Scott's Philosophy Notebook

The law of conservation of energy tells us -- more or less -- that nothing is wasted. Nothing simply disappears into thin air, and things do not tend to materialize out of nothingness. Take a human being. It lives, it grows old, and then it dies. The body decomposes into worm food, the worms eat the food then expel waste products, the waste products become fertilizer for plants, the humans eat the plants, then become worm food around 80 years later. There's even a song about it by Elton John, placed into a wonderful Disney movie called The Lion King (one of my favorite Disney movies, second only to Aladdin). Yes, the circle of life is quite obvious once you think about it. And it makes us think that all we are is worm food. How disgusting.

Now, if nothing is wasted, if things just don't vanish into thin air, nor do they spontaneously materialize, then if consciousness is a thing -- not just an idea, but a real thing -- then it stands to figure that our consciousnesses also are recylced in some way. If you preserve a brain perfectly, the electrical impulses that comprise the brain's thoughts and memories are also preserved. But if that brain decomposes, what happens to that energy? Is it devoured by the worms, only to give them a bit of a jolt before they have a bowel movement? Is it absorbed by the soil, to become figs in a fig tree someday? Are those figs eaten by a human, to have those latent impulses reawakened in some way? Or are those impulses passed through the body, only to be flushed away twenty-four hours later? (And even then, are they are sent out to sea to be nourishment or refreshment for some plant or animal in the ocean?)

I encourage responses especially to this chapter, especially since I am not a physicist and am not completely familiar with the law of conservation of energy (or even if it applies here). But it is because of this simple scientific foundation, no matter how flimsy, that I adhere most to reincarnation than any other life-after-death theory.