Afterlife—the Short Course
The traditional paradigm of an Aristotelian syllogism begins with the major premise “All men are mortal”. Since we nowadays try to purge our academic prose of superfluous gender indicators, we would doubtless write “All people are mortal”, but the fundamental thought is the same: Sooner or later, everyone dies. That’s also a first-class example of a rock-solid and indisputable fact. Medical technology has made great progress in postponing the inevitable, but it’s still inevitable. Sooner or later, everyone dies. Many people find this fact disturbing. It makes them unhappy. They wish that it weren’t so. This leads them to tell stories in which people, as it were, don’t really die. More precisely—since it is, after all, a rock-solid and indisputable fact that everyone does die—it leads them to tell stories about what happens to people who die after they die. In what follows, I shall call these “afterlife stories”.
One can ask various questions about such an afterlife story. The first question that occurs to most people is whether there is any good reason to believe it, any evidence that speaks in favor of it. That question, however, presupposes that it is the sort of story for which one might reasonably seek and hope to find supporting evidence. So there is another question that one can ask about an afterlife story, namely, whether it is that sort of story, the sort of story that one could in principle reasonably believe on the basis of supporting evidence. That sort of story is often called empirical. The question of whether a particular afterlife story is empirical to begin with is prior to the question of whether there is any good reason to believe it. Seeking evidential reasons to believe a story that is in a different line of work entirely is a fool’s pastime.
Another presupposition is also tacitly in play here. For just as we can ask whether it is possible to have good reasons to believe that a particular story is true, we can also ask whether the story could possibly be true in the first place. We can ask, that is, whether the story makes coherent sense. If it does not, then the issue of reasons does not arise.
One way that a story can fail to make coherent sense is by being a bit of pure nonsense. Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky is a familiar example.
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in
the wabe: /
All mimsy were the borogoves, / And the mome raths outgrabe.
Such nonsense poetry is not even ostensibly in the
being-true-or-false line of work. That’s
not to say that one can’t get it wrong.
It’s the toves that were slithy, and the borogoves that were mimsy, and
not the other way around. But that’s
just a matter of accurate transcription, of how the poem goes. The question of accuracy of transcription can
be raised about any text—reportage, history, theory, fiction, myth, or what
have you. Santa Claus’s sleigh is pulled
by eight flying reindeer—nine, if you count Rudolph—no fewer and no more. That’s how the story goes. But (no,
A more subtle and interesting way in which a story can fail to make coherent sense is by containing or implying a contradiction. Daniel Defoe wrote that Robinson Crusoe swam naked out to the wreck of his ship and, a few pages later, that he swam back with his pockets full of biscuits. Whether Defoe’s intention was to recount an historical episode or just tell a story makes no difference. What he wrote couldn’t be true. Defoe’s story, so to speak, wears its inconsistency on its face. Other stories are not so accommodating. Sometimes it requires considerable careful work to discover that, in the last analysis, a particular story doesn’t make coherent sense. Afterlife stories, I shall argue, are like that. In the last analysis, they make no coherent sense.
On the face of it, people appear to be living organisms of the species homo sapiens or, more briefly, living human organisms. Now all living organisms are competent creatures. Even the simplest of them take in nutrients, grow, and reproduce. More complicated ones perceive their environment and move about within it. Some have fixed behavioral repertoires; others learn from experience, adaptively modifying their responsive propensities. What we now know about the bio-chemical composition and functional organization of such organisms enables us to explain those competences. We understand the self-replicating capacities of DNA molecules which lie at the basis of growth and reproduction. We understand the energy-transformation processes of photosynthesis in plants and metabolism in animals. We understand the role of sense organs and nerve pathways in the reception and processing of external stimuli. We understand the physical structure of muscles and the electro-chemical transactions in virtue of which they expand and contract. And we understand the role of the central nervous system in the actualization of behavioral propensities and the regulation of behavior.
Living human organisms are especially competent creatures. Of course they also take in nutrients, grow, and reproduce, perceive their environment and move about within it, and, although the behavior of each of them is to some extent habitual, they also learn from experience and modify their responsive propensities appropriately. But, to an extent unmatched elsewhere in nature, human organisms are also social and communicative creatures. Human languages are more sophisticated than even the most complex animal signaling systems. They make possible representations of what is not present to the senses, so that a potential course of action can be evaluated hypothetically, by reasoning about causes and effects, without putting the organism itself at risk. They make possible representations of other representations, so that their truth or falsehood, their logical relationships, and their epistemic status can themselves become explicit topics of discourse and inquiry. And, crucially, they make possible the creation and transmission of a shared culture, embodying the accumulated theoretical knowledge and practical wisdom of other humans remote in space or time. In short, human languages make it possible for human organisms to be people, and so, conversely, they make it possible for people to be what, on the face of it, they appear to be, namely, human beings.
