About the author:
The natural scientist Dipl.-Math. Klaus-Dieter Sedlacek, born in 1948, studied mathematics, computer science and physics in Stuttgart. After twenty-five years of professional experience in his own company, he now devotes himself to his private research projects and publishes the results in a generally understandable form. He is also the editor of several book series, including the series "Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek" and "Wissen gemeinverständlich".
Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über www.dnb.de abrufbar.
© 2020 Klaus-Dieter Sedlacek
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ISBN: 978-3-7504-5857-4
What can natural science contribute to a topic that is otherwise occupied by philosophy and the various faiths?
I think a lot. For in natural science there are the extremely strange phenomena of quantum physics, which despite their oddity have the potential to shed light on those areas. However, it is about things where the established natural scientist usually simply turns away in order not to expose himself and his department to the danger of possible criticism.
But I don't believe that as a natural scientist you get dirty when you take up a topic that is close to the hearts of many people. These are people who may not be able to cope with what they are offered as wisdom on Sunday morning before the news. I have nothing against wisdom, I'm sure it is important for many people. It is just that some wisdom has a depressive character, in contrast to the claim of "good news".
So I think it is time to not only claim the good news, but to prove it. And evidence is rather the field of natural science than philosophy or good advice.
I do not want to claim that I have proved everything that is written in the following chapters, but I have chosen the path of reason, the path of comprehensible thinking, the scientific path as far as possible.
However, this path is also not without its stumbling blocks. First of all, there is the problem that the natural sciences have not defined consciousness; behavioural psychologists and philosophers have so far done so. But I needed a scientific definition. So I have created one myself, which is derived from what behavioral psychologists consider to be good and correct.
And then there is a physical phenomenon which Albert Einstein scornfully called "spooky long-distance effect". Today's physicists use terms such as "notlocal" or "quantum entanglement" instead. The spooky aspect of the phenomenon has disappeared from the vocabulary, but it exists, as experiments have confirmed.
When the word "notlocal" is mentioned, however, physicists unpack their rubber gloves so that they only come into superficial contact with them. They no longer explain what "notlocal" actually means, but rather seal themselves off. Everything that belongs to space and time of our known world is "local". The physicists still agree on that. Then "notlocal" can only mean It is something that does not belong to space and time of the world known to us.
I saw myself forced to draw this and similar conclusions myself. In addition to my sometimes somewhat sober, albeit generally understandable explanations, I am fortunate to owe many formulations to Prof. Dr. Dennert, who wrote them down some time ago, so that the text as a whole has come alive.
So I can only hope that you, dear reader, will actually find the contents of this book a pleasant message.
Stuttgart, spring 2016.
Klaus-Dieter Sedlacek
The question of the temporal end of our existence, which is of great importance to us human beings, and the rational answer to it should be our task in this book, but not the answer that faith seeks.
I am using the "we" here because I want to take you with me on the path of answering, which I would like to take together with you.
So in the following we want to stay on the ground of science, and there we have to examine quite soberly how far from the facts and from the point of view of logical thinking we can reveal the mystery of the temporal end and answer the question: Is there life after life?
If we have relentlessly followed this path to the end, then every reader may decide whether he wants to go another way, the way of the heart, with a clear conscience. Perhaps that this then still illuminates in a peculiar way many a stretch of the path of reason, which by its nature had to remain dark.
We can also call the path of rational thinking the critical-scientific one. But then it consists in the fact that we examine all phenomena that are connected with the question in question, that is, for us with the question of the end of time, without prejudice, and extract from them what is generally valid, whereby we must never deviate from logically clear concepts and conclusions.
So let us never try to leave this path in these investigations, only then will we keep firm ground under our feet until the end.
Now, it would seem extremely difficult from the outset to find a suitable beginning for our journey, because after all it is something which we can safely call a "secret".
But there is a way, and a very promising way.
Our basic question, of course, must be: "What is the temporal end?" But we will also be able to reach our goal by asking first of all for the possible opposite of the temporal end.
When we can understand this then we will also be able to unravel the mystery of the temporal end from him in the end.
We see life as the opposite of the temporal end, and since we are all in life, since life is our very own possession, we will have something to say about it.
Of course, we do not want to hide from the outset that here too we are faced with a serious problem, the mystery of life. This much alone makes it clear that it must be the less difficult problem for us, precisely because we ourselves are in it, and that we can best understand the mystery of the temporal end from the problem of life. Therefore, this will be our first concern.
What is life1? We ask this question first.
Life is a natural phenomenon, it belongs to nature, - about this there is not the slightest doubt at first. But if this is the case, then we find ourselves on the ground of natural science with the question of life. And she must be able to help us answer the question.
A look into nature and at the bodies and figures that compose it immediately shows us that we have to distinguish between these two large groups: Unanimated and living natural bodies. To those belong stones, rocks, earth, water, air, - to those plants, animals, people. To the unbiased observer this dichotomy seems self-evident.
But is it justified and what does it mean?
