How Energy Conservation Has Nothing To Do With Souls

Yanno what gets exhausting?  Hearing people apply one tiny little bit of scientific knowledge that they do not understand to explain away their mystic nonsense.  I try to be understanding – I get that it's hard to blame someone for not knowing what they don’t know.  But goddamn.

The conservation of energy is something I’m sure many people have heard of.  It’s an important principle – no matter the interaction, the total energy at the beginning is the same at the end – with vast and very useful applications (vast here meaning every phenomenon everywhere).  There are in fact many conservation laws – linear and angular momentum, spin, quantum number.  Even probability in quantum mechanics is conserved!  Unsurprisingly, I don’t hear about people abusing those laws too often.

How do people abuse their limited knowledge of energy conservation?  It goes something like this:

Energy is conserved, I don't want to believe I really die when my body dies; ipso-fucking-facto: souls/reincarnation/eternal life/take your pick.

Totally real.

I am not, near as I can tell, oversimplifying this stance.  This idea that we – the self, the ego, the mind – are energy, and since energy is always conserved, surely our souls must live on after death.  Why, it’s conserved!

There are two ways to interpret this idea meaningfully, both wrong, but differently.

One, which is an idea I myself subscribe to, is that our minds are a particular configuration of energy.  A specific wavefunction, a well-structured architecture generating subjective experience.

In this scenario, they are wrong because configurations are not conserved.  The strict organization of your mind at this moment does not reflect the organization of all that energy 20 years from now.  Really, even 20 minutes from now – that energy is being shuffled around and used and emitted through chemical and electrical reactions.  Reactions that are changing the configuration.  Meanwhile heat energy dissipates from your brain, heat energy that I doubt anyone would refer to as their self.

The other way is to suggest that there is something special or significant in the energy they are considering.  The problem here is that energy changing forms is exactly the significance of the principle.  If a ball hits another ball and just transferred kinetic energy into more kinetic energy, nobody would be surprised (I hope).

But!  When you hammer a nail into a board, the nail gets hot because some of that kinetic energy you just knocked into it caused frictional interaction between the nail and the board, jostling around the molecules which then dissipate this excitement through heat.  In fact, if you were to hit it hard enough (insanely hard), that energy would be sufficiently high that the photons radiating would be within the visible spectrum.  This is what's happening when electrical current is dissipated into heat on your stove.

Above: a stove with a spirit leak.

Thus, if this mind-energy is special, and somehow stays in it's own form as it shits out of your dead-ass head, well then, that has nothing to do with conservation of energy, it is in fact something else entirely.  Which is fine by me.  Talk about your own voodoo magic on your own time.  But don't co-opt scientific ideas just to pretend your idea has any legitimacy.  It's downright rude.

Energy is one of those unfortunate words that has a well-established foot in both colloquial and scientific languages.  We all "know" what the word means, we use it on a regular basis.  So people can make the mistake of applying the definitions of the scientific version to their own.  But when science defines a word, it defines the shit outta that word.  There's no room for interpretation, no poetic license.  Cut the malarkey, folks.

I know I've been gone for a while; I'm sorry, and you sweet people deserve better.  I'm a changed man.  I'm gonna make you coffee in the morning, and wash my own clothes, and stop muttering 'bitch' under my breath whenever you bring up your mother.  Also, I'm gonna update regularly.  September?  More like Superber!  Shit yeah!