I was updating the consciousness section of my website over the weekend, and I got to thinking about how we actually experience death most every day. Death in the sense of no consciousness, not in the sense of no living body. But hey, if you had a living body and no consciousness, then what good would it do you? The point is, every night when we sleep, we’re completely gone for a few hours (the other slumbering hours are spent dreaming, which is a form of consciousness). And if we need to go under anesthesia for a medical procedure, same deal. For a few hours, we just aren’t.

But we come back from these mini-deaths when our body awakens and the neuron structures critical to consciousness start firing again. Every night when we go to sleep, we trust that our memory structures will properly restore us intact, with the same personality and the same personal history and the same personal qualities, by the time that morning light shines (or even before, during our dreaming phases). Pretty amazing when you think about it. We give in to a death-like state, with the hope that a physical structure (i.e., that comprising our bodies and brains) is ready and waiting to re-activate our conscious lives in a few hours.

This also makes me think about the Star Trek Transporter scenario. What if, while you were in “dead sleep”, your body was destroyed, but replaced by an exact copy, all charged up and ready to go, but in a completely different place? Or even worse – what if your original body was intact, but there was also a copy? Would you split into two? Two human beings with exactly the same memories and experiences up to a certain point in time (i.e., the date of the copy)?

Right now, this is not a problem. There is no practical way of gaining all the information needed from your existing body, then using it as a blueprint to build a “new you”. Information has a cost, and the cost right now is way too high; it’s beyond what our science can do. But that doesn’t mean that it’s completely impossible, that it will never be possible.

If anyone could intelligently imagine an afterlife granted by a divine, omnipresent power, this would need to be the scenario or principle by which it would take place. That power would need be able to gather all of the information necessary to build an exact copy of the processes and states in your brain at the time of death (or even before, as the actual brain may have experienced severe decay before death, as with Alzheimer’s Disease). “The power” would then need to use that information to establish a working copy of your brain processes in some energy and information exchange medium. Voila, you would be – resurrected.

OK, it’s a long shot. But given that it’s Easter Sunday, well . . . . . I’ll leave it at that for now.