“Death is just an illusion”: a physical explanation

Take, for example, the weather. We see a blue sky, but a change in the brain cells can change the perception and the sky will appear green or red. With genetic engineering, we could, say, make everything red vibrate, make noise, or be sexually attractive in the way some birds find it.

We think it's light now, but if we change the neural connections, everything around us will seem dark. And where we are hot and humid, the tropical frog is cold and dry. This logic can be applied to almost anything. Following many philosophers, Robert Lanza concludes: what we see cannot exist without our consciousness.

The scientist suggests recalling the following experiment. When electrons pass through two slits in the barrier under the supervision of scientists, they behave like bullets and fly through the first or second slit. But if you don't look at them while passing through the barrier, they act like waves and can pass through both slits at the same time. It turns out that the smallest particle can change its behavior depending on whether it is being looked at or not? According to bioethicists, the answer is obvious: reality is a process that involves our consciousness.

We can take another example from quantum physics and recall Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. If there is a world in which particles spin, we should have an objective ability to measure all their properties, but this is impossible.

But why is the very fact of measurement important for the fraction we choose to measure? And how can pairs of particles on opposite edges of the galaxy be interconnected, as if space and time did not exist? Moreover, they are so interconnected that when one particle of the pair changes, the other changes in a similar way, regardless of where it is located. Again, for supporters of bioethics, the answer is simple: because space and time are just tools of our mind.

Our linear way of thinking and understanding of time is also inconsistent with an interesting series of experiments. In 2002, scientists proved that photons knew in advance what their distant "twins" would do in the future. The researchers tested the connection between pairs of photons. They let one of them finish its journey - it had to "decide", to behave like a wave or a particle. And for the second photon, scientists increased the distance it needs to travel to reach its own detector. A cipher was placed in its path to prevent it from being turned into a fraction.

The photon didn't decide whether to become a particle or a wave until its twin also encountered a cipher on its way. Experiments consistently confirm that the effects depend on the observer. Our mind and its knowledge is the only thing that determines how the particles behave,” emphasizes Lanza.

But that's not all. In a 2007 experiment in France, scientists fired photons at a device to demonstrate something surprising: their actions can retroactively change what has already happened in the past. As the photons passed through the fork in the apparatus, they had to decide whether to behave as particles or waves when they hit the beam splitter.

Critics argue that these experiments only concern the world of quanta and microscopic particles. However, Robert Lanza cites as a counterargument an article published in 2009 in the journal Nature that quantum behavior extends to the everyday sphere. Various experiments also show that quantum reality goes beyond the "microscopic world".

In this case, we are dealing with an infinite number of universes, and everything that can happen happens in one of them. All possible universes exist simultaneously, regardless of what happens in any of them. And death in these scenarios is no longer an inviolable "reality".