Self and life after death

Question 1

What is dualism?

Answer 1

Those who accept a dualist approach claim that the soul exists independently of and is superior to the body.

Question 2

How is Plato’s dualist approach depicted?

Answer 2

Plato’s allegory of the cave:
There are two worlds:
-The world in which we live, which is the world of appearances.
-The world of the Forms, which is the real world, eternal, perfect and changeless.

Question 3

What does Plato believe about the soul?

Answer 3

The soul is superior to and separate from the body and belongs to the world of the Forms.
It is therefore eternal and does not die, unlike the body.
It comes to earth and is imprisoned within a body.

Question 4

What does Plato believe happens to the soul after the body dies?

Answer 4

It escapes the body and returns to the world of the Forms, after which it is either born again into another body or remains to contemplate the Form of the Good.

Question 5

What is Plato’s charioteer analogy?

Answer 5

Shows that the soul is divided into three parts:

-The rational part which is immortal, searches for the truth, and keeps the other two aspects of the soul under control.

-The spirited part (thumos) which includes emotions and character traits.

-The appetitive part which dies with the body and is concerned with the basic human drives for sex, food and drink.

Plato’s charioteer analogy sets out the relationship between the parts. The charioteer keeps the parts in check and balance.

Question 6

Evaluation of Plato’s idea of the soul.

Answer 6

-The sense of the soul’s true home being elsewhere is found in the New Testament and is the view of many Christians.
-The idea of the soul as seeking escape from the body is an uncommon view but for many this idea fits with the feeling on looking at a corpse that something has left it.

-BUT there is no good evidence for the metaphysical world of the Forms.

Question 7

What is substance dualism?

Answer 7

The belief that the mind and the body are distinct substances with different essential properties.

Question 8

What is Descartes argument for the existence of the soul?

Answer 8

Descartes produced 3 proofs for the existence of the soul.

He began from a standpoint of absolute scepticism about reality, believing that sense experience could be deceptive and intellect-based ideas could be mistaken.

Question 9

What is Descartes Argument from Doubt?

Answer 9

“I think, therefore I am” - Descartes.
-He could doubt the existence of his body.
-This ability to doubt meant he could not doubt his existence as a thinking being.
-Therefore, as a thinking being, he was not identical with his body.

Question 10

What is Descartes Argument from Divisibility and Non-divisibility?

Answer 10

“As much as the body is by its very nature always divisible, while the mind is utterly indivisible” - Descartes
-All bodies take up space and so are divisible.
-Mental states, however, do not and so are not divisible.
-This means that minds are radically different from bodies.

Question 11

What is Descartes Argument from Clear and Distinct Perception?

Answer 11

-He attributed his perception of two different things to God having created two different things.
-So he had a clear and distinct perception of himself as a thinking being and of his body as a non-thinking being.
-So he was distinct from his body.
-As the mind/soul was no located in space and had no parts to decay, it was immortal.

Question 12

Views in support of Descartes argument.

Question 13

Views against Descartes argument.

Answer 13

First proof:
-Most philosophers view consciousness/the mind as a product of the brain, which is a part of the physical body.

Second proof:
-Neuroscience shows a close correlation between the mind and the brain.

Third proof:
-Viewed by many as a circular argument.

There is also a view of many philosopher that the self is just an illusion. There is thinking, but there is no ‘I’ that thinks.

Question 14

Hume’s challenge of Descartes

Answer 14

-The claim that consciousness comes from a non-material subject is a circular argument.
-Thought may have a material explanation; this is also the most common view of the mind in modern thinking.
-Since souls are not located in space, how do we know that there is only one soul?

Question 15

What is materialism?

Answer 15

-Monism
-Aristotle’s argument

Question 16

What did Aristotle think about the soul?

Answer 16

-Based on deductions from the world and sense experience.
-The soul is mortal.
-The soul is what gives something its essential nature.
-It shapes and gives life to the body.
-Through reason, humans are able to make moral and intellectual development: the soul develops a persons skills and character.
-It is the ‘principle of life’.

Question 17

What is Aristotle’s Hierarchy of Souls?

Answer 17

-Not all living things have the same faculties.
-Only the human soul has the capacity for rational thought.

Question 18

Arguments against Aristotle.

Answer 18

-Many Christians disagree because they believe that at death the soul leaves the body to return to its true home.
-BUT at the same time many people, including Christians, think that the mind/soul is distinct from but at the same time inseparable from the body.

Question 19

What are Plato’s views on the body-soul relationship?

Answer 19

-The physical body is subject to corruption and change; it imprisons the soul and attempts to distract it with fears and desires.
-The soul is separate from the body and eternal.
-At death the body perishes but the soul leaves it to return to the world of Forms.
-In most cases the soul is then reborn into another body.

Essentially, the soul is separate from the body but gives it life and directs it.

Question 20

Evaluation of Plato on the body-soul relationship.

Answer 20

-It does not fit with the instincts of many people and modern science.
-Most people think of themselves as an integrated whole.
-Modern sciences, e.g neuroscience, suggests that the mind and brain are closely interrelated, and some scientists would say they are the same thing.

