Time and Technicalities (Timewalkers Book 1)

by RP Halliway

  But people do die, so what happens then?

  To answer this question requires another body of exposition.

  Hopefully the idea of having a stack of lives in a ‘tube’, ‘changing’ (rotating) at a constant rate makes sense. But like the philosophers of old, the next question is ‘what exists outside of that tube?’ It’s turtles all the way down isn’t the answer in this case.

  It may be that the oatmeal tube cylinder that we are currently in is the only object in the universe, and outside of the tube is ‘heaven’ or ‘the abyss’ or something outside of the observable universe. This ‘cloud’ that exists outside of the tube could be heaven, and when a person dies, their soul drops off the paper and then exists in the cloud. Or if it is the Abyss, then their existence just ends.

  The Fundamental Theory of Change doesn’t purport to definitively answer the question of ‘what happens after we die?’ The theory focuses on examining a world driven by ‘change’ instead of ‘time’ and how observation becomes the primary evidence.

  However, it is this fact of ‘observation’ being the critical structure that allows for many of the possibilities for what happens after ‘death.’

  Possibility 1: The Bible.

  It is quite possible that the tube exists inside a cloud, much like a chicken rotisserie turning on a grill. The spit turning at a constant speed represents the change everyone is experiencing, while anyone watching the grill does not experience any change. This ‘changeless’ cloud could be defined as the afterlife, or heaven, or hell or some other cosmic entity.

  God exists in this cloud, the heavens, and watches the lives of everyone as the spirals rotate.

  When someone dies, their spirit departs from the oatmeal tube and joins up with others in the heavens. These could be angels or other spirits, or just souls going along with an existence in heaven. Or hell.

  This would produce a single lifetime for each person, after which each person goes to meet Jesus.

  The bible says in Hebrews 9:27 King James Version (KJV)

  27 And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:

  Possibility 2: Reincarnation.

  It is also possible that each person exists as one person over and over, reliving the same life each time through. This is hard to prove or disprove, but anecdotal evidence, in the form of deja-vu, could be explained by having remnants of past memories stick from a past life.

  Past memories can be imagined as a dream – sometimes dreams are not remembered, sometimes dreams are remembered vividly, but after time they fade and can’t be recalled anymore, with just snippets remain.

  Nothing in the Fundamental Theory of Change claims that each person needs to remain as their own person, but the Bible claims each person is their own soul, and that soul is forever, so while reincarnating as someone else is perfectly acceptable, keeping with Biblical claims, each person, if reincarnated, would live the same life over and over.

  Possibility 3: Multiverse.

  Possibility 3 and Possibility 2 are very similar, as they both deal with reincarnation. The difference is that Possibility 3 adds in the multiverse.

  What is the multiverse? It is the theory that there exists parallel universes in which events occur just a bit differently, or very differently, but that can’t be seen.

  For the Fundamental Theory of Change, the multiverse is a collection of cylinders or oatmeal tubes, each spinning at the rate of ‘change’ for that universe – which could be the same all over, or it could be at a different rate internally, as long as everybody in that universe experiences change at the same rate.

  In each oatmeal tube of lives, something differentiates that universe from another universe, although that difference could be great or small.

  The multiverse might just be a collection of change cylinders arranged in a probability distribution of what is most likely to occur. There are infinite cylinders in each portion of the distribution, but the most likely ones are clustered around the most common outcomes. A person sneezes at 1:33:04PM on July 1, 1998 in one universe, but it is at 1:33:08PM in another, but everything else is exactly the same from beginning to end for everybody else.

  Alternately, it is also likely that the sneeze changing to 1:33:08PM – that four second difference – causes a cascading sequence of events and produces a Cat 5 hurricane in the next month, producing a completely different universe outcome altogether. But that outcome universe may be probabilistically less likely, so it doesn’t exist as often – or rebirth happens in the most common universes.

  One way to imagine the multiverse is to hold up your hand, palm facing you. Keeping your fingers touching could look like the probability density of the current universe. The middle finger is tallest and represents the current life you have, which is the most common probability. The other fingers represent similar universes where something – probably something minor – is different. This would be like the sneezes at different time.

  Now spread your fingers apart. The middle finger now represents the cluster of universes your touching fingers just were. That is the highest probability universe, and all the surrounding ones with just minor changes.

  As you follow down your middle finger up to your ring finger, there is a dip and a gap. This represents a low probability set of universes. Something like ‘an asteroid hit at 1000BC and killed all humans’, or ‘people are born with 5 arms’ types. Something that is low probability compared to all the other universes.

  The ring finger represents a new cluster of universes, with a significant change from the middle finger cluster. ‘The Americans lost the Revolutionary War’, or ‘Germany won WW2’ type universes. Within that cluster is the minor change universes – like the different times of sneezes from before, but now all happening under a different victor than the other universe cluster.

