Explaining Death Through Quantum Physics

To the average man the only advice I can give is to make friendship with reality. No one can have a worse relationship with reality than I. From the beginning I wasn’t even attracted to reality. If I have the option, when I met reality, I will erase it and the whole thing is over! Reality and I – we don’t share the same values or goals! To be honest, I have no goals; I only have fantasies! They are exactly like goals but without the hard work. I am not a fan of hard work, but you know reality – it will push through its agent, the executive brain function to work!

One incident made me realize that reality may not be reality. I wanted reality to leave me alone in a nice house with all amenities, but I ended up going abroad. One day I found myself at Muscat. I was looking at the present sent to celebrate my arrival — not a pen or an office – but a three-foot-tall, stuffed Mickey Mouse. When I checked online catalog to see the cost of this mouse it is describes as “Life-sized.” Then I knew…Reality is not “reality”!! So, to find actual reality I decided to study quantum physics and chaos theory – after I returned home – that’s when I came into contact with actual reality: limits. Everything is limited.

What I want to write is about my personal challenge to reality. Here I wish to state that I love science. Though not a scientist I have an ability to understand science – except the actual science – mathematics. But the most outlandish concepts make sense to me. The string theory: the idea that all of reality emanates from the vibrations of these strings. Wave-particle duality: the idea that one thing can manifest into two! The fact that a photon can manifest into a wave and a particle coincided with my deepest intuitions that people are good and bad & ideas are right and wrong. Freud was right about penis envy and wrong about who has it!

The reality is duality and its interaction – like space & time; mass & energy and life & death. So I do not understand the mindset of people who want to “defeat death” and “overcome death.” How can they do it? How can you defeat death without killing life? It doesn’t make sense.  I find it incredibly ungrateful. We are given this extraordinary gift – life. Death is the gift breaker. Where do the concepts “defeat death” and “overcome death” fit in? For me, it’s disrespectful. It’s disrespectful to nature. The idea that we’re going to dominate nature, master nature, nature is too weak to withstand our intellect etc., are false.

If you read quantum physics you will understand that we don’t live in Newton’s clockwork universe. We live in a banana peel universe where we cannot know everything or control everything or predict everything. Nature is like a self-driving car. The best we can be is like the old woman in this anecdote: An old woman is driving with her middle-aged daughter in the passenger seat, and the mother goes right through a red light. And the daughter doesn’t want to say anything that makes it sound like, “You’re too old to drive,” so she didn’t say anything. And then the mother goes through a second red light, and the daughter, as tactfully as possible, says, “Mom, are you aware that you just went through two red lights?” And the mother says, “Oh, am I driving?”

Now, join me in a mental leap I am about to take. The mindset that wants to defeat death – translates as anti-life, anti-nature and it also translates as anti-woman, because women have long been identified with nature. Ms. Hannah Arendt, the German philosopher states in “The Human Condition” that classically work is associated with men. Work is what comes out of the head; it’s what we invent & create & it’s how we leave our mark upon the world. Whereas labor is associated with the body. It’s associated with the people who perform labor or undergo labor. This does not create a hospitable environment for women or for people associated with labor or perform manual labor.

From the banana-peel-universe point of view – I am grateful for life. I don’t want to be immortal. I have no interest in having my name live on after me. In fact, it’s been my observation that no matter how nice and how brilliant or how talented you are, 50 years after you die, they forget you. Who the hell is Mahatma? I love being in sync with the cyclical rhythms of the universe – extraordinary about life – a cycle of generation, degeneration, regeneration. “I” am just a collection of particles arranged into the pattern of my body, then it will decompose and be available to nature, to reorganize into another pattern. This is so exciting, and it makes me even more grateful to be a part of that process.

I look at death from the point of view of a German biologist, Andreas Weber, who looks at life as part of the gift economy. You’re given this enormous gift, life; enrich it as best you can, and then give it back. “Life is a banquet”- I’ve eaten my fill. I’ve consumed life, but in death, I’m going to be consumed. I’m going into the ground and there, I invite every microbe and decomposer to have their fill. I hope they will find me delicious!

So my attitude is real. My life has been enriched by other people.  I am grateful. I don’t want to say “other people” because I don’t really see us as two separate entities. I think in terms of quantum physics, again. The quantum physicists are not sure what happens when the wave becomes a particle. There are different theories — the collapse of the wave function, de-coherence – but they all agree that reality comes into being through an interaction. So do you people! Thank you so much for making my life real.

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