Do "Selves" Live On After Dying?

In Heaven in a Handbasket, we spoke about the unquestioned assumptions that go into the various philosophies we hold of life. We mentioned an academic paper that took as its subject the arguments of the famous philosopher David Hume and spoke about how such assumptions might well themselves be questioned. If, for example, religious faith is a fallacy and is simply untrue, why then do people with such convictions seem healthier and happier on the whole? Why does religious expression exist the world over, and, according to anthropology, characterize even the earliest civilizations? The most common explanation that is offered as to why religious belief or faith in general is false is because this was an evolutionary adaptation affecting the oldest regions of the mind, and, while difficult if not impossible to shake, nevertheless corresponds only to some kind of natural selection; some apparent utilitarian tendency in nature. If this is true, in some ways we might commend the David Humes of the world for looking beyond such adaptations in spite of the pragmatic purpose they serve. It might be truly comforting to believe that I have a fairy godmother, for example, who can sweep in through my windowsill and command nature with a wave of her wand, but if it really is not true, then at the least I am expressing raw courage in confronting and challenging this notion. Most of us probably do not believe in magical fairy godmothers, if for no other reason because we have no experience with such beings. Yet when it comes to religious faith in general, the majority of the world’s population holds some belief or another regarding the spiritual realm, life after death, and a Higher Power or higher powers.

In a course I am taking this semester entitled “Philosophy of Religion,” we have been reading some fascinating texts on the validity of life after death. Not surprisingly, to approach such issues philosophically raises as many questions as it purports to answer, though there do seem to be common features to such dialogues. The Western worldview has long been dominated by materialism and we are forced to admit that there is at least some degree of wisdom in that assertion. Few persons we consider sane deny that we have material bodies and there is not one of us who has not on occasion stubbed a toe or bruised a shin. We have all seen cadavers or medical patients either in real life or on television in which the skin was pulled back to reveal muscles and tendons, or where the rib cage was held open to disclose a palpitating heart or one recently cessated. We read in our textbooks about the dendrite-axon connections within the human mind and have made great discoveries in medicine and other fields with our theories of DNA and the understanding of the biochemical functioning of our cells. Technology in general has increased due to the time and attention we have given the material world and there is something solid and concrete about these aspects of existence. The hardest argument to refute of all is the simple truth that by and large “materialism works.”

With our materialistic backdrop in place, the idea of life after death is brought into even more complicated relief when discussed in philosophical terms. One of the immediate questions that arises is what happens at death, assuming that some kind of afterlife is true. Will we be reincarnated? become disembodied spirits of some sort? do we, as the Christian conception has long maintained, become enfleshed in some kind of spiritual body? Depending on how we answer these questions, our assertions about life after death can be more or less accommodated to materialism; the Christian answer in particular posits the existence of a new body, that much at least not obviously at odds with materialistic mind-body conceptions. One central question that we must answer before we continue, however, is what constitutes sameness or continuity? If I say, “I am a totally different person than I was just eight years ago,” (which is true, by the way) do I really mean that I am not the same person who emerged from my mother’s womb, who was raised in the countryside, who always had to go to church three times a week with very few exceptions, and who tended to be a loner in school? No, for did you notice the very subtle word “I”? I am claiming that “I” am not the same person—“I” implies an essence of continuity over change—built within my phrasing is the notion of some kind of continuity that stretches back to at least the day this “I” was born until this exact moment when this very same “I” (however different in other ways) types these words.

Philosophers, at least since John Locke, have puzzled over what it is that gives me this sense of continuity. For him, it was memory that supplies us this sense of continuity. Yet it has been pointed out that this criterion is mostly inadequate, for not only are there things we cannot remember (in which case, by this definition, we could not clearly be said to be ourselves), we can also have false memories. But if we have false memories that we believe to be true, are we thus no longer the same persons because of it? Are we not rather the same persons who simply happen to possess false memories? There must be at least some additional criterion by which we would attempt to explain how we come to have this sense of continuity that supplies us our identity.

