Save me from this prison Lord, help
me get away
'Cause only you can save me now
from this misery
Well I've been lost in my own
place, and I'm getting' weary
How far is heaven?
And I know I need to change my ways
of livin'
How far is heaven, Lord can you
tell me
Cause I've been locked up way too
long in this crazy world
How far is heaven?
"Heaven" by Los Lonely Boys, Copyright Garza Bros Music BMI © 2003
I love the Gnostic tenor of this song’s lyrics. How many times in my own
life, when under duress of pain in heart or in body, when laboring under
darkened spirits, have I wondered the same thing: How far is Heaven? At such
times I’m convinced that this dense, cloying mortal plane is truly a rank
emanation from some unnamed, evil Demiurge, long ago cast out of Heaven
himself. Where is that sublimely high place, whereof one tiny spark inside me
proclaims it must return?
Classically, Heaven was envisioned to lay above the highest celestial
sphere. Science tells us that the farthest observable objects in the universe
are 370,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 km away. Were my soul to fly at the speed
of light, at 300,000 km/second, it would take it 39 billion years to reach the
entryway to Heaven. But, of course, that entry will surely be much further
away by then, since the universe – or more accurately, the space between all
universal objects -- is very rapidly expanding. It would be unnerving indeed
to think that the ultimate rate of universal expansion would grow to the speed
of light itself, frustrating any chance of reaching those rosy gardens.
But quantum physics experiments done with "entangled particle pairs" show
that instantaneous transfer of states can occur between twin particles
at any arbitrary distance. This phenomenon was described by Einstein as
"spooky action at a distance", a notion so dreadful to him that it made him
shy away from quantum mechanical theory altogether – a theory that he himself
helped create in the first place! If my soul was "quantum entangled" with the
essence of the Godhead in some primordial time, manifesting in the form of a
"ghost" clone-soul remaining behind in Heaven, then it may immediately subsume
the essence of that divine copy upon its need to do so – that is, upon my
demise. There is some hope in that direction…
It’s of some interest, but not altogether surprising, that the stature of
man stands midway between his contemplation of the very largest and the very
smallest of things. The edge of the observable universe is estimated at 1026
cm away, and the smallest speculated physical size, the Planck length, is 10-33
cm long. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? That’s easy enough to
answer in scientific terms. We must assume that angels can shrink to any size
they want -- but nothing at all can shrink smaller than a Planck length, which
describes the region where quantum events arise – a length about 1
ten-octillionth the size of an atom. There is no smaller dimension that is
meaningful. If the head of the pin is 0.1 cm (10-1 cm) in diameter,
then 1063 angels shrunken to Planck-sized fairies could prance on
it:
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
of them.
Of course, that is far more human, animal, plant or single-celled souls
than have ever lived in the history of the world – most certainly, in the
history of all the worlds in the universe. It is, in fact, equal to the
number of atoms estimated to exist in the entire universe. So in short, the
correct answer is that all the angels could easily dance on the head of
a pin – with lots of room for line-dancing, if they so choose.
Perhaps Heaven lays in the microscopic realm, nestled somewhere beneath the
petal of a single Planck-sized particle. If my soul started off as the size of
my body, and shrank to half its size every second, it would reach the Planck
length boundary in only about 2 minutes. Makes me want to see that great old
1957 Sci-Fi movie again,
The Incredible Shrinking Man.
To many denizens of the modern world, Heaven is an inner world; a state of
mind. No one knows what the "mind" really is, but most people would consider
that it resides somewhere within the confines of the human brain. A mental
state would properly be considered an epiphenomenon of the brain, an
organized pattern arising from the chaotic complexity of myriad, individual
brain cell transactions. It’s one of the ever-changing shapes of the
communication network formed by the "brain internet".