Question 21

What is Descartes’ interactionalism?

Answer 21

-Descartes argument for how the separate substances (body/soul) interact.
-He located the soul in the pineal gland, arguing it forms a link between the body and the soul.
-His justification was that the pineal gland was the only part of the brain that was single and its function was unknown.

Question 22

Evaluation of Descartes interactionalism.

Answer 22

-Descartes location of the interaction in the pineal gland has been discredited.
-Descartes suggestion says where the interaction takes place, not how.

Question 23

Gilbert Ryle’s response to Descartes.

Answer 23

-‘The Ghost in the Machine’.
-Accused Descartes of making a ‘category mistake’.
-He argued we should not expect to find an extra something in the form of a mind over and above this different parts of the body.
-To talk of the mind/soul is not to take of some ‘disembodied ghost’.

Question 24

What is physicalism?

Answer 24

-Type of monism.
-Reductionist
-The mind reduces to the brain and consciousness is seen as no more than electro-chemical occurrences in the brain.
-There is no soul.
-Functionalism is a type of physicalism.

Question 25

What is functionalism?

Answer 25

-Type of physicalism.
-Sees the mind in terms of what it does.
-It is a system that processes information inputted from sense experience and it then generates an outcome.
-There is no reason why in the future the mind could not be uploaded onto a different ‘platform’ from the human brain.

Question 26

What does Richard Dawkins think?

Answer 26

-Hard materialist/functionalist
-Humans are simply carriers of DNA: the role of the body is to be a ‘survival machine’ for genes. The good genes survive and the bad genes die out.
-There is no such thing as an immortal soul guiding us. This is just wishful thinking.
-Our only guidance comes from our genetic inheritance. The only way in which we survive after death is through the DNA that we have passed on.

-High intellectual and mental powers are the only kind of soul that Dawkins considers, but this cannot be separated from the brain.

Question 27

Dawkins quote

Answer 27

“Life is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information”.

Question 28

Evaluation of hard materialism

Answer 28

-The mind and body are certainly closely related.
BUT
-Hard materialism’s reductionism is very determinist which is a problem for belief in free will and moral responsibility.
-It rules out any idea of survival after death other than memory/DNA. This is unacceptable for most religious believers.
-The physical brain cannot account for qualia, which are the subjective experiences everyone has as a conscious being.
-Dawkins makes sweeping statements.

Question 29

What is dual-aspect Monism.

Answer 29

The view that mind and matter are two aspects of one, as yet unknown, substance.

-Claims that there is only one entity.
-The one entity is unknown, but has two aspects to it.
-The brain is observable by science and is purely physical.
-The mind consists of subjective consciousness.

Question 30

Evaluate dual-aspect monism

Answer 30

-Provides an answer to the issues raised by both dualism and physicalism.
-Can combine with Process Theodicy to provide a different but clear view of life after death, perhaps through ‘objective immortality’ where every person’s experiences will be remembered in the mind of God.

-BUT this can rule out any sense of personal existence after death, which contradicts Christian beliefs.
-The single substance that underpins the mind and the body is not yet known.

Question 31

What are ideas about personal identity?

Answer 31

Physical
-Functioning brain is essential, so bodily ‘identity’ is about spatio-temporal continuity.
Metaphysical
-What is real about individuals is their unchanged conscious awareness.
Psychological
-Derek Parfit: during our lives there is connectedness to the past and future, but no deeper and enduring level of ‘self’.

Question 32

What would hard materialists say about life after death?

Answer 32

-There is no continuing personal existence after death.
-A person’s identity is linked inextricably to the physical body. When our physical life ends, all mental activity comes to an end.

-Russell + Flew

Question 33

Bertrand Russell on life after death

Answer 33

-Concept about surviving death result from the instinctive fear of death.
-The continual change in each of us means that there can be no distinctive identity. We are simply a collection of experiences that arises out of memory and habit.

Question 34

Anthony Flew on life after death

Answer 34

-The concept of life after death is linguistically coherent. Stalk of life after death is effectively talking about ‘dead survivors’, which is self-contradictory.
-In speaking about someone, we are referring to a particular person, not a disembodied soul.

Question 35

What is Hick’s Replica Theory?

Answer 35

-Hick was a materialist BUT believed that there was life after death.
-He believed claims about life after death are cognitive statements that can be debated.

He used three scenarios:
-Living person transported in the blink of an eye to another part of the world.
-A dead person in one part of the world and the appearance of a ‘replica’ in another.
-A dead person on earth and his/her appearance as a resurrected person in another sphere.

Hick didn’t believe life after death would be like the third scenario. He was simply trying to stimulate debate by showing that life after death was a logical possibility.

Question 36

Evaluation of Hick’s Replica Theory.

Answer 36

-If Hick was right in his belief that God is omnipotent, then bodily resurrection must be logically possible.

-His belief about future states of existence fits in with beliefs about reincarnation.