The explanation of these special competences of human organisms, however, is no different in principle from the explanation of more general competences that they share with other organisms. Although the details are still being worked out, it is clear that the biological structure and electro-chemical functioning of the 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections of the human brain lie at the basis of the ability of a human organism to store and process information about the world and to steer a behavioral path through its complex physical and social environment. Just as damage to the sense organs can impair or even cancel perceptual capacities—resulting, for instance, in blindness or deafness—and damage to nerve pathways can impair or even cancel motor capacities—resulting in palsy, paresis, or paralysis—damage to the brain can impair or even cancel, not only such perceptual and motor capacities, but cognitive and linguistic competences as well—resulting in various forms of amnesia, agnosia, and aphasia.
Considered as an event in nature, the death of a human being is exactly the same as the death of a dog or fish or earthworm or carrot or any other living organism. Living organisms are complex homeostatic systems. That is, their intricate bio-chemical organization is self-stabilizing and self-sustaining over a wide range of environmental interactions. The death of an organism consists in its permanent and irreversible loss of the capacity to preserve and sustain that intricate bio-chemical organization. What remains when a living organism dies is no longer a living organism. What remains are its remains. It follows that, if people are human organisms, then what remains when a person dies is no longer a person and so, trivially, no longer that person, the one who dies.
If people are living human organisms, then what happens to people after they die is: nothing at all. People who have died then no longer exist, so nothing that subsequently happens can happen to them. Their remains—their corpses or cadavers—may exist after they die, at least for a while, but the remains of a human being aren’t a person. What happens to such a corpse or cadaver depends on the particulars of the case. Some of them are cremated. Some of them decay and are ultimately dispersed into their constituent chemical compounds and elements. But some of them can retain a good bit of their original macroscopic structure—for a fairly long time if they are embalmed, for a very long time if they are mummified, and for an even longer time if they happen to become fossilized. Some people care about what will happen to their remains, but it is hard to understand why, since, if people are human organisms, when those remains exist, they themselves no longer do, and if there were an afterlife, then what subsequently happened to people would be entirely independent of what happened to their remains.
Afterlife stories all presuppose that, when a person dies, that person, the one who dies, continues to exist. So afterlife stories all presuppose that people actually are not what, on the face of it, they appear to be, namely, living human organisms. Afterlife stories, that is, can’t even begin to make coherent sense unless people aren’t living human organisms. But if people aren’t human organisms, then what are they?
There are a limited number of traditional candidates. In some afterlife stories, people are called spirits; in others, they are said to be souls; in more modern-sounding ones, they are sometimes called minds. But so far this is only a matter of accurate transcription. So far, that is, we have no idea what a spirit or a soul or a mind is actually supposed to be. To answer that question, we need to look inside the stories. Since most of the stories share the features that are relevant to my present project, to simplify matters I’ll just talk about souls.
It is important for afterlife stories that a soul be, not just something that a person has, but rather the person himself. It is, of course, quite common to speak of people as having souls, but that idiom is essentially a rhetorical device for signaling that our concept of a person is the concept of a subject of thoughts, feelings, and actions which are legitimately susceptible of rational and moral evaluation. A person can sensibly be said to have all sorts of things—an opulent apartment, a fast car, and a chaotic marriage, for example, but also a well-developed physique, an engaging smile, a talent for mathematics, and a problem with alcohol. Apartments and cars are, of course, things in their own right which exist independently of the people who have them. But to say that a person has, for instance, a generous or a sensitive soul no more implies that, in addition to people, there are also the souls that they have, than the fact that a person can have, for instance, a charming manner and a fondness for jazz implies that, in addition to people, there are also manners and fondnesses. Such “soul” talk is ultimately no more than a poetic way of saying that the person himself is characteristically generous or sensitive.
The souls which occur in most traditional afterlife stories, however, are precisely supposed to be things in their own right. As they are normally described, their most significant feature is that they are immaterial. Whereas organisms are made of something—ultimately of atoms of various elements, hierarchically organized into complex molecules, cells, tissues, organs, and organ-systems—in traditional afterlife stories, souls aren’t made of anything. Nothing about souls corresponds to the intricate bio-chemical structure of a living organism. So, at least on the face of it, it doesn’t make sense to ask what the shape of a soul is, or what size it is, or how much it weighs.
Some afterlife stories transform the claim that souls are immaterial into the claim that they are made of energy. That has a nice pseudo-scientific ring to it, but it actually manifests only a serious misunderstanding. Energy is not a kind of stuff that could be worked up into a soul or anything else. It is rather a property of physical systems, specifically, a measure of the capacity of a physical system to do mechanical work. Different kinds and states of physical systems are characterized by different forms of energy—potential, kinetic, chemical, thermal, nuclear, electrical, radiant—which can be more or less readily transformed into one another. Energy is measured in joules, ergs, calories, electron-volts, BTUs, or kilowatt-hours, but, at least on the face of it, it makes no sense to ask, in any of these terms, what form of energy and how much of it a soul is or has.