  Within the multiverse there exists an infinite number of universes, all with something different.

  A little thought experiment can help to show the infinite magnitude of the possible universes. There are 31.5 million seconds in a year, thereabouts. Suppose every person on earth has a decision to make every 2 seconds throughout the day on average. That is 16 million decisions per person. And for simplicity, say each decision is a heads or tails type of decision. Each decision creates a new possible universe. For each person, that turns out to be – not 16 million times 2 – but 2 raised to the 16 millionth power. The result is 8.5 with 4.8 million zeros after it. That’s a big number.

  If a sheet of standard printer paper were to print 3000 of those zeros, it would take 1,600 pages just to print the zeros of the number.

  And that is just one year for one person, multiply by every person who ever lived, and possibly animals and trees too, and how long they lived, and that adds many many more zeros again. That’s a lot of universes. An impossibly big number of universes.

  Imagine the single finger multiverses – with small changes close to the tip, and bigger changes further away. This would very much look like a hill of sorts. A hill with trillions of universes inside of it, all slightly different from each other. Zooming in on the top would show that many of the cylinder surfaces overlap. The overlap could represent all of the events that are the same.

  A zoomed in hill surface might look something like this:

  How does this relate to the question ‘what happens when somebody dies?’ Putting the theory of reincarnation together with the Biblical claim of each person having a permanent soul, then the multiverse theory suggests that each person jumps from universe to universe – as themselves – after one life ends, and begins a new life, as themselves.

  This possibility also can explain deja-vu, as the faint remembrances of past lives, but it could also explain why deja-vu is just a passing feeling. One event doesn’t follow the same path in each universe, so there are just glimpses of ‘this happened before’ because the entire event fo
llows a different trajectory to fruition, only part of the event happened the same way as you are currently experiencing.

  Expanding on the hill model for universes, changes in the major events would create different hills, representing mutually exclusive events. For example, an asteroid wiping out humanity in 1000BC, and Julius Caesar becoming emperor would be mutually exclusive, because humans wouldn’t have been around to establish the Roman Empire. Additionally, since only one victor can emerge from any war or conflict, those would also create separate hills.

  All told, there are trillions of trillions of hills as well, looking much like a set of waves in the middle of an ocean, and expanding forever in all directions.

  The peak of all the hills would be the most likely universe in that set, and all other close universes would be the small changes, whereas the bottom of the hills would be the greatest changes from the central universe, and have a much lower probability of occurring.

  Possibility 4: The Abyss

  It is also possible that after dying, each person just fades away into nothingness. This is not as exciting as the other possibilities but should be considered.

  ***

  Out of all of these Possibilities, the multiverse in Possibility 3 is the most fun to examine.

  Starting from Biblical truth, the claim that each person is a permanent soul says that we are all comprised of three parts – body, soul and spirit. The body is the physical form, with all the senses and physical interactions with the world around us. The soul is the life force that is permanent and will reside in heaven or hell for all eternity. It is very possible that the ‘soul’ is responsible for memories – acting as a hard drive of sorts for any learned information. And the spirit is the part of each person that interacts with God through faith, hope, prayer, etc. The spirit died when Adam and Eve sinned, and that is why Jesus desires all people to come to him and be saved, and ‘born of the spirit.’

  Where is the soul now?

  It is quite possible that the soul exists in the ‘cloud’ outside of the multiverse, and is what interacts with the mind to control the body.

  How can this be?

  Imagine a computer doing a task – like running an app or opening or closing the garage door. The computer interacts with the physical world, selecting things when pressed, etc, and operating the garage door, but there is something beyond that – a person operating the computer to direct the steps.

  This is how the soul can interact with the world. The soul is the ‘real’ you – and knows everything, but is limited in what can be told to the body needing to experience things. The soul cannot just implant memories of past lives, it requires something physical to create the memories, otherwise the memories would feel like dreams. Each lifetime in the multiverse has data stored on a different partition of the memories hard drive, and the partitions cannot talk to each other.

  The Bible says in Jeremiah 1:5 ‘Before I formed thee in the belly, I knew thee’ - so there is a connection between God and the soul before birth or conception. This suggests that God and all of the souls of every person on earth exist together outside of the multiverse.

  From your soul’s perspective, the physical ‘you’ is the character in a computer game, and the soul is controlling the character though some form of communication – it could be the brain, or could be the heart, etc. There is no provable organ that the soul connects to, but since most people ‘feel’ thoughts are created in the brain, and have the most powerful senses (sight, hearing) in the head, it could be the connection from the soul is tied to the brain.

