……………………… |——– >|__________________________>|——………….. ?

The diagram above is a simplified representation of the “line of existence” of all beings who emerge from nothingness to enter life, then pass from life to death, before returning to nothingness. The diagram uses dotted lines ….., dashes —-, two arrow brackets >, three vertical bars | , a continuous line segment ______, and ends with a question mark. This is an attempt to symbolize the timeline of all individual existence. Starting from the left and moving to the right, we first see a dotted line representing the passage of time, from the distant past to a certain special, unique moment: the conception of a living being. For practical reasons, this line has not been represented in its entirety. In theory, it should begin at the very origin of time, say at the date of the Big Bang. We have limited ourselves to showing its final part, just before the appearance of a first vertical bar and a dotted line, which represent the period of time between the conception of the human being and its birth. The first arrowed parenthesis represents the process of childbirth, while the second vertical bar symbolizes birth. The solid line represents the duration of life in this world. The second arrowed parenthesis denotes the period preceding the moment of death, itself symbolized by a third vertical bar. The second series of dashes represents an intermediate period during which, according to certain traditions, the soul of the being in question continues to be present in this world. Finally, the last dotted line symbolizes a new period, that of the decomposition of the body, followed by the descent into “nothingness” that will ensue, until a hypothetical end of time, represented by a question mark.

Why this diagram? Because it allows us to spin the few spatio-temporal and physico-metaphysical metaphors that follow.

The “slice of life” between birth and death can be likened to a space-time segment belonging to the space-time associated with the entire universe. This segment of “life” has indeed existed in space-time, and will continue to exist as such for as long as space-time itself exists. In other words, even long after the death of a living being, the entirety of its “life” will continue to be stored in the lines of space-time corresponding to its passage on earth, symbolized here by the continuous line segment. Just as the “cosmic microwave background” continues to bear witness to the appearance of a primordial illumination emitted after the Big Bang, so too will everything that existed in a part of the universe during a specific period of time continue to be inscribed in the very substance of space-time, at least as long as the latter still exists. The latter represents a kind of repository of everything that was, everything that is, and everything that will be. A pure observer, that is, one outside this universe and therefore independent of its space-time, would be able to visit every corner of it in spirit, and perhaps virtually “relive” all the events recorded in the space-time segment associated with a particular “slice of life.” Let us suppose, for a moment, for the sake of this conjecture, that there exist outside this universe dematerialized intelligences, freed from all ties to any space-time corporeality, which would in theory be capable of freely flying over and exploring the entirety of the space-time corresponding to this universe, from its origin to its final collapse. All the “slices of life” of all living beings would thus be preserved in their entirety in this space-time, as if in metaphysical Plexiglas blocks, displayed in the windows of the total museum of the universe.

For a long time, the idea of a dualism of soul and body has been defended by philosophers such as Plato and Descartes. Furthermore, and completely independently, quantum physics has familiarized us for about a century with another fundamental dualism, that of the wave and the particle. For the sake of speculation, I propose to compare these two forms of dualism (soul/body and wave/particle). The soul would then be to the body what the wave is to the particle. If we take the metaphor further, certain results of quantum physics could allow us to formulate new hypotheses about the relationship between the soul and the body. Indeed, we could postulate the existence of “fields of consciousness,” just as gravitational fields and quantum fields exist throughout the universe. These fields of consciousness, like quantum fields, could be associated with wave functions. The birth of a new soul in a particular body could then be compared to the “collapse” or “reduction,” in the quantum sense, of a “wave packet of consciousness” that had previously remained in a state of indeterminacy. This collapse or reduction would follow the interaction of a certain wave packet with some “mother matter” consisting of the first cells of the fetus, shortly after conception. The individuality and personality of a singular soul would initially be “informed” by the entanglement of this wave packet with the fetal cells at the moment of “reduction,” and then constantly influenced by other forms of entanglement throughout life. Life would follow its development, gradually conquering different levels of consciousness, according to the experiences lived. Throughout life, the “body-soul” complex would be continuously entangled with fields of consciousness of different natures. It would be analogous to what is called in physics a “black body,” i.e., “an ideal object that perfectly absorbs all the electromagnetic energy (all light regardless of its wavelength) it receives (hence its name ‘black’) and restores it entirely in the form of a particular thermal radiation, known as black body radiation.” This analogy would allow us to imagine the “body-soul” complex of a living being as also absorbing the energy of the various fields of consciousness in which it is immersed, releasing it in the form of “radiations of consciousness,” of which the soul would be particularly aware when they “illuminate” it. When death occurs, at the moment represented in our diagram by the third vertical bar, a process of disentanglement of the soul and the body takes place, until the soul and the body are completely separated. When this process ends, symbolized by the second series of dashes, the soul takes the form of a new “wave packet of consciousness,” enriched by all the experiences it has had, conscious or unconscious, and more particularly by all the ‘awareness’ that has taken place during its life. This “awareness” is distributed throughout life. In fact, at every moment, consciousness is capable of “becoming aware” that it is itself a consciousness capable of becoming aware of itself. I will use one last metaphor here, which will undoubtedly speak to those who have some knowledge of elementary mathematics, that of Taylor series ⁱ. At any point on a curve associated with an infinitely differentiable function, all the information needed to fully define this function at all its other points is available. This information consists of the set of all derivatives of the function at the point in question. If we apply this mathematical metaphor to the wave function of the soul, it means that at every moment of the soul’s life, it carries with it its entire past and future life—but only if it is “indefinitely differentiable.” However, the life curve of a soul cannot be presumed to be “indefinitely differentiable.” This curve has singular points, represented in our diagram by vertical bars. Conclusion: the metaphor of Taylor series applied to the soul has only limited scope, but it opens up an interesting avenue: the soul can be likened to an infinite wave function, whose associated quantum field not only fills this universe in its own way, but also transcends it.

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i In mathematics, and more specifically in analysis, the Taylor series at point a of a function f (real or complex) that is infinitely differentiable at that point, also called the Taylor series expansion of f at a, is an entire series approximating the function around a, constructed from f and its successive derivatives at a. (Wikipedia)