From the Big Bang to the Immortality of the Self?

From the Big Bang to the Immortality of the Self?

In his 1999 book The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World (Basic Books, New York), the British philosopher Colin McGinn advances a thought-provoking hypothesis concerning the relation between consciousness and the creation of the universe in the Big Bang. Although this hypothesis – as McGinn frankly admits – is wildly speculative, there is a seductively plausible logic to it. In the following I want to use McGinn's hypothesis as a stepping stone towards a plausible or at least possible argument for the immortality of the self. Whether this argument is convincing I leave for the reader to the decide. As a philosopher I have no religious stake in this matter and am merely interested in the rationality of the arguments at hand.