For many people, the worst consequence of dying is the loss of life. They would prefer eternal life. Some people address this matter with religious faith, believing that God has endowed them with an immortal soul, or that in the end of days He will resurrect them in new, imperishable bodies. Either way, earthly death needn’t be the end of their existence.
But what about people who lack religious faith? Do common sense and science support belief in life after death? Most approaches concern relationships between our minds and our bodies. One of these identifies individuals with their minds, as distinct from their bodies. Many people in poor health think that their bodies are betraying them. But who is the “them” being betrayed? It’s their mind, where they have feelings, consciousness, awareness, and perceptions, that is being harmed by their increasingly frail bodies.
This view is known as dualism. Each person has two different aspects, mind and body, with the mind constituting the real person. Unlike the body, on this view, the mind is a spiritual, unitary substance that does all the feeling, thinking, and perceiving and gives each person her identity. When we die, the body loses the material organization necessary for life, but the mind continues to exist because, being spiritual and unitary, it can’t be destroyed. What’s unitary can’t break apart (it has no parts), and what’s immaterial is immune to material causes of destruction. So, people automatically have eternal life, according to this dualism.
The main problem with dualism is that it seems to make it impossible for the mind to interact with the body and other material substances. If the immaterial mind is impervious to material intrusions, how is perception possible? How can material photons that hit my retina result in perception, which is mental? In the other direction, how can my decision to raise my arm, a mental phenomenon in the immaterial mind, result in my material arm going up? Dualism seems to make common experiences impossible.
An alternative to dualism is materialism, the belief that both mind and body are material. This makes interactions between them understandable, because we see material things interacting all the time. The most plausible material to identify with the mind is the brain, so many people think that the mind and the brain are identical. Evidence for this view is that changes in the brain commonly lead to changes in thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Injuries to certain parts of the brain can deprive people of vision. Seeking another example, I conducted an experiment and found that drinking a lot of wine altered my thought processes.
Identifying the mind with the brain implies that when the body, including the brain, dies and decays, so does the mind. This is bad news for personal immortality. But perhaps the brain is like a computer and the mind is like a computer program. Just as the program can survive destruction of the computer, the mind can survive destruction of the brain and be immortal.
Unfortunately for this view, computers aren’t like minds. In the first place, we have no convincing evidence that our minds, like computers, work through mathematical algorithms. More important, our minds can refer to matters outside themselves, but computers can’t. When I see a picture, hear a sound, or feel sorry for someone, the mental event is responsive to what exists in the world outside my mind. Computers, by contrast, receive symbols which they exchange for other symbols. An algorithm generates an output from an input. All reference to reality is made by human beings when they arrange for the input and interpret the output. Siri receives a satellite signal which refers to your location because people have established a relationship between that signal and a particular location. An algorithm within the computer translates that input into an output. Siri says, “Turn right in 500 feet.” You relate that message to the real world. Siri doesn’t know where you are, and frankly, she doesn’t really give a damn.
It still doesn’t follow scientifically from all this that the mind isn’t immortal. We know that minds are somehow related to brains. But brains are really just pieces of meat. We have no widely accepted scientific theories about how these pieces of meat could possibly generate minds with thoughts, emotions, dreams, and perceptions relating to the real world. It’s a mystery. Personally, I’ll be completely shocked if I discover from my own experience that my death wasn’t lethal. But if science can’t explain how minds could exist in the first place, how can we be sure that they don’t continue to exist after we die? Equally, leaving religion aside, how can we be sure that they do continue to exist?
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