We should pause for a moment and consider what we have been saying. Materialism focuses on the tangible aspects of our world that can be observed empirically, including the fact of our own bodies. Yet its claims begin to thin out when it attempts to tackle questions such as what constitutes consciousness or identity. The best answer it can provide without casting about for options outside of itself is that we are animated chunks of matter, biochemical/electrical signals keeping what are essentially organic robots functioning smoothly and efficiently. On its surface, this seems plausible enough; recall again seeing the cadaver or the patient anesthetized on the operating room table. Yet consider this implication as well: if this is true, why do people like yours truly write articles like this one? Why all the wonder and speculation if nothing more than a biochemical robot is typing these very words? The paper we mentioned in the last issue suggested that for Hume, at least, the miracle was that we believed in miracles. We might better suggest that it would be nothing short of miraculous that by no outside agency whatsoever we came to be the beings we are today, and for what purpose? I cannot conceive of any fathomable reason an unguided process set in motion by no one and consisting only of matter would select for and favor self-perpetuation to an eventual culmination in biochemical robots asking astonishing questions that amount to no more than delusions; questions that amount to no more than the sum total of their biochemical machinery: the sum of their neural correlates, to use the word Francis Crick coins in The Astonishing Hypothesis (the astonishing hypothesis being that there is no soul, merely biochemical pathways hardwired into organic shells and thus constrained to fire in absolutely predictable ways—if only we knew all the variables—at predefined intervals). That seems a greater miracle to me than there being some so-called miracle that I believe in the miraculous.

Incidentally, our thoughts are not an argument against evolution; rather, they are an argument that suggests that if we are prepared to accept such notions without any kind of amendment whatsoever, we are indeed speaking of the miraculous, as I believe many in the scientific community in fact realize and why they extol nature to such degree in high praise and amazement. She is indeed amazing if she, metaphorically speaking of course, started out with the chaotic electromagnetic radiation of J.T. Fraser’s atemporality in Time, Conflict, and Human Values, and, having no mind of her own and directed by no force outside of herself, eventually settled on biochemical robots at the noo- and sociotemporal realms who write essays about life after death for the apparent entertainment of other biochemical robots to read. So then, my fine robotic friends, here’s to ya. :) I say, rather, that it would be a miracle if we did not believe in the miraculous on some level, at least if we have given any serious thought and reflection to our own existences at all.

It seems that we are always drawn up short right on our very own doorsteps. How is that we exist at all and have consciousness as we do, however illusionary it may in fact be? Yet we do exist and we recognize that we do have continuity of some sort: some apparent self that while always changing, nonetheless retains a central identity. I am not the man I was just a month ago, yet I am still Eric and everyone recognizes me as such. What makes Eric Eric if he is in fact always changing? What if he became horribly disfigured or maimed? would he still be Eric? The difficulty for philosophers as they speculate about life after death is to determine what, if anything knowable, would be both a necessary and sufficient requirement for the being who passes through to the other side of death to still be called Eric: to still in fact be Eric in some very real sense that, while different, nonetheless experiences an unbroken or at least “re-activated” continuity. We mentioned cadavers twice now; we know that when Eric dies, that is exactly what he is going to be leaving behind, at least assuming that he can be said to be leaving at all; otherwise, this cadaver (and whatever stray electochemical energies dissipating from it) is in fact all that would remain of him in this world or any other. In fact, some of us who have known Eric well may wonder why he has not already left us his cadaver, for his life philosophy once appeared to be, “Die young and leave a (comparatively, in his case) beautiful corpse,” but that is the story of another newsletter.

So if, from our perspective at least, Eric has now left a cadaver behind, how can he be said (if he can be at all) to be living again as the same person (albeit perhaps altered in some appreciable way)? What is the criteria we would need to establish the likelihood of this continuity? For our friend Hume, there could be nothing. He in fact denied a self, namely on the grounds that we can never seem to find such an entity; when we go in search of it, all we seem to find is an attic full of skeletons and other assorted novelties. As Jeffery Olen writes in his chapter “Personal Identity and Life After Death” in Persons and Their World, we could only validly say that experiences exist, but would be forced to retreat when it came to saying anything definite about an experiencer. If there is no self (in whatever sense of the term), how can anything unify these experiences in any way? How can they validly be said to be even a collection of experiences? While we should be fair to Hume and allow him room for a public and a private thought life, a side that lives in common sense versus a side that wishes to legitimize knowledge according to some higher standard, we still might do well to pause and reflect before we conform our thoughts unquestioningly to his musings, whether regarding the miraculous or anything else. Do we suppose that Hume really lived his life any differently than the rest of us?

