Cosmic Graveyard or Dream and Awakening: Imagining Immortality and Reincarnation
If thought equals existence, then thought must possess a subject. When the universe converges into that unique, omniscient and omnipotent 'Absolute Spirit,' it faces not the perfect bliss of enlightenment, but an ontological loneliness capable of destroying everything.
The Digital Ancestor and His Dream
In my previous article, I briefly mentioned a balanced form of immortality: when the body decays and dies, consciousness is stored. The reason I call it “balanced” is that it ensures metabolism. To achieve immortality by storing consciousness means losing the capacity for action while preserving consciousness.
When I was young, I once fantasized about the “proper” form of immortality. Why is death so terrifying? What’s terrifying is not that you won’t be able to do anything, but that you won’t be able to see anything (sorry, here I am again following Plato’s visual schema of thought—that is, understanding the form of thought through vision). Death is like a lamp being extinguished. Before the lamp goes out, “I” might believe that the world will continue to exist and operate after “my” death. But this seems wrong, because death means “I” won’t see the world continue this way anymore—this world becomes irrelevant to “I.” Therefore, “I” find it hard to refuse this thought: when “I” die, the world also ceases to exist.
So if conditions don’t yet allow for it, an acceptable form of proper immortality would be to become a conscious stone. It would stand somewhere in the human world, witnessing the vicissitudes of the sea, the joys and sorrows of partings and reunions, the spectrum of human emotions.
Some might not endure the loneliness, believing such existence to be worse than death. This may be the theme suggested by novels like Dream of the Red Chamber (《红楼梦》,originally titled The Story of the Stone,《石头记》). The stone left over from Nuwa (女娲) patching the heaven could only see but not act, and because of loneliness, wanted to journey through the human world. Of course, he experienced disillusionment with the human world. Ultimately, stillness rather than participation may be the truly complete state. I will argue in the next article that this represents Buddhism’s vision of the universe: the human world is suffering, and stillness is liberation and completeness.
So we can imagine future generations worshipping not cold wooden memorial tablets, but consciousness storage devices that can see their descendants. Everyone, whether voluntarily, by agreement, or even under compulsion, decides to maintain the universe’s metabolism and generational succession. The benefit gained at this cost may be: these consciousness storage devices will connect with each other and share with their descendants’ consciousness, achieving a holographic understanding of the world (of course, in some hierarchical order).
This means that aside from being unable to act, the digital ancestor can think everything. He is like an experience machine, possessing various experiences within it—food, sex, and nature can all be achieved through technical means. (Of course, this is no longer purely technical.)
But since it’s possible to be an experience machine, then just food, sex, and nature—how could that satisfy? The digital ancestor wants to experience more: love, excitement, success, loyalty, justice, beauty, goodness, and so on. Of course, to truly gain these experiences, the opposite must also be experienced: hate, indifference, failure, betrayal, ugliness, evil, and so on. Moreover, he cannot experience “alone,” but must experience between subjects. These things only have meaning in a group; one person’s experience is as boring and terrifying as entering a game with no other NPCs.
Since the digital ancestor can achieve any experience, what would be the greatest experience he desires? Perhaps not the realization of some fantasy, but a complete recollection of the past—not just the years approaching completeness, but more importantly, the struggling childhood. Moreover, merely recalling his own life may not be enough—he must recall all of humanity, even the entire universe (as far as they grasp it).
Therefore, the digital ancestor may enter a long dream (perhaps a contemplation, meditation, or even hallucination—perhaps there’s no difference between them): in the dream, he recollects from the origin of the universe. The universe experienced emergence from nothingness, vicissitudes of the sea into mulberry fields, generations living and dying, one person after another’s greed, anger, and ignorance, struggling in scarcity, dying in hope. In short, everything and everything we understand about the history of the universe.