-But there are many unanswered questions about the details of the scenarios. E.g the possibility that God could create a number of replicas, each with a different consciousness.

Question 37

What are Christian beliefs about resurrection?

Answer 37

-Jesus’ resurrection is a key feature of Christianity.

-One reading of the Gospels and Paul’s teaching suggests that Jesus’ resurrection was bodily: they speak of the empty tomb and resurrection appearances.

-The Nicene Creed also states belief in the resurrection of the body.

-However, Jesus’ own teaching about resurrection suggests that he had a more spiritual concept of the afterlife.

-In Paul’s letters, there is no reference to the empty tomb.

-Before death we have an earthly body, but after death we have a spiritual body.

Question 38

Plato’s arguments for the natural immortality of the soul.

Answer 38

-Soul is eternal and belongs to the world of Forms.

-Everything comes into existence from its opposite: living beings die so life must come from death (THIS DOESN’T WORK).

-Knowledge isn’t about learning new things but was about remembering: the soul remembers things it observed in the world of Forms but it’s an imperfect memory.

-Believed in the transmigration of souls.

Question 39

Price on disembodied souls

Answer 39

-Modern version of Plato.
-The afterlife is mind-based.
-The environment of the souls disembodied after death would be a reflection of their desires and memories.
-Influenced by his studies in parapsychology
-Suggested that souls would communicate and recognise each other through telepathy.

Dependence on parapsychology is challenged by many.

Question 40

Swinburne on existence after death.

Answer 40

-Dualist
-Believes mental states are soul states.

Uses analogy of the lightbulb to show the brain is different from the soul:
-Embodied or disembodied, it can survive death, retaining memories, desires and identity.
-All the soul needs is something to replace the function performed by the brain.
-This is possible because God is omnipotent.

Swinburne is pointing to logical possibility rather than claiming fact.

Question 41

What is reincarnation of the soul?

Answer 41

-Found in Hinduism.
-The atman (soul) is ternal, indestructible and unchangeable.
-The sharira (body) is created, mortal and subject to change.
-The atman is imprisoned in the sharira.
-At death, karma determines whether the atman can be liberated from the samsara (cycle of birth, death and reincarnation) to attain nirvana, or whether it passes intro another body.

Evidence to support:
-Past life regression where under hypnosis an individual recalls a supposed past life.
-Direct past-life recall in which young children claim to remember a past life.

Question 42

Evaluation of reincarnation

Answer 42

-The spontaneous childhood memories appear very convincing.
-But there are some other explanations, notably cryptomnesia.
-Some research procedures have been weak.

Question 43

What are near-death experiences?

Answer 43

-Found in all cultures and religions.

-Can be religion-specific or culture-specific.

-Range of commonly occurring features: out of body, tunnel to bright light, meeting dead loved ones, immense peace, feel the need to go back, profound change in lifestyle and attitudes to life/death.

Question 44

Evaluation of near-death experiences.

Answer 44

-Individuals aren’t actually dead so not compatible evidence.

-Science suggests they are hallucinations caused by medications/brain releasing endorphins.

-Examples of people with no optic nerve reporting sighted experiences can be quoted in support of their genuineness.
-Transformation of lives is evidence of the genuineness.

Question 45

Parfit Bundle on psychological continuity after death.

Answer 45

Sees continuity after death in terms of psychological connectedness.
-Any influence people have in life continues after death as long as they are remembered.
-No such thing as a ‘self’; individuals are bundles of ever-changing states of being.

Linked his ideas with Buddhism:
-Buddhists believe the ever-changing combination of mental and physical energies occurring throughout this life is a process that continues after death.
-Therefore, some form of personal survival after death may be compatible with the Bundle theory.

Question 46

Dennett on psychological continuity after death.

Answer 46

Functionalism thinks in terms of a computer with the input, processing and output.

Mental states consist of the brain processing the inputted sense experiences and outputting the results of the process in the from of behaviour.

Dennett claims the human brain’s computer program consists of the experiences, memories and personality that form the narrative self.
These could survive the death of the individual if stored on another platform, such as a computer.
This stored information of the individual’s life would be psychologically continuous with what went before.

Question 47

What is objective immortality?

Answer 47

-Links Process Theodicy and Dual-aspect Monism.
-Both associated with Panpsychism: every entity has some level of consciousness and there is no cut-off point.

-Griffin claims God and the universe exist panentheistically as God is the universe and the universe is God.

-Objective immortality means that after death, every entity survives in the mind of God. For humans, this means actions, thoughts and ideas exist eternally as objects in the memory of the eternal God.

-Some Process theologians think in terms of subjective immortality. They think that God has the power to enable the survival of individuals in such a way that there is continuity of identity.

Question 48

Evaluation of Process Theodicy and Objective Immortality

Answer 48

-Many Christians would reject this.
-Process Theodicy rejects the traditional attributes of God, which for many makes God unworthy of worship.
-Survival after death is seen as meaningless unless it includes being self-aware.

-Some people, however, are attracted by its compatibility with science and rejection of anthropocentrism.