Conscious Life Beyond Death (Part I)

Abstract

In this five-part article, known scientific principles are used to prove that conscious systems maintain a permanent physical soul beyond the existence of a material body. We will demonstrate that the fundamental material form which conscious physical structures are built occupy their own space and change in their own time according to their own laws of behavior. These changes are controlled by forces within each soul but also are a result of interaction forces connected with external events. It has become customary to treat the behavior of our bodies as the sum of behavior attributed to dead material and the sum attributed to the desires of our soul as evidence of living material.^[1] Because we assume the soul occupies its own space and time, the property of life as exhibited by a body lasts as long as the communications channels supplying the interactions between body and soul are maintained. Temporary interruptions of communication are associated with a loss of consciousness. A permanent break is recognized as death.

Mainstream science has failed to identify the material basis of consciousness in living organisms let alone dead matter^[2] while most religious traditions assume consciousness as a fundamental postulate that relies upon faith without the need for scientific evidence. Both approaches are incomplete. Recent developments in physics addressing the necessity of including the conscious observer in any complete theory of our own existence have emerged. Progress has been achieved, not by advancing ontological interpretations or refinements of quantum theory, but by eliminating the assumption that we live in an objective world independent of our own existence. In Conscious Action Theory^[3] (CAT), we recognize that our objective world is a phase of a self-measurement, explanatory activity that includes both our conscious experience and the physical material producing the experience. We adopt the assumption that elementary events, not elementary particles, are the building blocks of both ourselves and the universe we believe that we live in.

Such a change to the foundations of physics allows us to conceive of ourselves as interacting lifetimes instead of the cosmologies found in classic or quantum physics. Life and death are then conceived as the difference between interacting and isolated events. Living bodies are evidence of interaction while non-interacting lifetimes, like non-interacting atoms, cannot be seen. You and I are events containing each other’s bodies as memories of our interactions. Consciousness has always been part of existence, both before our bodies are grown and after they are abandoned. This article will show that CAT is a viable theory of physics that contains consciousness in cyclic events. These events grow, maintain, and abandon material bodies along their own evolutionary trajectories. Evidence of human consciousness beyond an individual body’s life is generally available when a belief system such as CAT is adopted that includes the subjective element and gives us a logical explanation for the available evidence.