Living beings bring more order to the world, and are required by the second law of thermodynamics, to simultaneously produce more disorder through metabolic heat dissipation. Consciousness in living beings produces even more order, enhancing survival and reproduction, and incurs an entropy debt that must be paid separately, and non-metabolically, through heat dissipation produced by Landauer’s principle: the erasure of information within the "explanatory gap" of the hard problem. Consciousness is assumed to depend on the properties of tryptophan in microtubules and their ability to dissipate heat through superradiation as required by Landauer. After the post-mortem decomposition of microtubules, consciousness will have no mechanism for the necessary heat discharge, which would violate Landauer’s principle and thus the second law. Any actual such  survival would imply life-before-death to be solipsism. The aim is to distinguish near-death experiences and out-of-body experiences from life-after-death in biophysical terms, and to explain how they might arise as a result of natural forces. It is hypothesized that near-death and out-of-body experiences, and their vivid nature, arise from the disinhibition of microtubular consciousness after electroencephalographic brain activity has stopped, but while microtubular Tryptophan continues to be activated by ultraviolet photons. These are hypothesized to be transmitted to the brain primarily via light falling on the retina or skin, carried to the brain through mitochondria and microtubules acting as optical waveguides. Additionally, bioluminescent ultra-weak photon emissions accompany membrane depolarization at the moment of death. It is hypothesized that the relativistic transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics could explain the entanglement of this photonic microtubular input, as potentialities, with environmental photons in order to account for rare, veridical near-death extraocular perceptions. Veridical Auditory near-death and out-of-body experiences require a coordinated stimulation of Heschl’s gyrus by ambient sound, which might be accomplished by adiabatic mechanical propulsion of axonal solitons along the Auditory nerve, or possibly transcranial perception of low frequency sound waves.Ultimately, the approach of death can be accompanied by a pseudo-solipsism of "added time" that could seem like an eternity for the deceased person even as microtubular stimulation decreases.

Aim: Emergentism as an ontology of consciousness leaves unanswered the question as to its
mechanism. I aim to solve the body–mind problem by explaining how conscious organisms
emerged on an evolutionary basis at various times in accordance with an accepted scientific
principle through a mechanism that cannot be understood, in principle. Proposal: The reason for
this cloak of secrecy is found in a seeming contradiction in the behavior of information with respect
to the first two laws of thermodynamics. Information, the microstate of particles within an isolated
system’s macrostate, can, like first‑law energy, be neither created nor destroyed, yet the information
in the system, like second‑law entropy, will inevitably increase. To explain information increasing
without being created, Laplace’s demon is invoked, able to predict where each particle is destined.
This doesn’t work for emerging events like consciousness, which are unpredictable. This can be
understood in terms of the derivation of entropy, and the emergence of classical physics, from the
Relativistic Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. I propose that the increased entropy
in a time‑irreversible, unpredictable (emergent) isolated system requires the simultaneous deletion
of information concerning the steps, or calculations, involved. Conclusion: Thus, the steps leading
to consciousness are immediately destroyed and must remain a mystery. Implications include that
entropy, not panpsychism, is the universal principle generative of consciousness, that our being
conscious proves that we are not predetermined, and that consciousness requires assuming an
“entropy debt” that can only be repaid by living organisms, prohibiting the emergence of conscious
machines.