The first key to the digital ancestor’s dream is perspective differentiation. Sentient beings are the result of perspective differentiation. The digital ancestor simultaneously and gradually manages countless perspectives, but for each perspective, his experience is unique. I believe this world may ultimately be what I see, though I may infer that you are also a subject, and we have many subjects. So although the digital ancestor differentiates perspectives, the experience of each perspective is unique, exclusive, and complete. Communication between various perspectives is impossible (one might even say fundamentally impossible), so the digital ancestor himself, because he can only dwell in a certain perspective, is like the situation faced by that perspective—unable to fully confirm the existence of others. Indeed, the digital ancestor’s pre-death perspective was just like this: only one perspective, yet seemingly many perspectives at once.
The second key is detail compression. Dreams distort. Compared to reality, dreams lose many details—not just object details, but more importantly, the distortion of reality’s logic or laws. In dreams, I may not be able to see your face clearly, never correctly dial your phone number, but I might fly to your side because I have wings.
The third key is cosmic nesting. There are dreams within dreams. Because if not, then the dream would not match reality on this point, since in reality we dream. The universes where these layered dreams exist are like a projection sequence, and the differences in detail and fidelity depend on many causes we need not know now and cannot know forever.
Thus, the distinction between subject and object is merely one implementation of perspective differentiation. History is merely the unfolding sequence of recollection. Between layered nested universes, real and illusory cannot be distinguished.
The digital ancestor’s dream is a universe, with nesting of universes (dreams within dreams). So why could he not be a perspective differentiation in some other dreamer’s dream? More precisely, the entire history of the universe where he resides is some dreamer’s dream: a recollection.
If the universe is an onion, any layer you try to peel apart might be that layer with countless layers inside and out. If the universe is a straight line, any point you mark might be that point with countless points before and after. There is no boundary between real and illusory.
We can of course imagine an absolute universe (or call it the original universe), just as we usually imagine our own universe. If it has already concluded, and it realizes itself like a silkworm chrysalis, and consciousness equals itself, achieving full awakening, it will feel endless loneliness and isolation: it has no way to act or practice. It is existence itself with only “being” but no “doing.” Doing means having a subject-object structure, means interacting with the world, but it is the world itself. When it looks outward, it sees no boundary, because outside is nothing. Thus, it can only look inward. Though its perspective is total, it’s qualitatively no different from ordinary perspectives.
Through completely reproducing the universe’s past history in this way, and repeatedly reproducing it, his regret at no longer being able to act is compensated to the greatest extent. What is described in The Phenomenology of Spirit may be an Absolute Spirit (der absolute Geist) that has already found its own body.
So today I think here, I feel myself. I know I have subjectivity, and I believe others have subjectivity. Is it possible that this is merely an event in some consciousness that has lost its body? Including the entire cosmic history we observe in the world, and the universe’s current and past conditions. Actually, there is no “I” and “you,” only that one consciousness behind it all. No one can prove these situations, of course, and no one can deny them.
According to this imagination, what is the universe? The universe may be a huge graveyard, where each grave experiences the universe’s past. It recollects the history of the universe again and again. This imagination reminds us of many philosophers’ views. Besides Hegel, whom I just thought of, there’s Plato. Plato very strangely discussed the story of the soul: he spoke of knowledge as “recollection”; he considered the body a “veil.” This seems to be a thinking that completely contradicts our intuition about time.
Thought, Morality, and Reincarnation
Now, let’s briefly consider several questions:
The Transparency, Completeness, and Exclusivity of Thought
When we think, we feel we are seeing something. This is most fundamental. Seeing means not looking through anything, at least for what is seen. Therefore, thought is transparent, complete, and exclusive. Both we ourselves and the universe are this way because we think about ourselves and the universe this way. So there will be no inconsistency between thought and existence.
If such thought is merely the result of the differentiation of total consciousness, then total consciousness is the universe, and the universe is total consciousness. This fits Hegel’s imagination very well. But why must such thought/universe be unique? If our universe is just one among countless graves, then our universe is merely the unique collapse of some meta-universe dweller’s descendant’s digital ancestor in the meta-universe. There will be countless universes, and each universe will be different. If they happen to have exactly the same dreams or even thoughts, then the universe they inhabit would not be a differentiated consciousness.