We can summarize our observations up to this point as follows: In afterlife stories, souls are immaterial people. To say that souls are immaterial, as we have seen, ultimately amounts to saying that they have no structure, for having a structure requires having differently-constituted parts. This stipulated immateriality of souls renders them, so to speak, “otherworldly”. It disqualifies them from entering into the sorts of causal interactions with observers and instruments that would make them suitable objects of scientific inquiry. To say that souls are people, on the other hand, amounts to saying that they are subjects of thoughts, feelings, and actions which can sensibly be both rationally and morally evaluated. They are described as being aware of their surroundings, as experiencing pain and pleasure, and, in at least some afterlife stories, as communicating with other souls and perhaps engaging in other activities as well, although it is not terribly clear just what else there might be for an immaterial soul to do.
By now, I hope, the problem of making coherent sense of afterlife stories has come clearly into view: On the face of it, the idea of an immaterial person is as incoherent as the idea of a naked swimmer with pockets full of biscuits. Animals are aware of their surroundings by virtue of the causal impacts of their environment on their sense organs. Light stimulates photosensitive cells in the eye; compression waves vibrate a membrane in the ear; inhaled or ingested chemicals interact with appropriate receptors in the nose or on the tongue. However an immaterial soul is supposed to be aware of its surroundings, it plainly can’t be in any of those ways. The idea that souls experience pain or pleasure gives rise to similar problems, for such experiences characteristically presuppose some suitable interaction with the environment and a correlative sensory awareness. One feels pain, for example, when one is burned or cut or punched; when one stubs a toe or breaks an arm or sprains an ankle. Pain is localized within the sensible body. One has a headache or a toothache or a backache. Pleasure similarly depends on such interactions. One enjoys something—reading a book or watching a film, listening to a concert or participating in a conversation, dining or dancing or having sex. But, again, however the pains or pleasures of an immaterial soul are supposed to arise, it plainly can’t be in any of those ways.
But even if we could somehow make sense of the idea that an immaterial person could, figuratively speaking, “see” or “hear” or “feel” the things that a living organism might literally see or hear or feel, the further idea that immaterial people might communicate or otherwise interact with each other gives rise to additional puzzles. For, to begin with, it is utterly unclear how one immaterial soul could even come to know that another one was there—wherever there might be—and, as it were, available for such purposes. And, while organisms communicate by producing signals—sounds or gestures or inscriptions—that other organisms can register and interpret, it is hardly surprising that afterlife stories have nothing to say about how immaterial people might go about exchanging information, not to mention about whether, to put it metaphorically, they all “speak the same language”. Ordinary living people certainly don’t.
In the last analysis, then, afterlife stories don’t make coherent sense. The putative immateriality of souls renders their stipulated personhood unintelligible. Indeed, since, when subjected to even a modest amount of critical reflection, afterlife stories obviously don’t make coherent sense, the evident failure of so many people to notice this itself needs an explanation.
A plausible explanation is not far to seek. Wishful thinking surely plays a large role. People want to believe afterlife stories. They’d like for them to be true. But it’s impossible to believe that a story is true once one has noticed that it doesn’t make coherent sense. Best then not to think about it too carefully. Critical reflection tends to be an effective detector of nonsense. And it helps that such afterlife stories are usually familiar and always fragmentary. Their familiarity facilitates accurate transcription, while their fragmentariness inhibits critical reflection. People know how the stories go, and they go just far enough to be consolatory without adding the sorts of details that might provoke a more thoughtful response.
But afterlife stories evidently are consolatory. Many people who profess to believe them also claim that they are consequently not bothered by the fact that, sooner or later, everyone dies. They purport to be, if not exactly comfortable with, then at least reconciled to their own mortality, i.e., to the fact that, sooner or later, they themselves will die. These attitudes are of dubious rationality. If a person understands that his history will come to an end with his death, that subsequently he will no longer exist, then there is no reason for him not to face the fact of his own mortality with equanimity. But it will be reasonable for a person to feel reassured by the thought that things will continue to happen to him after he dies only if he has some reason to believe that what will subsequently happen to him will be generally agreeable. And, even if we discount the fact that afterlife stories actually don’t make coherent sense, it is hard to imagine what could possibly constitute such a reason. Wishful thinking again seems a more plausible diagnosis, and perhaps a measure of self-deception as well.
Well, perhaps that diagnosis is correct, it will be said, but so what? Children who believe that eight or nine flying reindeer pull Santa’s sleigh around the world on Christmas Eve so that he can deliver presents to people by slipping down their chimneys are surely no worse off because of it. What does it matter that many people mistakenly think that afterlife stories make coherent sense, profess to believe them, and, indeed, find them comforting or reassuring? As long as it makes them happy. It’s a harmless enough delusion, isn’t it?
Unfortunately, it isn’t. Some of the people who profess to believe particular afterlife stories also think that those stories can make it reasonable to strap on a vest loaded with dynamite, climb onto a bus full of people, and blow themselves up. Afterlife stories, in short, can make some people insane. We should consequently, I submit, be very mistrustful of people who insist on telling such stories, especially to impressionable children.
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