do that.”

“Well, as I just said, antennas are now designed to transmit a carrier wave of essentially a single frequency with the information encoded serially on this carrier wave. To transmit some piece of information all at once, or in parallel you might say, what we’d need is an antenna designed so that each element of the antenna, perhaps because of its individual length, or because of how it is connected to adjacent elements, represents a single bit or piece of the overall information to be transmitted. That way, if all the elements required to completely encode a thought or message were properly arranged and connected, then if we were to excite this antenna array, let’s call it, with electrical energy, might it not then transmit the entire message all at once?”

“I don’t know. But even if it did, you could only send one message. The single message you had encoded in the first place. And that would be a ridiculously wasteful use of an antenna. Which is a good reason for using a single carrier frequency the way we do now. Besides, it seems to me you’d probably have to have just as weird an antenna to receive the information. And it also seems to me that, just like the transmitting antenna, this one piece of information would probably be the only information the receiving antenna could ever receive as well. And one more thing. I can’t see how this information, once it’s transmitted, wouldn’t interfere with itself as it’s propagating through space, which is another good reason for transmitting information serially in the first place.”

“I know, I know. The problems here would seem to be insurmountable. Let me just point out, though, that if memories are encoded pretty much the way I described, then might not each hard-wired pattern of neurons, which encodes a specific piece of information, also double as a micro-antenna? In other words, if we were to consciously electrically excite a neuronal pattern in order to read out the memory or information it contains, might not the electrical energy flowing through the neuronal array also cause the array to act as an antenna and at the same time transmit the information in the form of electromagnetic waves just as a regular antenna would? Except the information, instead of being transmitted serially, would be transmitted in parallel. Certainly, if this were true, with the truly astronomical size of our memory banks, there’s no telling how many of these memory antennas we might manufacture in a complete lifetime.”

“Yeah, but don’t forget, any signals these micro-antennas send out, even if they transmit anything at all, are going to be of microscopically low amplitudes. So they’re not going very far.”

“True. But remember the blue dye universe inside the swimming pool? And remember what I said about general relativity and how it could be explained if our universe existed inside some older, larger reality with its own dimensions of space and time? If this turns out to be true, then our parent reality is not spatially separate from us in the way we generally think of things as being separate. It’s actually all around us. So, if you’re talking about how much energy it’s going to take to make the trip from this world to what we sometimes call the world beyond, well, beyond may not be as far away as we think. And it might not take much power to get there. Besides, this closeness of the parent reality to us would take care of the problem of the parallel-transmitted information interfering with itself. Maybe it doesn’t have the time or space needed to interfere with itself before it gets to where it’s going.

And another thing. Maybe this would explain how close family members, and particularly twins, can seem to know when something happens to each other. The similarities in their DNA might cause them to form more similar neuronal patterns, thereby affording them a higher sensitivity to each other’s transmissions. And still another thing. Maybe this would explain why people who think they’re dying often say they saw their life flash before their eyes. Maybe the brain is designed to automatically transmit all the memories in the memory bank at such a time, and in doing so it also downloads all these memories into the central processor part of the brain, which we know is what it normally does anyway.

And, finally, this almost completely different way of communicating between this world and its parent reality could explain why such extremely sensitive listening devices as we have available to us are unable to detect it.”

“OK, OK! I hear what you’re saying. And, once again, I just never thought about our brain, and our thoughts and memories, in the way you’ve just described. And, once again, I’ll try to keep in mind what you’ve just said when some scientific type starts talking about how there’s no such thing as an immortal soul somewhere in our bodies. But, still, like you said, these are just ideas.”

“You’re absolutely correct. And, frankly, it might be more politic of you, if you do indeed speak of this world view with your friends, to stick to what we’ve said about equilibrium considerations, and helical E wave propagation, and Newtonian mechanics, and so forth, and maybe steer clear of this discussion we’ve been having about the relationship between science and religion.”

“I’m not certain I can do that. The people I have in mind are super-sharp, and once I start telling them about time, and general relativity and the blue-dye universe, and elasticity, pretty quick they’re going to start thinking about the possibility of a world beyond, and a Creator, and just generally how all this gets into the realm of religious beliefs. I just wish you had some more evidence I could give to them.”

“Right. Well, you know, there is some evidence you could bring up. That is, if you felt it worth bringing up at all. (Here he reaches for the sheet of paper with the list of scientific questions about the universe on it.) Remember me saying how with this theory I can answer just about all the questions listed here? And how the answers are all connected together so the physical universe, and evolution and so forth now makes very good sense?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then. (He turns the paper over, exposing two shorter lists.)

• How do we define these terms?
  • Truth
  • Right, wrong
  • Good, evil
  • Beauty
  • Justice
  • Best form of government

• Was the universe created? Is there a reason for it or was it accidentally formed?
• Is there a creator?
• Is there a reason for humanity or was it accidentally formed?
• Is there more to reality than our known universe?
• Is there an immortal soul in every human being?
• Is there a life “after” this one?
• What must we do to achieve it?