Perhaps I should not be so hard on Hume; it is unfair of me, and yet it is so tempting to respond in turn when someone appears to be pouring acid criticism over something that none of us can speak of with any infallibility. We simply do not know—none of us do, no matter what we profess to believe or how strong our faith or even what certain supernatural experiences have appeared to reveal to us (for we ourselves are not yet dead)—and in the face of zero personal evidence—again, not one of us has died yet—it is just as “foolish” to doubt as it is to believe: we are all more or less on equal footing here. Yet doubt we do or believe we do and sometimes both; therefore, can we really call another foolish? Yet precisely because some do claim to have had supernatural visitations, I would suggest that there is at least some evidence to support the notion of belief and only an argument from silence to support the notion of doubt. You scoff because I claim to have been visited by my grandmother in a vision after she died; I have had an experience and you have not: of the two of us, who appears to have the greater evidence? You seek to discredit my experience simply because you have none of your own; if you were the one who had the experience, you would have to confront it much more directly, even if you ultimately discounted it. But I am still not being fair and what is more, I am not trying to be. I am trying to force us to think, to realize as philosophy continually forces me to realize that there is very little we can claim to know and that most of our edifices are constructed of a potpourri of personal factors, probably none of which would stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny if we were to admit only such as our exclusive form of validation. Life is a mystery and probably never will be fully explained to the degree that our deepest questions are wholly satisfied. It goes back to being human, to being alive, to the mystery of life and personhood.

We spoke of edifices constructed of potpourri; on several occasions, we have also mentioned Dr. Baumlin, the English professor who has hired me to scan manuscripts for publication and convert published essays and excerpts of books into electronic format for his students to easily download using Blackboard. Some time ago, he put me to work scanning two manuscripts written by his late colleague Dr. Jim W. Corder, best known (aside from his textbooks) for his introspective personal narratives. One manuscript is entitled The Scrapbook and is slated for publication as soon as it passes through the proper channels, perhaps another year in the offing. My part in the process (aside from the scanning) consisted in writing the afterward and lightly editing the converted text, correcting obvious omissions and errors and slightly rewording here and there for clarity, such as in a chapter where Corder began talking about “she” and only later got around to mentioning that he was referring to his wife. In any case, the manuscript is deeply reflective and rather melancholy in many places, the testament of an older man knowing death awaits in the eves and wondering if his life has had any real meaning. One essay in particular—for it was in many ways more a stand-alone memoir than a dependent chapter—was entitled “Fragments of a Personal Canon.”

Corder attempts to reconstruct his own personal canon—this edifice of potpourri—trying to retrace the steps that shaped and molded him into the man he now finds peering back from the other side of the mirror. Even at the earliest stages of our lives, he suggests, “something has always already been filling our experience before we have stopped to notice and to name it.” That something varies for everyone, but it begins to form the basis from which he or she looks out into the world. This something Corder calls the “personal canon”: “long before any one of us knows that there are canons, literary or otherwise, each of us already has a sacred personal canon.” Yet when we look back over our lives, we cannot always tell where we stop and it starts or vice-versa. It has effectively become us, a canon we peer out from even as we peer into other’s canons. “We miss it because we can’t see it,” he continues, “at least not always and at least not in its entirety. Because we usually can’t see it, and can never see it in its entirety, we don’t know that it is sacred or that it is personal, though not exclusively so, and we don’t know that it has the shape, character, and power of a canon.” He goes on to add these words: “I cannot identify my own sacred personal canon, let alone describe another’s. For each of us, it is a set of texts of extraordinary diversity. Kilroy graffiti form a text, and chapters in a movie serial, and Burma Shave signs along the highway.” His point is that we are shaped by many wide-ranging things, a large portion of which are not even true, much less that admit to any kind of rational thought. These come from a diversity of sources, many of which are hopelessly lost or only partially remembered.

Yet Corder believes he should work with what he has, and proceeds to recreate his own personal canon as best he can. It consists of unrealistic expectations of the macho male who must always be strong, an indefatigable lover, and never cry, gleaned in part from the apparently wholesome black-and-white classics we mentioned in the previous issue. It consists of comic books with newspaper-dot heroines with flaming red hair exposing just enough paper-and-ink thigh on their covers to interest a prepubescent boy in the mysteries of femininity; it also consists of fiery Southern Baptist sermons and countless Protestant hymns. Corder’s early church days apparently did not teach him so much of Christ but rather revealed his inherent sinfulness and the certain damnation of unworthy souls of which (or so his personal canon seemed to suggest) he was most probably one. One does not get the impression in reading his words that he ever did meet the Risen Lord in any real or personal way.

