Self, Death and the Afterlifel: Key Information Flashcards
Plato (428/427-348/347)
- Plato was a dualist and contrasted flux and change of the empirical world with sense experience with the perfection of the world of the Forms.
- Empirical World: All things decay, but for all empirical objects, Plato reasoned that there exist metaphysical counterparts that do indeed not decay nor change.
- While the physical body is part of the world of the senses, the mind is related to that higher reality of the Forms.
- The Allegory of the Cave: Plato likened people untutored in the Theory of Forms to prisoners, who were chained to a rock in a cave and who had never seen the outside world. They believed that the shadows they were seeing in the cave were physical objects. However, one of the prisoners escapes and gets into the real world, and realised that the others in the cave were seeing shadows of real objects that existed outside of the cave. He saw flowers as they really were in all of their colour and how trees grew. He went back into the cave to tell the others what he had seen, but the other two prisoners did not believe him and had planned to kill him.
- Dualism has become influential as it has been incorporated into Christian thinking as it spread through the Graceo-Roman world and also dominated the thinking of the medieval period and furthermore demonstrated a very different version which was put forward by the French Philosopher Descartes.
- Dualism, for Plato, it an immaterial substance: the psyche and the physical body. When he had wrote ‘Republic’, he decided that the psyche was more complex than he had previously presented it, and that it compromised of three parts:
1) Logical/Thinking/Reasoning which seeks to learn the truth;
2) Thomus (the spirited part of the psyche);
3) The appetitive part (the appetites for sex, food and drink). - Overall, Plato holds that the soul is separate from the body, but directs it.
The nature and existence of the soul; Descartes argument for the existence of the soul
- His agenda was religious which many would argue is not helpful in a philosophical argument
- He thinks that there are two essential substances: mind (soul) and matter. Matter is said to be res extensa (extended substance); mind/soul is res cognita (mental substance).
- Descartes’ argument from Doubt: I can doubt that my body exists/but I cannot doubt that I am a thinking thing (doubting is thinking)/ Therefore I am not identical with my body.
- This does not work as most modern philosophers think that the mind is produced by the brain, so brain and body are the same thing, so the brain cannot doubt its body’s existence.
- The Argument from Divisibility and Non-Divisibility: All bodies are extended in space and so are divisible/Minds are not extended in space, so are not divisible/Minds are therefore radically different from bodies. - This does not work either as neuroscience shows that there is a close correlation between mind and brain. If the brain (which is a part of the body) is damaged, the mind is damaged also, so to that extent it can be ‘divided’.
- The Argument from Clear and Distinct Perception (CDP): I have a CDP of myself as a non-extended thinking thing/I have a CDP of my body as an extended non-thinking thing/So I and my Body can exist apart from each other/ So I am not my body. - This does not work either, because Descartes starts the argument by presupposing that God exists to guarantee his CDP’s, but that just becomes a ‘Cartesian Circle’ (a circular argument), because in Meditation V, Descartes deduces God’s existence by having CDP’s, and now wants to use to guarantee his CDP’s.
Descartes Dualism
- Problems with Descartes dualism include Ryle and the Ghost in the Machine/category mistake and Hume and the idea of soul substance:
- The idea of ‘soul substance’ is a circular argument because it merely says: Soul substance can think because soul exists as a thinking substance.
- It may well be that the cause of thought is a material substance.
- The problem of counting souls. - Descartes’ cogito establishes only that ‘there is thinking’, not that there is an ‘I’ who thinks.
Descartes’ Interactionism
Descartes thought that body and soul interacted in the pineal gland, but interactionism solves nothing; saying where interaction might take place tells us nothing about how a non-physical mind can interact with a physical brain.
Physicalism, which explains everything in terms of matter
There is no body-soul relationship, because there is no soul. Physicalism is a reductive philosophy: ‘mind’ reduces to brain, and physicalism seems to give an obvious explanation to common phenomena, for example that dementia affects both brain and mind in parallel, so the brain must be the mind.
Functionalism
Functionalism is a persuasive reductive physicalist theory. A system’s function can be described in terms of input/function/output, as with a thermostat, for example. It is possible, therefore, that human minds could run on a computer platform, where the input is sense experience, the function is the processing of information by the brain, and the output is the resultant behaviour. It is even possible that human mentality could at some stage in the future be ‘uploaded’ to super-powerful computers and massively enhanced.
Functionalists would have to admit that minds could run on a metaphysical (Cartesian-type) platform, although most functionalists see that as extremely unlikely. Does Functionalism show that the dualist account of the mind-body relationship is false? Probably not, although all physicalist theories, including functionalism, show that Cartesian Dualism has a lot of problems:
- The problem of how non-physical minds can interact with physical matter - The fact that it seems obvious to most people that matter and mind are inextricably linked: we do not find minds that are not linked to matter. - The fact that drugs clearly do affect the mind.
Nevertheless, Dualism in some form is still a valid option, for example
- Most Dualists today think it is obviously true that mind and matter are not the same.
- Religiously, it is still popular: having a soul that can survive death means that Christians can be judged by God and sent to heaven or hell. Also, God is thought to be bodiless, so it makes sense to believe that humans have a non-physical soul.
- There is some evidence for Dualism in accounts of near-death experiences.
- The ‘Hard Problem’ of consciousness is nowhere near being solved. The idea of the ‘I’, the thinking self, is very difficult to reduce to a physical description. We can see this from the qualia argument - what is it like to have subjective conscious experience, for example, Thomas Nagel’s What is it Like to Be a Bat?
