Why life would be experienced as a panorama near the moment of death?

My email friend DU asked a highly interesting question: Why would the brain go through a recall of important life events before death?

The question is an excellent challenge for the TGD based view of conscious experience. It splits into many sub-questions. What is conscious experience? What is life? What happens in death? What happens in memory recall? Why would life be seen as a panorama before the moment of death?

1. What memories and memory recall are in the TGD Universe?

1. Memories are not possible in standard QM based theory of consciousness. Since the state after the quantum jump carries no information about the state before it.
2. In TGD the small failure of classical determinism plus holography predict that quantum states in zero energy ontology (ZEO) are superpositions of 4-d Bohr orbits for 3-surfaces as analogs of particles. In standard ontology one would have superpositions of 3-D surfaces.

   In ZEO, quantum states are superpositions of these Bohr orbits. However, all Bohr orbits start from the same 3-surface and repeated small SFRs (SSFRs)do not change this surface at the passive boundary (PB) of causal diamond. At the active boundary (AB) state changes and this gives rise to self as a conscious entity experiencing the flow of time. This corresponds to the Zeno effect in which the quantum state does not change in repeated quantum jumps.

3. Conscious experience is about space-regions where the non-determinism is. The 3-D loci of non-determinism would serve as sources of conscious experience. They would serve as memory seats. Small state function reductions (SSFRs) for a given seat with time t_n would replace the Bohr orbit with a new one at times t>t_n. The superpositions of Bohr orbits would be like quantum stories of life. These stories would begin from the same 3-D quantum state at PB.

   Each SSFR would mean memory recall would mean a quantum measurement for some memory seat as a locus of non-determinism. For instance, a localization to one alternative state of the memory locus would occur: this would mean selection of one possible classical future.

2. How to achieve the memory recall as a quantum measurement?

Option 1: The first view is that in an active memory recall a negative energy signal to geometric past is sent and this signal is received by the memory state and induces a quantum jump changing the 3-D state of the memory state and therefore also the future. This induces a signal propagating to the future brain and induces memory as conscious experience.

Option 2: The second view is that the memory loci with t=t_n are quantum entangled as they would be if a superposition of Bohr orbits is in question. What would be measured, would be the state of memory locus at t_n. This would mean a selection of one future.

3. What would happen in death?

In the TGD Universe, death and birth would be completely universal phenomena occurring in all scales and biological death and birth would be only a special instance of it.

1. In ZEO death would mean "big" SFR (BSFR) in which the arrow of time changes. This measurement is induced by interaction with the external world at AP.

   Density matrix is a fundamental observable and is measured in BSSF. In the interaction of AB with the external world, the density matrix of AB ceases to commute with the density matrix and observables whose eigenstates the state associated with PB is.

2. The measurement of density of AB occurs and necessarily changes the state at PB. The roles of AB and PB are changed and the arrow of geometric time changes. Old self dies and the reincarnated self with an opposite geometric arrow of time is born.

4. Why would death make it possible to recall the entire life?

The total memory recall should occur before the death of BSFR. All memory seats of self, which define subselves, should be activated simultaneously and involve SSFR.

Option 1: If negative energy signals to the geometric past induce a memory recall then a very strong signal of negative energy covering the entire frequency spectrum could generate this. A kind of white noise. All memory seats would be activated in time order propagating from now to the geometric past and the last activated seat would be near or at the moment of birth. Life would be lived in a reverse order. The arrow of geometric time for memory seats as subselves would change: also they would die and reincarnate with a reversed arrow of time!

After that the even bigger BSFR, in which self itself dies, would/could occur and also the arrow of time of self would change.

Option 2: In this case the entanglement between the neighboring memory seats would be reduced by a sequence of SSFRs propagating to the geometric past step by step and stop at PB. The outcome would be life experienced in reverse time order.

In the blog discussion a person who had experienced the life panorama told that the life review was in some sense objective: as if the life would have been seen from a higher perspective. This could be possible if the NDE involves transition to a higher reflective level at which the person is a subself. The memories would be memories of the higher level self about the person. This transition might mean that the third person perspective, which could be present always, is not masked by the sensory, motor and cognitive input anymore. Also a phase transition in which the algebraic complexity of the magnetic body increases can be considered.

The holography= holomorphy vision leads to a concrete proposal what reflective levels of consciousness could mean (see this). They could reduce to a functional composition f→ g(f) of an analytic map g: C²→ C² with a map f: H=M⁴× CP₂ → C², where f is an analytic map with respect to hypercomplex coordinate and 3 complex coordinates of H. When g reduces to (g,Id) acting trivially in the second factor of C², this gives compositions of complex maps of C→ C and iteration of g produces Mandelbrot fractals and Julia sets.

See the article Does Consciousness Survive Bodily Death? or the chapter with the same title.

For a summary of earlier postings see Latest progress in TGD.

For the lists of articles (most of them published in journals founded by Huping Hu) and books about TGD see this.