Death in Mind: Discovering the Mind, #5

Death In Mind

William X. Adams

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Copyright 2024 by William X. Adams

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Epub ISBN: 979-8-9877761-6-2

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

BHNs in Mind

Death Vs. Other BHNs

Death Defined

The Process of Dying

Afterlife

The Soul

What Persists across a BHN

The Planck Code

Definition of the Planck Code

Karma and the Planck code

The Start of Death

The Workings of Death

The End of Death

The Reconstruction

The Big Con

Reincarnation

Reindeering

The Bod Con

The Great Necker Cube

Bibliography

Want More?

About the Author

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Table of Figures

Figure 1. The Quantum Mental Process

Figure 2. The Three QMP Modules of a Whole Mind

Figure 3. Context of a BHN

Figure 4. Image of the Interior of a BHN

Figure 5. Individuation from the CS Grid

Figure 6. Necker Cube with alternate viewing orientations

Figure 7. Apollonian Gasket

Acknowledgments

I thank my teachers, dead and alive, for the intellectual foundations on which to build this structure.

I thank my friends, family, and colleagues for the social world that supports my journey.

I thank my lucky stars for living in a historical moment and circumstance that enabled me to think these thoughts.

I thank my Planck Code for a life tensioned between membership and alienation.

Preface

This essay attempts to naturalize death. You might think it’s already natural. Everybody dies, always has, and nobody has ever not died. What could be more natural than death? But those are observations about other people, people who one day ceased moving and were pronounced dead.

From personal experience—mine, yours, anybody’s—nobody really knows what death is like. You have to be alive to have experience, and if you’re alive, you haven’t died yet. In the context of personal experience, death about as unnatural an event as anything could be.

In fact, death is not an experience. It’s the end of experience, the absence of experience. Nobody knows what it’s like to die (near-death experiences don’t count) because nobody has ever come back after dying, fanciful stories aside. Nor has anyone ever communicated with the dead to learn what it’s like—again, putting aside mythology, religious doctrines, and paranormal tales. As a topic for first-person investigation, death would seem to be a dead-end.

That’s certainly what I thought until I discovered numerous tiny Black Holes of Non-experience, later deemed Black Holes of Nothingness (BHNs) within the processes of normal mentality. I documented those in an essay called Mind Without Brain (Adams, 2021a) and provided detailed description of them in Nothing in Mind (Adams, 2023a).

Those micro-BHNs are unnoticed moments of non-experience, periods when one is not present to one’s self. A larger, easily-noticed example of a BHN is dreamless sleep. Every night, you literally lose your mind for several hours. You repeatedly enter a period of non-experience, where your self, your you-ness, your very mentality, simply evaporates. You become nobody, not located in time or space. Mentally, experientially, you cease to exist. It’s normal. Normal, but very odd.

There are many other examples of BHNs in everyday life. They’re everywhere, once you start looking for them. Anesthesia is one. A drunken blackout is an example. Tiny BHNs even occur in the middle of conversations and in the middle of thoughts.

On the assumption that BHNs are basically all the same, it occurred to me that maybe death is the biggest BHN of all. If that is correct, dreamless sleep, meditative emptiness, coma, anesthesia, and the micro-BHNs of ordinary experience are no different in principle than death. Except for the fact that we recover from all the other BHNs, whereas death seems to be a one-way trip.

Since death is terminal, it does not afford any obvious way to investigate it from a first-person point of view. To be clear, scientists from pathologists to paleontologists examine dead bodies from every which angle, but I’m not talking about bodies. I’m talking about experience: what it is like to have experience. There is nothing it is like to be dead, because in a BHN, the you is gone so there’s nobody to experience anything. A BHN is the opposite of experience. It is noxperience. (That’s a term I’ve coined for whatever mental process the opposite of experience is).

If death is structurally and functionally the same as other BHNs, we should be able to learn something about it by examining those other, more accessible cases. BHNs of the everyday kind can be examined. Not by direct introspection, since there is no first-person point of view in a BHN, by definition. However, we can use scientific introspection (Adams, 2020) to inspect the context and horizons of BHNs. With several other methods, including functional analysis and a method called the MPM (Adams, 2023a), we can even get a glimpse of what’s inside BHNs.

