Dying may mean an eternal, conscious void before rebirth

The theory that says dying is an eternal, conscious void

For those who defend this thesis, dying is not switching off. According to this idea, it means being tied to a chair in the middle of a conscious void, unable to move, see or hear, for an eternity the mind registers in full. Consciousness with no way out. The proposal has no empirical verification and, even so, an internal logic that is more unsettling than it should be.

What happens when you die, according to the void theory

The full premise works in two acts. In the first, upon death, the mind falls into the void of the universe and travels endlessly. The body is left behind; what persists is pure motionless consciousness, aware of the situation and with no way to escape. Those who hold this view compare it to being tied to a chair for all eternity. No stimuli, no time, no way out.

The second act comes when that drift ends, if it ever ends: the return to earth involves nine months locked inside the mother's womb, another dark, enclosed space. Hence, the thesis goes, the newborn's cry. Not hunger, not cold: the memory of two consecutive confinements.

The baby's phase of totality and the cry at birth

Here another participant in the debate adds a piece. In the first months, the claim goes, the newborn cannot distinguish its own body from what is outside; it is attributed a phase of totality in which the baby is the world and the world is the baby. No boundary exists. It makes a face, closes the fingers of one hand and discovers, always according to this account, that it is inside a closed system.

The void thesis reads that discovery of the limit —hand, skin, outside— the other way around: not as a learning process, but as the rescue of a consciousness that had spent eternities unable to touch anything. It is a suggestive reading. It is also, as of today, unprovable.

The holes: infinity, rebirth and the eternal doubt

The arithmetic problem appears immediately, raised by another participant: if the journey is infinite, by definition there is no end and nothing afterwards, let alone a rebirth. The infinite admits no afterwards. The objection dismantles, according to this argument, the second half of the story without needing a laboratory.

And then there is the question that opens any conversation of this kind: and how would anyone know that? There is no verifiable answer, only narrative coherence. In speculative territory, the question about aliens also sneaks in, and it goes unanswered. Nobody knows. That is precisely the problem.

From metaphysics to the tax office and fiscal exile

The conversation soon drifts into jokes. Some claim to experience that same paralysis when filing their tax return, and someone replies that an aniseed hangover produces a similar effect. The leap to fiscal exile —via Andorra— completes the turn: from eternity to taxation in three messages.

It is no coincidence. When a subject admits no proof, humour is the only rational way out. And the joke, moreover, points to something true: the anguish of the conscious void and that of paperwork share a structure —confinement, obligation and no visible escape route—.

---

None of this can be verified while alive, and probably not afterwards either. If the thesis is right, the comfort is scant. If it is wrong, no one will come to collect the bill. The only reasonable prediction is that we will keep turning it over —and paying taxes— without ever having left the void.