mali said:
My first assumption: You are all dead. You have only the past to think about, so your theoretical future ends with your last breath, which you already made, because you have no present to live in.
OK, first of all, let's make this clear: I'm not empirical in my thinking at all, but am trying to always deal rationally with questions like these.
Now, according to Einstein, the string theorists, etc, you're absolutely correct: since the whole world can be condensed into
at least 10 distinct dimensions, and since the world is completely deterministic (if we make enough observations, and even observe our observations etc, we could theoretically predict the future, because nothing "random" ever happens), death should be only one cube in that 10-dimensional space.
We, as "limited beings" in this universe, are only able to see four of these 10 dimensions, where one of the dimensions (time) is our dominant axis (we can walk back to a point in dimension 3 that we once were at, but we can't travel back in time and will never be able to). Other creatures (assuming that they possess consciousness and self-awareness) like e.g. archaebacteria are only able to view one dimension (time) with that being the dominant axis, since they have no way of telling where they are, or e.g. computers, which operate in one dimension too (the "impulses" dimension; computers are not time-aware).
In conclusion: Reality is a gigantic, static tensor of information, and we're only able to form a "view" on that tensor which we call "life", according to the string theory.
However, rationally, you cannot say that we all live in the same universe (we live in different spaces of dimension 9) since we cannot possibly observe what another being experiences to prove it, so we can't really make assumptions about the universe based on other's experiences. It follows, then, that your assumption that our personal time stops with "death" cannot possibly be true (rationally speaking of course), since none of us have lived long enough to check if it is, and the probability therefore is close to 0 that our experience actually ends with death. Now, I'm not religious in any way here; what I'm saying is that it is as probable that we *ourselves* will never die, but just continue to see those around us die(aka *I* am unique in *my* universe in that I will never die), as it is that we will experience some kind of afterlife etc (aka that everyone dies, but nobody's experience of the universe ends with death). What we see happen to others mustn't necessarily apply to us.
Now, mathematically speaking (and mathematics has been quite good at modelling the world so far), it is impossible for a dimension to *end*, and we don't observe any dimensions in the rest of the universe that *have* ended, so it is rather improbable that
life our experience of the universe will end, ever. It is therefore not necessarily possible to say that "we're standing at one point (death) watching one line of the rest of the universe (our past)", but we have to instead say that "we ourselves" do not exist, but instead *are* views of the universe; e.g. "we" are just indescribable entities that act like "cameras" that observe the world around us, including a body that we use for gaining sensory input, and "we" are nothing more. I'm going to sound like a Buddhist if I say that our bodies are just mortal shells containing who we really are etc. so I won't, but I hope you get the idea behind what I mean. So, "we" aren't stationed somewhere in the describable universe, but are part of an external (11[sup]th[/sup], if you will) dimension that we cannot describe, and are just "watching" a lower dimensional space.
I speak as if all this is fact, but I do of course only make these conclusions based on what I myself know. If someone can find any contradictions, please share!
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