Needless to say, none of this is traditional science. Science is not designed to investigate mental experience. Science is organized around observation of objects and events in the world. Experience, made of mental phenomena derived from what it is like to encounter the world, is not susceptible to the scientific method.

Just for one extremely simple example of why this is so, we note that there are literally no inner eyeballs, so self-observation of the mind is beyond the scope of science by definition. Introspection is not defined for science. A BHN logically cannot be an object of traditional scientific study.

I have described instead alternative first-person investigative methods parallel to science that can be used to examine experience empirically. They are Scientific Introspection (Adams, 2020) and the MPM (Adams, 2023a). Anyone incorrigibly committed to the existing scientific method as the only valid epistemology will find that this essay leaves them adrift.

For others though, here’s the outline of this project. First, I briefly summarize key facts and principles of the mental architecture I use in my discussions of the mind. That architecture is called the QMP schema and was described in detail in Adams (2020a and 2020b), and summarized in Adams (2023a). Then I recount the main features of a BHN as articulated in Adams (2023a). That background will give us a common language and lay out some foundational assumptions.

Next, I draw a perimeter around death as a mental phenomenon: what it is; what we know and what we don’t know. We’ll have to distinguish between the experience of death, which is the end of experience, and bodily decomposition. Those are very different definitions of death. This essay is focused on death as non-experience, not the bodily remains that go into the ground.

Inevitably, it is necessary to consider eschatology, a big word for inquiry into the idea of life after death. Short answer: it’s an oxymoron, a confusion in reasoned thinking. But it’s instructive to ask why such a myth persists in human culture. Maybe it’s just irrational denial of death, but maybe it’s also something to learn from. It raises a pointed question: are there logical, phenomenological, or other evidential reasons to question the characterization of death as absolute oblivion? I think there are.

Assuming death is no different in principle than all other known BHNs, it follows that death is not a permanent condition. The key question then is, What persists across a BHN? We garner answers from study of ordinary BHNs and see how those could apply to the BHN of death.

If the best conclusion is that death is transitory, as all other BHNs are, we are forced to ask, What’s on the other side? We turn again to close study of the micro-BHNs within the cyclical QMP mental architecture to come up with answers. We apply them to the BHN of death and see what the result is. The outcome is surprising.

Finally, we sweep up the debris of smashed assumptions arising from re-defining death as a BHN. Topics include replacing the image of The Great Wheel with the Necker Cube as a new geometry for death. In the end, we have a richer sense of the interplay between life and death.

William X. Adams

September, 2023

BHNs in Mind

The main strategy of this essay is to suppose that death is a mental Black Hole of Nothingness (BHN) then apply what is known about ordinary BHNs to what we know and believe about death and see what happens. The strategy assumes all BHNs are more or less the same. Review of the known characteristics of a BHN is therefore an important preliminary.

Not all BHNs are equally well-understood. The BHN of anesthesia, for example, is difficult to study from a first-person perspective because it doesn’t occur very often. In contrast, the BHN of advanced meditation is controllable and repeatable and has been described many times through many centuries (Van Gorden et al., 2019). The BHN of dreamless sleep is common and eminently accessible but difficult to study because the cognitive faculties needed for analysis are diminished in the periods just before and just after it (aka sleepiness).

I base my characterization of BHNs mainly on the micro-BHNs that occur in each cycle of mental activity. Those are too fleeting to be noticed by casual self-observation but can be studied using scientific introspection (Adams, 2020) and the Marco Polo Method, or MPM (Adams, 2023a). A preliminary schematic of the fundamental cycle of mental activity will allow us to understand the role and qualities of the micro-BHN.

The QMP Model of Mind

The simplest possible mental event is called the Quantum Mental Process (QMP). It has been described in detail in Adams (2021 a & b). It is the smallest complete mental act that can be discerned. The QMP is visualized in Figure 1.