Such awareness by recent scholarship of the personal canon that characterizes all of our lives accounts for a degree of the scorn and criticism that is sometimes heaped upon philosophy, and it has been said by more than one person that a philosopher is simply a person who has learned to persuasively give the appearance of validity to his opinions and prejudices, many of which are no more solidly anchored than newspaper silhouettes on the front pages of inexpensive comic books. That kind of criticism is sometimes warranted, of course, but philosophers, like all other kinds of people, come in all shapes and sizes. A good many of them genuinely do seek to uncover truth, in particular a refined truth that can be held in confidence of being consistent and correct. For that matter, a good many people who are not philosophers find the notion of some kind of ultimate truth very attractive. What is more, we intuitively realize that there must be some kind of ultimate truth, even if it is disappointing and highly relative. That to say, if the ultimate truth is that all things are relative, it cannot also be the case that the ultimate truth is that all things are not relative.

We have taken a huge detour and for that I must apologize. Hume is no different than the rest of us; his personal canon most likely consisted in part of the Kilroy graffiti and Burma Shave billboards of his own day along with the rigor of the medieval scholasticism that was still in common currency at the time. He may have been inclined to believe that the miracle is that we believe in miracles, but if so, it was only because he too was searching for a truth that was ultimate and his personal canon did not admit of any miraculous possibilities. What is more, a miracle is not the same thing as an impossibility; however improbable, a miracle still leaves the door open for such a thing to occur, whereas if he were to have implied that it was plainly false (and not merely miraculous) to believe in miracles, he would have closed the door entirely. So, according to Hume, unless there was something he overlooked, we have no self that can be discovered. If we cannot even get that far, how then can we say anything about any possible continuity after death? Or, if we agree that John Locke’s notion of memory is an inadequate description of what is involved in the continuity of the self, then what other necessary and ultimately sufficient criteria could we identify as constituting it? These and other questions have prompted more contemporary philosophers to speculate beyond Hume and Locke to suggest that it must somehow be tied to sameness of mind. As we can see, we may speak of a self, but it is very difficult to establish the criteria for what such an entity might look like.

There are two different places where philosophers have traditionally searched for the continuity of personal identity. One of these is nicknamed the bodily criterion: I am housed in the same body I was from the day I was born, even though it has gone through changes. Olen uses the example of his typewriter: we would admit that the typewriter is still the same machine even when the ribbon is changed, the keys are replaced, or other routine maintenance is performed. In the same way, allowing for the natural death and replenishment of his cells, the changes in his height, weight, and the differences effected from the aging cycle of infant to (eventual) elder, the shell in which this tortoise known as Eric carries himself around remains a constant. Is he the same as his shell and his shell the same as him? Let us take Locke’s memory once again. This is the second criterion to which philosophers typically appeal in their search for personal identity; we will follow Olen in calling it the memory criterion. How would we validate that a memory was in fact true; how would we differentiate between, to again use the labels supplied by Olen, an apparent memory versus one that was genuine? Assuming some method of confirming the genuineness of a memory beyond a reasonable doubt, say, with a video recording of a prior event or some other means of reliable documentation that we could match up between the memory claimed and the events captured, what would constitute validity? Maybe we are making this question too difficult, for we have already given away the answer in the way our question is phrased. The point, in other words, seems to be that we would be verifying memory based on how closely a person’s actions aligned with what that person purports to remember. That is, we would be relying on the physical exteriority of the person, for it is only by bodies that we can be perceived by others. Olen concludes that the bodily criterion unwittingly triumphs even here. If this recognition is the case, however, what does this do to our speculations about disembodied spirits? How could they perceive; how could they act; how could they communicate? Would they have some kind of boundary: that is, some point in which their personal identity started and some point at which it stopped against some kind of exterior world?