  Consider the brain – it has been theorized and even experimented on to determine when thoughts occur, and it might be there is activity in the brain that occurs before a thought happens. This could be the soul interacting with the brain to produce said thought.

  It also makes sense that the character in the computer game wouldn’t know as much as the soul does. As you run through a game, you learn all the levels by memory, but the character in the game doesn’t share that memory. You may have a map from the guide book or from the internet, or might have played the area before several times to learn a particular trick that is needed to move on, but you have no way to communicate your knowledge to your computer character. It may be the same for the soul. The soul may know lots of things, but has no way to produce that knowledge in your brain. Therefore, each life is a new experience for your physical self.

  How does this agree with the multiverse?

  There is one verse in the Bible that specifically deals with the afterlife:

  Hebrews 9:27 King James Version (KJV) states “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment:”

  One way of interpreting this verse is that each person lives one life, dies, and then goes to the judgment. There is nothing at all wrong with that interpretation, and it is probably the most correct interpretation, and should make everyone fearful for their soul.

  This interpretation also matches with the verses stating that the souls of people who died believing in the Savior, but died before Jesus paid for their sins, waited in Paradise, or captivity, for the Savior. After Jesus rose from the dead, He took all those souls to heaven.

  This interpretation suggests that the single oatmeal tube universe is how things are, and that there is a cloud, or heavens, outside of the oatmeal tube where all the souls and heavenly bodies exist with God.

  Another possible way to interpret Hebrews 9:27 is to use the exact words, but stress it in a little different way. “once to die, but after this the judgment”

  It could be interpreted as ‘one death leads to the judgment’ out of many lives and deaths.

  In a way that may be similar to the game ‘Press Your Luck’, each square is a life, and only when the ‘whammy’ comes up does the judgment happen. It would surely be “pressing your luck” to live like that – that this life is one of many and most likely leads to another go around, hoping that the judgment doesn’t follow this one death.

  If the multiverse respawing theory is true, then each death leads to a rebirth in another universe – for good or for evil.

  In a big stretch of the interpretations of Bible verses, the multiverse may exist in synchrony with the Bible. Consider the verse 1 Timothy 2:4, talking about Jesus, “Who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth.”

  Maybe there is the perfect universe somewhere in the very middle of the multiverse, where there is perfect faith, and all people are saved and have pure faith in Christ. Maybe that is the universe God is waiting for?

  The Fundamental Theory of Change and the ‘cloud’ could also explain when the Bible talks about time.

  2 Peter 3:8 states “be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”

  If God and souls exist outside of the change – like looking at the rotating chicken rotisserie – all of the days could be seen at once, all of the interactions of every person, making time stop but all things known, but then also jumping ahead with perfect knowledge to any point in the oatmeal tube.

  Aside from the Bible interpretations, the multiverse theory makes a lot of sense in other ways, such as why there are NPCs.

  What is an NPC?

  An NPC is a ‘non-player (or playable) character’ in a computer game. It is a computer controlled character that the player may interact with but that doesn’t engage in the actual game by itself.

  The NPC theory states that there are people around that do not have any internal dialog or thoughts and just robotically go through life being controlled by a computer.

  How does the multiverse explain this?

  If there exists 8.5 followed by 4.8million zeros universes in one finger of the multiverse, it would be very unlikely for any two people to exist in the same universe in the same ‘lifejump’ if you will. This means
that all of the interactions are pre-recorded and happen as they did, but with only one character actually in real time.

  Suppose there have now been one hundred billion-billion lifejumps of people so far in the multiverse. That wouldn’t even begin to scratch the surface of universes to inhabit – that is only twenty zeros out of 4.8 million zeros that comprise this one finger of the multiverse. But that would still be one hundred billion-billion lifejumps for each person, which is already an eternity.

  This means that because the multiverse is so large, if a person never jumps to that multiverse, their entire character will need to be ‘computer driven’ as an NPC.

  Even if the character has jumped to that universe before, they probably aren’t there now, so the interaction that you would experience would be their memory – and pre-recorded actions.

  Maybe this explains why there is the theory that everything is a simulation. Because in each lifejump, there is probably only a single, or on rare occasions, a couple, actual person or people living the universe life, and everyone else is an NPC or a memory. It is possible that the universe seems like a simulation because each person is being driven by their soul, and the simulation seems very much like a computer game to the soul, and sometimes that feeling and memory does find its way into the brain.

  Putting this into a Biblical context again, the multiverse exists inside the ‘cloud’ of heavens and souls and God, and Colossians 1:16 states “all things were created by him and for him”, speaking of Jesus, and this could explain how God has both given people ‘free will’ and also predetermined things – like who would be saved. Romans 8:29 states “For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son”