I've talked about this in the past, but it is something that I feel would make for a good blog post.
One day, about 9-10 years ago I woke up and thought 'Woah...I know what happens when we die...it's so obvious!' and since then, I've not been too fussed about it.
I'm more concerned about other people dying than me from a purely selfish point of view whereby I don't want the pain of missing them, even though I think I know where they end up.
To explain where we go we have to start at where we came from.
You're a grown up, so you know that when a sperm meets an egg it (literally) flashes with light, and starts the process of Mitosis with cells splitting again and again and again until we're literally a blob of cells that eventually start to deviate from simple Mitosis to begin following a set DNA directed blueprint for creating a human.
Before that though, all women are born with every Egg they'll ever have as part of their growth. All men start producing Sperm at puberty.
Apparently when Sperm is produced, this is the process:
The seminiferous tubules of the testes are the starting point for the process, where spermatogonial stem cells adjacent to the inner tubule wall divide in a centripetal direction—beginning at the walls and proceeding into the innermost part, or lumen—to produce immature sperm. Maturation occurs in the epididymis.
Whatever that means, the man's body takes the bits and pieces from what the man has eaten and it turns them into little sperm that mature over time. Literally speaking, the body is taking protein and so forth and turning it into sperm that for the most part wont make the journey into becoming human.
So with that in mind, I appreciate this may be extremely patronising for those of you that to this point feel like I'm just going over basic GCSE Biology. But if that is where we come from then it is obvious where we go...
So the next thing for me is the fact that as person, there is a certain point where my body could be literally discarded without me becoming 'not me' - my assumption is that if some how we could keep a brain alive in a jar then the rest of the body is just meat and bones built and maintained from what I eat.
All of those living cells are independent from me and merely forced into following a specific task outlined to them by my body. Their 'reward' being that they can eventually pass on over time.
Lots of people throughout history have lost parts of their brain to injury or disease. There are people who've survived on half a brain, we can survive lobotomisation, so there are parts of the brain that aren't part of "us".
You can effectively live without any memories or skills. So those parts of the brain are shot.
This one part is where I don't know enough about the brain to pin point something that supports my thoughts, but there simply has to be a point of no return, where if you destroy a specific part of the brain, then we cease to exist - even if you kept all of the other parts functioning like some kind of meat robot.
So that part of our brain, I think there must be a 'master cell' within that which is where we reside.
My thought process is that when the sperm is made it is almost like making a vehicle. You select the raw materials, build them into a Sperm, and then once it is ready to function, the final piece of the puzzle is introduced - a cell that will be the 'pilot' - you could call this the soul, but it is just a single piece of matter, whatever shape and size the smallest cell of existence could be.
I think that every living single cell organism could effectively be the driving force if they happened to be the selected cell that 'piloted' the sperm.
When we eat the cells of a plant or animal, we're breaking them down into resources.
Some are going to have the misfortune of being broken down and used as a piece of skin, muscle, hair or whatever. Some are going to be lost as waste.
Some will be pushed towards the production of Sperm and whilst that is where you'd arguably want to be if you were consciously aiming to become human, there are still trillions of sperm all piloted by cells that equally want to beat you to the goal of becoming human.
Think about it from that point. This may be a little graphic and adult, but trillions of sperm are deployed at once - they all have to rush for the mythical egg. Often it isn't there...sometimes it is.
Out of a number so high it is virtually impossible to fathom, ONE sperm will reach the egg and have the fortune to kick start a human. The rest are just killed and redistributed into nature.
That one successful sperm, out of trillions of other sperm, who were the 'lucky ones' out of trillions of cells from the human's body/food which came from trillions of cells from the animal or plant that the human ate, is now growing into a human who uses other cells and resources to build a body for itself.
The natural order is for that successful sperm to start pulling in other cells to act as parts of its body, until it reaches a point where it is a successful human being, and grows old enough that it can eventually start producing lucky winners of its own into the human race (or whatever species to be fair).
So, my thoughts are that when we die the body stops and all of the cells are essentially heading for the exit door. The main pilot is no different. We've had a good run, we piloted a naffing human at the most insanely short odds, it is unlikely to ever happen again, even in a trillion years.
This fits in with the concept of reincarnation. It fits in with a lot of scientific theories. You can't destroy energy, and simply speaking, everything can be broken down into 'energy' at its base level.
Most humans are buried or cremated. I find cremation to be a bit of a scary prospect, because if I am right, then we're transferring all of the cells and living pieces into heat and light and essentially removing a lot of the resources that other living things could use.
In a realistic scenario I'd want to be buried, but there is an argument to say that if I am correct, I'd stand the best chance of returning as a human if I was eaten entirely by another human.
That sounds insane, and it is of course insane. Even in my mad theory, it would be virtually impossible for the one victorious speck that makes up 'me' to somehow become yet another sperm, and yet another successful foetus. Even if it did somehow happen, we've already established that memories are disposable - hence alzheimer's and other memory issues.
So being buried seems like the least amount of fuss all round. The body would break down as the cells evacuate and head for better things. The piece that is me, would have no access to memories and feelings from being a human, but it would have to still exist, because energy can't really be destroyed.
That is a very difficult concept to imagine, because you wont have eyes, ears, taste, smell, touch, you wont have any language or concepts of existence that you can depend on.
It is a state of being that I've thought about quite often, because you're essentially there, but you have no real way of knowing about it until you become a pilot again - and even then you have no way to know that you've succeeded.
Most of us will end up as a minor part of a blade of grass, a part of a tree, or a single cell in a worm, fungus or something trivial like that.
We'll make our way into the food chain over time, but what good is it if we're eaten by a crow who ends up eaten by a fox, who ends up dead in the road, and we've never progressed further than the dinner in their belly.
I think this makes the most sense as a theory because it holds such little meaning and progresses infinitely. Even to the point where the Sun goes supernova and the Earth is consumed in fire, we would simply be burned away into raw light and heat as part of the process.
We'd emanate across the solar system as heat, light and radiation, and perhaps one day land in a place where we can join the new eco system and work our way up the chain to be something else.
I find this pretty comforting in a weird way. I'm me, in this time and place, at this point in history in this part of the universe.
I could die tomorrow, and I'd be none the wiser. But the essence that makes me 'Sheepdog' will rattle around until it finds itself somewhere else. G
rass one day, the rump of a cow the next, straight into a burger, and through the insides of some random man, pushing to win the impossible race to become another human. We all have our parent's to thank for at some point eating a meal that we were a part of, think about that!
As usual, let me know what you think. I've wanted to write this out properly for so long and I think about it far too often because I feel like it is 'obviously' the answer. Is there a flaw to my thoughts? Do you think we somehow retain memories and so forth without the physical brain pieces to hold them? Would you feel different if you witnessed someone lose their memory?
I'd love to hear counter thoughts, and whether any other theories fascinate you. I'm mad enough to think I've cracked it - why not eh?
I can't stop thinking this would make a pretty fun game. Trying to traverse the food chain in such a way that you become human again by beating the odds. I have a story in mind that'd work, but I don't think I have the programming and art skills to justifiably make such a project.