From the so-called monism2 one has denied that one has to make such a distinction between the inanimate and the living and has claimed that the living is only a special form of the inanimate. The starting point was the philosophical endeavour to attribute everything real to a single principle, an endeavour which, however justified it may be in itself, must not influence us in such a way that we view nature with bias. - So we want to keep ourselves free of it on our way to the knowledge of life and the temporal end.
Let us first try to dissect the inanimate.
The inanimate consists of material substances of various kinds and is characterized by certain properties. If we observe the behaviour of this matter, we see that it is subject to constant change. Yes, on closer inspection we find that all events in nature are basically nothing more than a continuous change of matter, but that this change is ultimately based on the interaction of the various material substances of the world.
The water of the streams and seas becomes vaporous through interaction with the temperature conditions of the air and rises into the air as mist, conglomerates here in clouds and becomes solid through cold air currents, falls down as snow, which melts on the warm ground and becomes water again, etc.
The hard rock becomes crumbly and chemically altered by the interaction with the factors of its environment (air and water), finally it disintegrates into arable earth, the material substances of which are transferred to the plant through the life process of the plant, and from the plant often into animals and humans. When their body later decays, its substances are again decomposed and are again transferred to the substances of the earth.
In the same way, we could dissect what is happening in the whole world of material matter, everywhere we would discover sequences of such changes and interactions, work performances or energies, as we call it scientifically. If the substance itself changes during the processes in question, e.g. iron changes into brown rust during rusting, then this is a chemical work performance, but if only the state changes, but not the substance itself, e.g. when the iron is magnetized, when the water becomes steamy, etc., then we speak of physical energies.
It is a very significant result of modern natural science that all natural phenomena occur in material substances and that all changes in substances can be traced back to chemical and physical energies.
It is irrelevant for our present purpose to pursue this further in detail, but the following is extremely important: Energy or work performance can always be measured.
As far as measurable, we are completely in the field of inanimate matter and its energies and thus in the field of chemistry and physics.
And another one! If we follow the transformations of energies and matter more closely, we come across a highly significant fundamental law of inanimate nature in classical physics3, which is During all transformations of material substances in a closed system, the mass of matter remains constant and the sum of energies remains unchanged.
If we follow any changes in certain substances, we make the surprising discovery that neither substance nor energy is lost or newly created. Substance and energy are changeable, but indestructible.
If, for example, any substance burns, it combines with the oxygen in the air as a result of chemical energy. Precise weight measurements have shown that the total mass of all substances involved in the process is the same before and after, no matter how profoundly they have been changed.
So if you weigh the material to be burned together with the oxygen available to it and then weigh all the combustion products again after combustion, we get the same number. Thus, nothing was lost in substance (in mass) during combustion.
And it is the same in all other cases, including physical processes, e.g. when movement is converted into electrical energy and this is converted into light, etc.
So these energies can always be measured, and therefore, for example, electric current and electric light can be sold like a commodity, which would be completely impossible if there was no measurability.
With the measurability of energies we are, as already mentioned, in the area of inanimate matter.
Is there now another characteristic of these phenomena of the substance? The continued observation of world events, however, reveals another very important one. It has been shown that the same causes have the same effects. Where the same conditions meet, the success is always the same.
For example: Wherever in the world hydrogen burns, water is created, wherever a corresponding temperature is applied to water, it becomes solid or vaporous, etc. And these processes also always take place according to very specific measurable conditions. Because the same phenomena also always have the same effects, therefore world events give us the impression of necessity, of regularity, and this regularity is the further unmistakable characteristic of phenomena in the field of inanimate matter.
What about the living now?
First of all, it must be said that life too is always bound to matter. We don't know it any other way. And this matter has the same chemical and physical properties as in inanimate nature. Of course, it is after all a special material substance.
All living beings are composed of cells, but cells are lumps of so-called protoplasm with a cell nucleus. Chemically, the protoplasm consists mainly of proteins. These now do not exist outside of living beings in nature. Wherever we find them, we can conclude with certainty that they originate from living beings. But these proteins are made up of the same basic materials that make up the substances of the inanimate world.
But protoplasm is not completely synonymous with protein. Its peculiarity is that it is organized, that is, it has a special peculiar construction. In order to understand this, we need to look at something else first.
A drop of water can undergo the most diverse changes, become steamy, become solid, or even be broken down by the electric current into its basic materials, hydrogen and oxygen. It is then always possible to reconstitute it, even from the basic materials. So he is indestructible in some ways. And it is the same with all other inanimate natural bodies.
In contrast to this life is a temporary phenomenon and every living being without exception approaches its temporal end and when it is dead then according to the present state of science it is impossible to recall it back to the living state. A borderline case of this rule are the experiments of the American biochemist Craig Venter, who was the first to succeed in producing a genetic material himself and implanting it into a cell, thus creating a viable bacterium.4
Fig. 3.1: Characteristics of a living system. Graphic: Sedlacek
Nevertheless, the certainty that life is something other than the dead state arises. Every death proves it with compelling certainty.
It is now also the case that every living creature is constantly exposed to the danger of death. In order to escape the end of its temporal existence, it must constantly carry out a series of actions, i.e. processes, which have the very purpose of sustaining life: It must move, it must feed itself, it must respond to harmful stimuli appropriately and protect itself. And since every living being must die one day, it must reproduce and produce offspring beforehand, if all life on earth is not to disappear in a short time (see Fig. 3.1).
