Coincidentally, someone very recently sent me an article about a physicist who experienced NDE. The sender knew that I was interested in topics like these.
Physicist Who Had Near-Death Experience Explores the Afterlife, Pondering Weird Quantum Physics
This article also mentions things like dark matter, but what interested me was the analogy of the cloud as consciousness, and I’d like to borrow that analogy to apply to memories recall to see how it works out. In a post, Lal explained that memories are stored in nāma loka (viññāṇa dhātu), and we retrieve memories from there with our brain.
Where Are Memories Stored? – Viññāṇa Dhātu
Let’s say we use Google service like gmail, google calendar, Google Docs, etc.
We retrieve those information via our personal computer, which is analogous to our brain.
The Google cloud is like nāma loka (viññāṇa dhātu).
When we die (our PC dies) we arrive at the Google data center for sometime and retrieve data directly from the servers at the data center.
After sometime we get another PC (born into another body with a new brain) and retrieve data via the new PC.
In the step about death above, I made the assumption that when our PC breaks we have direct access to the Google data center until we get a new PC. This part may be strange, but the part about how retrieving memories is like retrieving data from the cloud via a PC makes sense to me. Of course, another assumption is that the Google cloud will never be down.
Physicists on the forum, such as Lal, would know whether the other hypotheses in the article make sense. Lal does have a section on quantum mechanics, but, not being from a physics background, I haven’t checked that section out in depth.
A final thought: if Dr. Alan Ross Hugenot comes across Dhamma concepts like gandhabba and para loka then he can find insights to his research.
Best,
Lang