Olen notes that the Christian conception may get around the notion of bodily criterion such as would be demanded by skeptics like Crick with his so-called astonishing hypothesis. In this view, one would have faith that God—an outside agency—replaced or replenished the essence of a person into a new container. But aside from all the difficulties associated with establishing that of which the criteria for continuity would consist—assuming that we had been able to persuasively answer this question and identify some factor—how then does this factor carry over into a new body? For the sake of clarity, we will call this necessary and sufficient criterion “ASDF.” Now then, we ask again, how does ASDF carry over into a new body? In other words, ASDF was what constituted the continuity of the man we know as Eric in the here and now. Assuming Christianity to be true, upon his death and resurrection, ASDF has now apparently been uprooted and put by God into an entirely new shell of some sort. Could this new shell containing ASDF be said to be the same person who had the personal identity of Eric before he died? Would Eric still be Eric in any appreciable sense if his ASDF was transplanted into some kind of spiritual interface that constrained it and gave it boundaries delimiting where it started and where it stopped over and against an exterior world? We usually call ASDF Eric’s soul and we assume that built into this will be Locke’s memory, consciousness, and other properties of awareness—Eric’s mind, in a word, that makes Eric Eric. Philosophers argue that when we say soul, we really know as much about what this thing is as when we say ASDF. We assume it, but we cannot prove it, just as Hume could not point to any obvious self.

You may have been under the impression that I set out in this newsletter to give you answers. I did not. But I did have a point. In a letter to Evodius written in 415 A.D., St. Augustine relates a dream sequence that a physician they both knew named Gennadius experienced. Gennadius was an upright and God-fearing man and known for his great compassion. Yet when he was a young man, he found the question of life after death troubling. One evening as he retired for the night, “a youth of remarkable appearance and commanding presence” appeared to him and showed him a celestial city and he heard the sweetest music he had ever heard in his life. He awoke that morning and assumed he had only been dreaming. However, the shining youth appeared to him again the next night as well and posed a few questions. The youth first asked Gennadius whether the good physician knew him or not. Gennadius did recall quite well his guide from the night before and said as much. The youth then asked Gennadius if the experience happened when he was awake or asleep. Gennadius correctly answered that he was asleep when the visitor had shown him the spectacular sights. The youth continued his questioning: “Where is your body now?” “In bed sleeping,” came the reply. To this, the youth inquired whether Gennadius knew that his earthly eyes were tightly shut and seeing nothing. Gennadius was aware of this fact but he had no answer at all when the youth asked, “How is it then that you see me now?”

The youth, it seems, had a lesson in all of these questions that he wanted Gennadius to grasp and not lose sight of. “In the same way that you now see me,” replied the youth, “so too will you see after you die. There will be a life in you that still lives and a perception in you that still perceives.” The youth finished by advising Gennadius to be cautious in doubting whether or not men live after they die and according to the quill of Augustine, the question was settled for Gennadius once and for all. St. Augustine continues his letter to Evodious by frankly noting that he may have raised more questions than he has laid to rest. However, his point is the same point I wish to make here.

Archive note: See also the thread Selves living on?? and the post Selves Living On regarding this newsletter.

We have demonstrated that we still cannot understand or identify exactly what it is that causes the continuity of personal identity even in the life we now live, though no sane man disputes that personal identity nevertheless exists. In fact, we use our own experience to critique such theories of continuity; fully aware that we do, in fact, have a sense of self that has continued to this very moment, we do not long entertain theories that purport otherwise. We seem to believe that our experience should inform our theories rather than our theories informing our experience. In fact, this goes back to what we were saying of Pepper’s claim in which common sense is seen as the ore from which all refined knowledge is mined. To some degree, our theories can take on lives of their own and interpret the everyday world, particularly when do not realize that our personal canons consist at least partially of the theoretical impartations of others taught us as though certain truth. My generation may discuss matters theoretically; my son’s generation may inherit our discussions as gospel truth. But there reaches a certain point in which the everyday world always gives evidence and validity to theory and the two, as we have said before, must tango, one seeking validation in the other and the other seeking substance in the one. So then, let us say with St. Augustine to skeptics like Hume and others: “Every day man wakes, and sleeps, and thinks; let any man, therefore, answer whence proceed these things which, while not material bodies, do nevertheless resemble the forms, properties, and motions of material bodies: let him, I say, answer this if he can. But if he cannot do this, why is he in such haste to pronounce a definite opinion on things which occur very rarely, or are beyond the range of his experience, when he is unable to explain matters of daily and perpetual observation?” Over fifteen hundred years later, his words have lost none of their poignancy. (Incidentally, you can read his letter to Evodius in which the description of the youth above is recounted at St. Augustine: Between Two Worlds: see specifically numbers 3, 4, and 5 at the very bottom of the page.) In sum, it may not be as big of a miracle that we believe in miracles as we were first inclined to think. Put another way, it may be a far bigger miracle than we had even first supposed that we believe in miracles. In either instance we are of course expressing the same idea.

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Do “Selves” Live On After Dying?