Incidentally, a process is defined as the totality of interacting procedures in a system by which matter, energy or information is transformed, transported or stored.
So these are the processes of life, and we cannot discover anything like this in any inanimate natural body. Wherever one believes it, it happens under revaluations and reinterpretations of fixed terms, which are made for the sake of other philosophical views.
So the processes of life always take place in such a way that they serve to preserve life, and that is why they are called purposeful. And you will not find such practicality anywhere in inanimate nature. There is no point at all in opposing this word, as is actually happening from some quarters. Because then you would have to find another word for it, such as "useful" or "needy".
The result, however, always remains the same: that there is no such thing in inanimate nature. That here, then, there is a fundamental opposition between the living and the inanimate.
In order to understand all this even more clearly, we will now take a closer look at two life processes, metabolism and regeneration.
Substance is consumed in all life phenomena. The time limit would soon come to an end if this substance were not replaced. So here there is an undeniable need of living beings, and this need is fulfilled exactly as the preservation of life demands it.
A need is defined as the tendency to pursue a goal. Inclination indicates that it is not the rigid, unalterable pursuit of a goal. Conflicting objectives may need to be resolved when two different objectives are contradictory. Then a decision must be made. Further down we come back to the concept of need when we take a closer look at consciousness.
To pursue a need special devices, tools, are needed on the body of living beings, and these tools are called organs and the construction of such organs is called organization or system.
This is not only true with regard to nutrition, but also with regard to all other life phenomena.
That is why every living being shows organization, and this goes right down to its smallest components: the cell, even the protoplasm, is organized in this sense.
The living beings are differently perfect, the simplest ones consist only of single cells; but then one can observe life processes, e.g. nutrition, and an organization serving for it.
Nutrition in the whole of the living world, in the simplest and most complex living beings, consists in the absorption of different substances from the environment by certain organs and their processing in other organs into the substances from which the living being is built, and always into the substances that are needed here or there, according to need. This so-called metabolism takes place under constant disturbance of the chemical balance.
There is not a single living creature where it would not be so, and there is not a single inanimate natural body where something even remotely similar could be observed. In inanimate nature, the chemical processes are rather constantly striving towards chemical equilibrium.
But when a previously living being has died, has become addicted to death, then it immediately behaves with regard to its chemistry just like an inanimate natural body, then no power of the world can again cause the nutrition process and metabolism in it: Everything now strives for chemical balance.
That transformation of the ingested food into the substances of one's own body, primarily into proteins, is now in itself quite chemical in nature and in this respect does not differ fundamentally from the processes in inanimate nature. It is not the nature of the processes that is peculiar to life, but the fact that they always take place as required by the need to preserve life, i.e. in relation to the organism.
This will become very clear when we consider a particular example.
In our liver cell, the size of which is about a thousandth of the size of a pinhead button, very different, often almost opposite chemical processes take place next to each other, depending on what the preservation of life requires. Ten or more such events have been counted. For example, sugar is produced in the liver cell from a starch-like substance, glycogen, to provide the blood with the necessary amount of such a substance. However, if the blood contains too much sugar, so that life is in danger, then in the same liver cell, this sugar is converted back into glycogen.
Franz Hofmeister says about it5: "What distinguishes the whole process here is the amazing simplicity and practicality of the means used and the resulting saving of space and energy.
The protoplasm of the cell carries out these chemical processes with the help of very special, peculiar substances called enzymes, which have the highly striking property that they only cause chemical processes by touching them or by making changes themselves very easily, but that they then just as easily regress in order to act again. In any case, very little of such enzymes is needed to trigger one and the same chemical process all the time. They will be highly useful for chemical processes in the extremely small space of a cell.
It is therefore very remarkable that it is precisely in the cells of living beings that such enzymes are used in their nutritional processes, whereas they are not known in inanimate nature.
The microscopically small liver cell of which we spoke earlier contains no less than ten such different enzymes with different areas of activity. They cause and regulate the important chemical processes in this cell that have already been touched.
It is no different with the simplest living beings consisting of only one cell. In the yeast fungi, which consist of microscopically small single cells, no less than four different enzymes were found: one, diastase, for the conversion of starch into sugar, a second and third (invertase and maltase), which cause conversions of different types of sugar, and a fourth (zymase), whose field of action is fermentation, whereby alcohol is produced from sugar. And also here all these processes, which are in themselves quite chemically based, always take place according to the life requirements of the yeast fungus.
The second life phenomenon that we want to use here to confirm what has been said is regeneration. -- We have already said that living beings must protect themselves against harm; their useful devices and abilities in this direction are very great, and many are precautionary for possible future dangers. However, a special chapter offers the question: How does the organism help itself when direct damage to the body has already occurred?
Well, in this case he has the ability to immediately repair and heal this damage, i.e. wounds, and even to replace lost organs in some animals. This is called regeneration. It can be said that the less a living being is developed as a whole, the more it is gifted with the ability to regenerate.
If you try to catch a