Figure 1. The Quantum Mental Process

In the first half of the QMP mental cycle, subjectivity emits an intentional act directed toward objectivity. The intentional act, a vector of mental motivation, generates an objectified representation of the just-prior state of subjectivity. That quasi-object allows subjectivity to (metaphorically) get a look at itself, which is what makes introspection possible.

Objectivity itself is inert and unmotivated. Subjectivity soon turns away from the self-object, leaving it to become part of the not-self otherness of the objective domain.

In the second half of the QMP cycle, an object, or part of one, is accommodated back into subjectivity. Subjectivity (metaphorically) recognizes itself in the object, and reconfigures itself to include (partially or wholly) the object back into the subjective domain. That is a mental cycle. The cycle repeats as mentality continues.

That is an extremely brief summary of the QMP rotary engine. For details, see Mind without Brain: A Proposal (Adams, 2021a). The whole QMP cycle defines one mental event. A single thought is made up of many QMP cycles. While the QMP engine has numerous components, none of them, not even subjectivity, is itself is a mental event. Only a whole cycle defines a mental event. Mentality considered over time is a definition of consciousness.

BHNs in the QMP

One mental act is the base unit of experience but a BHN is a non-experience, so we do not see a representation of BHNs in the QMP diagram. But they are part of it and critical to the operation of the cycle.

At a whole-person level of description, a BHN is a period during which one is not present to oneself, a period of non-experience, no mentality, no sense of self or world, absence of consciousness: an experiential Black Hole of Nothingness. That’s what you get, experientially, when the QMP engine of mentality stops spinning.

The QMP metal cycle ceases when subjectivity pauses its activity. When that happens, mentality disappears and a BHN prevails. Luckily for us, BHNs end and the QMP spontaneously re-starts.

When subjectivity emerges from the micro-BHN, it comes out with its intentional guns blazing so to speak, as if making up for down time, and the QMP is on again. That’s why mental experience is actually bursty, not continuous.

Consciousness is not a stream, as the famous metaphor would have it, but a punctuated, intermittent phenomenon more like Morse Code than flowing water. Several philosophers of mind have observed this about consciousness, though it is not the mainstream view. The mainstream likes streams. (Again, this is a savagely brief summary. See Adams, 2021a for details).

Why does subjectivity fall into a BHN between periods of intentional activity and why, after having fallen in, does it spontaneously emerge again? These are questions about the inner workings of a BHN. They were addressed in detail in a prior essay about BHNs, Nothing in Mind (Adams, 2023b).

A second micro-BHN occurs in the second half of the QMP cycle when subjectivity accommodates an object to itself. In order to accomplish accommodation, subjectivity inhibits its intentional activity for the same reason you have to stop talking in order to listen. When subjectivity exercises that self-control, it becomes inactive and falls into a BHN. When it spontaneously emerges, it finds itself reconstituted on a larger footprint than before. Its enlarged  scope includes the former self-alien object within the expanded domain. At a whole-person level of description we say that we now understand the object; we get it.

During the second micro-BHN the QMP engine is again paused, again punctuating experience with a moment of non-experience. The two micro-BHNs within every mental cycle are too brief to be noticed in casual reflection but are identifiable upon close examination. They can be mined for information about BHNs in general.

Modules of Mind

When we reflect upon our thought processes, we typically do not find the QMP model of mentality. Instead, we find images, ideas, words, songs, feelings, and distant memories. How does everyday experience map to the QMP unit of mentality?

Casual introspection reveals mainly only one aspect of the mind, the socio-linguistic part, which I call the SLM module. We take that to be the mind, but it’s only one third of the mind. A whole, mature human mind is composed of three modules, as shown in Figure 2:

Figure 2. The Three QMP Modules of a Whole Mind

The three modules of mind are:

The IMS, the Intrinsic Motivational Source, supplier of mental motivation to the rest of the mind.

The SMC, the Sensorimotor Cycle, the feeling-basis for embodied experience.

The SLM, the Socio-linguistic Mind, the thinking and intersubjectively self-aware part of the mind.

Each of the three modules is an instance of the QMP