At first I thought it was baloney, but it's an appealing idea. I completely reject the idea of an afterlife, but I often wondered if energy can't be created or destroyed, what happens to it when the body dies? I wonder if animal consciousness does the same thing. I would imagine it does. Why wouldn't it? For that matter, what about insect energy, or even bacterial or viral energy?
That energy can be neither created nor destroyed is part of the First Law of Thermodynamics. But you leave out what comes after: '...only converted into a different form.' That's why it's misleading to speak of 'the body's energy,' 'insect energy,' and so on. Suppose a batter swings at a baseball and hits it. During his swing, his arms have kinetic energy; the peripheral nerves in the muscles his arms (legs, torso) transmit bursts of electrical energy to them; this causes them to contract or relax as his body moves. These electrical impulses are a form of energy, created by chemical processes in the appropriate parts of his brain. His body has an internal temperature of so-and-so: it contains heat, (thermal energy) and under certain circumstances some of that heat will be radiated or conducted into the ambient air or the lining of his cap, and so on.
Now suppose that just as his bat strikes the ball (giving it too kinetic energy) he drops dead. If we're talking 'brain death' here, the chemical processes and electrical impulses will stop. Where do they 'go'? The chemical processes may linger for awhile but soon they will through the processes of decay (which use them as 'fuel') cease to exist in their present form. The electrical energy is now 'lost' because it has done its job, that of creating muscular contractions and relaxations. It has done 'work' (energy is sometimes defined as the capacity to do work) and having done it, disappears from the scene.
As the body cools (or warms, if it's a really hot day) thermal energy will either be transferred from it to its surroundings, or vice versa. There is no form of energy which is unique to humans, or to ants, or to computers. There are just various forms of energy. The sorts of energy that a human body has are lost, upon death, in non-mysterious ways. They do not metaphysically band together at death to create a further kind of sentience, one that is, oddly enough, modeled on the capacities the body no longer has.
Robert Paul Professor of the Commonplace Mutton College ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html