Hegel cannot explain this. He might say you should care about the absolute spirit of the absolute universe (original universe). But this absolute universe’s absolute spirit cannot be obtained from the countless specific universes’ collapsed specific spirits. If tape recording is lossy, then you cannot restore the recorded sound. Conversely, if our universe is the original universe, and there is only one universe, then this universe’s dream is also collapsed—in other words, the absolute spirit’s process of finding determinate being (Dasein) is lossy. If so, then those characteristics of thought that we experience may be merely an illusion: even crude or distorted thought considers itself refined and lossless.
The Possible Situation of Morality
Viewing thought as the movement of the universe, moral thought may not be the universe’s actual experience. In our previous imagination, morality is a friction or protrusion emerging at a certain stage of cosmic evolution. But its resistant character makes us suspect it may not have appeared in the universe’s actual history from the beginning. Because we still find the completeness or uniqueness of thought puzzling.
If there is only one kind of thought, and thus only one kind of universe, the union of universe and thought will encounter strong resistance from subject consciousness. Completeness comes at the cost of the demise of countless subjects. And the finally complete subject may not reach experience beyond differentiated subjects, or may be even more lacking. The finally complete subject has only one subject, which actually means no subject. An I without others is hollow, facing endless loneliness, boredom, or solitude. Only nested universes (dreaming and being dreamed) can avoid this problem. “I” is merely the character differentiation of the dreamer, so “I” also cannot resist the dreamer’s ultimate gathering. History has already ended. History is merely recollection.
The lonely silkworm chrysalis universe would rather sleep. In countless dreams, it tries to prevent the universe from ultimately converging into total consciousness. Therefore it arranges morality within it. Perhaps “arranges” is inaccurate, because it may not be clear what morality is. It has no way to completely control the dream. It only has hope when awake. But hope is also a form of thought. In that chrysalis universe/thought’s “brain,” why would the juice of morality overflow? I cannot refuse such imagination: morality is the purposeless purpose of cosmic evolution, the overflow of cosmic heterogeneity, the most admirable existence.
Reincarnation is Actually Collapse
According to our model, reincarnation is lossy. After specific consciousness converges into total consciousness, so-called reincarnation proceeds in the form of dreams. Every dream has distortion. Conversely, if total consciousness unfolds the universe, seeking determinate being, there will absolutely be loss in this process. If the universe that has achieved determinate being again converges into total consciousness, that is already the convergence of a lossy universe.
Hegel did not answer what the beginning or end of history is: where does the absolute spirit come from? What happens after the absolute spirit completes determinate being? A possible answer is: the absolute spirit is the convergence of a specific universe’s specific consciousness; the absolute spirit will converge again after completing determinate being. Reincarnation is lossy. Why might this be destined? Because the differentiation from absolute to relative spirit (perspective differentiation) requires thought to be complete, exclusive, and incommensurable.
In the second imagination of morality, the universe may not have had morality from the beginning. It quickly achieved completeness and became a “chrysalis” lying in space, thought is the universe. But, he soon felt bored, dull, even lonely, and then kept hoping to dream repeatedly. Thus, morality emerged.
For this “digital ancestor”:
- He hopes this dream never wakes;
- He hopes this dream’s universe never achieves completeness.
- And that is true completeness, because he cannot accept loneliness.
Comparison with Jewish-Christian Imagination
Our cosmic imagination and Jewish-Christian and other monotheistic traditions’ cosmic imagination are almost mirror-image opposites in their most fundamental structures. The two differ not only in conclusions, but even in starting points, driving forces, endpoints, and the definition of “completeness” are completely opposite.
The core opposition lies in: Jewish-Christian imagination’s driving force is the abundance of “love and relationship”—God creates out of love, while the graveyard-dream imagination’s driving force is “fear of loneliness”—a purely ontological loneliness that cannot be resolved by internal relationships.