Zen Buddhists hold that Heaven is a state called Nirvana, and they
attempt reach it through silent meditation. Nirvana is a quiet, still place
where the frenetic activity of the mind is calmed, and one approaches
communion with the Nothingness that is God. It always sounded to me like
meditation was the act of consciously trying to snuff all brain activity
altogether. I could do that a whole lot easier by simply putting my head under
a hydraulic punch press.
No, to me Heaven is a different state – one of wonder, brightness,
enchantment, orgasmic joy. The landscape would be colorful beyond description,
the sounds majestic beyond anything Bach could compose, the architecture
soaring and imaginative. There would be dancing in the streets, and great
camaraderie in all the pubs and public places. Laughter and mirth would
be the coin of the realm. All would be in movement, and all would be infused
with wonder -- yet, ultimate understanding of all mysteries would prevail. The
dross of jealousy, anger, fear and distrust, so common on the normal mental
plane, would be unknown in this grand, scintillating place.
A few beautiful, scantily clad, grape-feeding vestal virgins wouldn’t
detract at all from this scene. Unfortunately, I don’t plan on sacrificing
myself in an Islamic Jihad anytime soon -- and according to the
Koran, those guys seem to have a monopoly on that particular aspect
of Heaven. Ah, well. It seems you can’t have everything in Heaven…
To experience just an instant of Heaven would be sufficient, since
its fabric is woven from timeless thread. An "instant" is scientifically
defined as a Planck-time interval. That is the time it takes for a
photon of light to travel across the distance of one Planck length. It's
the shortest duration that has any physical or theoretical meaning -- 10-43
second. Surely, if the true mental state of Heaven was achieved even for
this tiny sliver of time, it would last forever.
If the rudiments of a thing can be imagined, then there must be a unique
mental state in the brain somewhere that will produce its exact, full-blown
perceptual content. Let’s assume that a mental state is defined by the unique
combination of all the neuron cells in the brain. To keep things simple, let’s
say a neuron can either be active or inactive -- switched on or off, as in a
digital circuit. There are about 1010 neurons in the brain – ten
billion of them. The total number of combinations of overall mental states in
this simple digital model would be 210,000,000,000. A number this
large has absolutely no meaning in an enumerative sense.
That number only represents the total quantity of unique mental states
possible. Each of those 210,000,000,000 mental states could be
described in a codebook, composed of a listing of the state (0 or 1) of each
neuron in the brain. Every one of these codebooks would be 1010
characters long. Figuring 500 characters per page, that’s 20,000 pages –
probably easier to consider it as a 20-volume set, each volume being 1,000
pages long. There is not nearly enough room in the entire universe to house
the library containing all possible states of mind – even if the size of each
codebook were only a Planck length long! And yet, there are those who have the
audacity to claim that the mind of Man is limited!
One could never find Heaven in a field that large. The processing power of
the human brain is only about 1017 bits/sec, based on the number of
brain neurons (1010), average number of synapses per neuron (about
104), and the average neural firing rate (about 103 Hz).
If you had the ability to consciously plow through each and every mental state
available -- even if you could interrogate a googol (10100) of them per second – you
wouldn’t even scratch the surface if you lived as long as the universe will
physically endure. If somehow you were still surviving when the last existing
proton in the universe finally expired, you would not be appreciably closer to
finding that unique mental state than at the moment of the Big Bang itself.
But of course, there’s one thing about statistics and probability: There’s
always a chance that you could find Heaven in your next thought…
Back to Essays...
Image at top is City of Angels, Zebhul by
Selina Fenech.
Thanks to my friend and work colleague Tom
Freeman for telling me how to figure the number combinations of unique binary
states (i.e., brain states) in a N-large set: simply 2N.
Tom is also quite knowledgeable about the chemical transactions that occur at
the neural synapses, and he (properly) pointed out that my scenario was an
immense simplification of how the brain actually works. And so I
pass that on to you. The total number of actual mental states is likely
much, MUCH larger and more complicated than I have represented above.
Nevertheless, it does not detract from my conclusion.
