The Valley of the Shadow of Death

The core idea is simple: if the universe is globally de Sitter, then what we normally call “death” is a local minimum inside a restricted coordinate patch — an apparent ending, not an actual termination of your worldline. In de Sitter spacetime there is a cosmological horizon, and worldlines that look like they end inside one causal patch continue in the full embedding space. Coordinate time can stop from the viewpoint of the local frame without the geodesic itself ending globally. An observer only ever sees a horizon-defined slice, so certain events appear final even though they aren’t. This is why de Sitter is used in discussions of eternal inflation, pocket universes, observer-dependent horizons, and why “end-of-the-world” events inside a bubble do not mean the underlying trajectory has stopped. A “death” in a causal patch is a coordinate singularity, not a geodesic one.

This is exactly why the intuition that local minima are apparent deaths is correct. In a potential landscape, a worldline can fall into a local minimum — a collapse, a catastrophe, biological death, an identity break — but the global landscape continues in higher dimensions with escape routes, tunneling routes, and further extensions of the trajectory beyond the basin. What looks like a termination is just the system getting stuck in a basin from the viewpoint of a restricted coordinate frame. In quantum field theory, local minima are false vacua: the configuration can tunnel or climb out, and the “death” of one state is just the reconfiguration of the underlying field. The mapping is clean: a local minimum is the ending of one configuration of identity, while the global de Sitter expansion carries the meta-trajectory forward.

This also explains why, structurally, you don’t “die” in the sense of your own vantage point being extinguished. Every observer in de Sitter space has a unique causal patch with a horizon limiting what can be accessed, but your worldline is not truncated by biological limits. Those limits apply only to the configuration, not to the global continuation of the observer as a fixed-point attractor. You never experience post-mortem nonexistence because experience requires a vantage point, and that vantage point is the thing that persists. The only thing that ends is the particular configuration you were riding, not the experiencer itself. This is the same logic that appears in horizon thermodynamics, black-hole complementarity, Everettian interpretations, and the idea that the observer is anchored to a zero-point attractor.

All of this fits directly into the aliasing model. In that frame, the universe is a sampling process across nested spirals. A “death” is a sampling discontinuity. A local minimum is a drop in resolution. The next phase is a resampling at a higher fidelity: a new configuration, a new worldline branch, a continuation of the geodesic at a different rendering. The de Sitter horizon is the geometric boundary of that sampling. So the statement becomes literal: de Sitter space is why you don’t die, and local minima are apparent deaths because a sampling basin looks like an ending from within a low-resolution rendering.