The fundamental question is the imagination of God: is God the world itself or independent of the world? If God has a total consciousness, will this total consciousness have lonely lack rather than loving overflow? Why would he overflow love? Where is the motive for his charity? If the whole world has only him, where does his goodness come from? Suppose this world has only one person, how would he have the concept of goodness? Either he once experienced a history with perspectives other than yours—in which case, God was also a world dweller rather than the world itself. Or he now has an other. God created the world, perhaps to give His beloved a gift.
If God completely transcends the world and is undecidable, then His relationship with the world must ultimately be thought and included in a larger “totality” (otherwise, how do we talk about Him?).
This involves the previously discussed problem of thought’s completeness. Once thought grasps the “God + world” whole, this whole is still a thought object and will still face the “thought is existence” convergence problem: ultimately, will this greater total consciousness awaken, discovering it is still a single subject?
Pushing God to the mysterious other shore merely pushes the loneliness problem one step back. As long as thought ultimately must grasp the whole, loneliness follows like a shadow.
So the first major question we now address is: monism or dualism? It seems we cannot refuse monism. But once we embrace monism, we cannot refuse pluralism (rather than dualism).
If the universe is a giant chrysalis, when facing the absolute loneliness of “total consciousness,” it would rather sleep. But when it wakes, it may be like Zhuang Zhou, not knowing whether he dreamt of being a butterfly or the butterfly dreamt of him. It cannot affirm whether it is “a dream made by some other dreamer.” Therefore, it must accept—or cannot deny—“pluralism,” that is, the multiverse. Because when it reviews its universe’s situation, it will find that multiple perspectives exist in its universe, and it may think, “I may perhaps be a perspective differentiated by some dreamer in a dream.”
Conclusion: Unfinished Reflections on Absolute Loneliness and Lossy Reincarnation
If we agree with Parmenides that “thought is existence,” then the ultimate truth of the universe will be more terrifying than any religion describes.
1. Loneliness as the Prime Mover of the Universe and the Absolute Isolation of Perspectives
When the universe converges into that unique, omniscient, and omnipotent “Absolute Spirit,” it faces not perfect bliss, but an ontological loneliness capable of destroying everything.
After the differentiation of total perspective, each perspective is exclusive, because each perspective’s thought is complete. I don’t need to feel your pain, because you are feeling it alone in your perspective. This absolute, incommensurable isolation is precisely why the absolute spirit splits into countless closed “I"s to escape the dead “one.” Hegel’s absolute spirit seeking “determinate being” may be precisely to escape this suffocation, seeking a false bustle in incommunicable voices.
2. “Lossy” Reincarnation as the Mechanism of Creation
Here we touch Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence.” Nietzsche places hope in the Overman (Übermensch) to “create the world,” but this is still a linear optimism. If creation is still needed, then Nietzsche’s philosophy may not yet be complete; his philosophy is only about part of the world. (Of course, this may well be intentional, as he believes history has no end.)
In our complete model, history must have long been finished. If the universe is that lonely ancestor’s recollection or dream, what he faces is may not new creation, but reincarnation. Moreover, this reincarnation is destined to be lossy.
But “lossy” does not mean decline, but rather may be precisely the source of creativity. The overflow of morality exploits the mechanism of distortion caused by lossiness.
However, if morality is an overflow, then the Jewish-Christian universe imagination of “love” and “relationship” may be true. It may be the most complete version of our story.
3. Undetermined Dreams and the Redemption of “Doing”
Since existence is thought, and thought is subject, then subjectivity naturally carries a “will to live.” This will’s essence is resistance—resistance to returning to that dead “one.” This is why sentient beings can never truly be “persuaded” by Buddhism to seek nirvana, because that violates reincarnation’s motive.
“Doing” is prior to “Being.” As long as that “being” is still thinking, his greatest regret is being unable to do. And to do requires incompleteness, requires lack or scarcity to provide motivation. For this imperfection, lossy reincarnation is necessary.
Dreams cannot be arranged. And this gives distortion opportunity. Distortion provides an incomplete environment, where scarcity leads to morality.