Dual-Aspect Monism
This is not Dualism, because it holds that there is only one kind of substance: neither is it physicalism, which reduces mind to matter. Mind and brain are two aspects of the same, as-yet-unknown, substance. One aspect (mind) is first-person subjective awareness/consciousness (qualia); the other is third-person objective experience. A brain scanner can se the physical states of a brain (such as someone reacting to eating chocolate), but cannot know the first-person qualia of the taste and smell of chocolate.
- DAM avoids Descartes' problem of how the two substances of non-physical mind and physical brain can interact because there are no separate substances: there is only one substance with two aspects - mental and physical. - DAM has no problems with qualia - they are first-person subjective experiences. - DAM gets support from the principles of complementarity in quantum physics, where light can sometimes behave as a wave and sometimes as a particle.
The Possibility of continuing person existence after death
There are two related questions: What, if it were to happen, would count as ‘the person’ surviving the death of their body? Secondly, Is there any evidence that this occurs?
Persons change radically over their lives through growth, injury, memory loss and so on, so what is it that constitutes my identity through life? We need to know what constitutes the ‘I’ who might survive before asking how it might survive. There are three sets of general ideas surrounding this idea.
1) Personal identity as physical, involving Spatio-Temporal continuity of the body and brain
A physicalist would argue that you cannot do without your brain and still be a person. Having no brain means you have no memory, personality or thoughts. The brain is especially important because, unlike many of the body’s cells, the neurons in the cerebral cortex are not replaced as you age, so the brain retains identity of neurons in the cerebral cortex.
Physicalists generally agree that to be the ‘same person’ throughout life depends also on the spatio-temporal continuity if a functioning body and brain. Your body/brain occupies a unique location in space and time throughout its life.
2) Personal Identity as metaphysical, involving continuity of the consciousness
On this view, what is ‘really real’ about persons is their unchanged conscious awareness. As Descartes says: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ This is best understood by thinking of C.A. Campbell’s illustration of a clock striking. There has to be an unchanging ‘I’ - a same self who hears each successive stroke and remembers each one - because memory depends on there being an ‘I’ who is self-aware.
3) Personal Identity as psychological continuity of personality and memory
Parfit’s account of ‘psychological connectedness’ follows in the general tone of Hume’s ‘Bundle Theory’ of the self, and from the Buddha’s view that we are a bundle of mental events. This means that persons have a ‘narrative identity’ - they form a subject of a connected narrative (A series of TTS’s - ‘Temporary Terminal States), from birth to death, which gives the false impression of being a self.
Parfit uses a series of thought experiments in brain fission, brain fusion, branching and teletransportation to suggest that this is futile to ask where the conscious self or soul might go in such cases. The (lack of) evidence from these cases suggest that what matters is ‘Relation R’ - Psychological Connectedness. including memory and personality. Persons are psychologically and spatio-temporally connected (through brain and body) with all past and future states of existence, but at no time is there an identity of self that links these different states. On this account of persons, then, you do not survive death as the ‘same person’: you merely have psychological connectedness with your immediate ancestors and your children who survive you.
The possibility of physical existence after death
Bertrand Russell states the ‘common sense’ view of physicalists/materialists, that persons are reducible to matter, so there is no physical existence after death.
Functionalist arguments can establish the possibility and perhaps the probability of continued life, for example, by uploading the mind into a computer. Strictly speaking, this is not a continuation after death, since the brain is uploaded before death. Nevertheless. the functionalist account allows for human immortality through human technology rather than as an act of God.
It would be difficult to show, however, that a brain uploaded to a computer would be the ‘same person’ as the discarded brain and body of the original person.
The Christian idea of bodily resurrection is defended by John Hick, who used his replica theory to argue that God resurrects a replica of the human body-soul. His thought experiment of Mr X shows that bodily resurrection is logically possible, but Hick’s view does not seem to avoid the problem that God could in theory produce any number of replicas of Mr X, so it is hard to se how a replica can really be the ‘same person’ as the Mr X who died.
The possibility of the existence after death of a conscious self
H.H. Price pictures a community of disembodied Cartesian-type souls, who would communicate telepathically and project images of themselves to other disembodied souls. It is very difficult, however, to talk of sameness in the absence of body, brain and sense experience.
Plato argued for the natural immortality of the soul using, for example, the Argument from Opposites and the Argument from Recollection. Plato’s core argument is that the soul is immaterial, unextended and simple (so has no parts) so it cannot be destroyed at death. But what would a ‘simple’ soul be like? How could it have a character? How could the reincarnated soul be verified as the ‘Same Person’?
Swinburne’s defence of Substance Dualism rejects the idea that the soul can be naturally immortal. He sees the soul as an evolutionary development in connection with bodies and brains, brought about by God’s intervention or some other process. Mental states are states of the soul, so at the point of death the soul, which is the real person, would have character, beliefs and desires.
In principle, souls could survive death in a disembodied state. Certainly God could bring this about. Alternatively, God could reconnect a soul to its original body, or to another body if the original body has been annihilated. In either event, since a soul has character, beliefs and desires, the surviving person would be the ‘same person’ as the one who had died.
Swinburne clearly assumes that God’s intervention would be needed to bring about the survival of disembodied soul or souls linked to existing or new bodies. For some, this is a weakness of the argument.
Reincarnation of the soul
In Hinduism, the atman (soul) passes from body to body, governed by the law of Karma, but may aim finally at identity with divine reality itself (Brahman). During successive incarnations the soul is necessarily embodied, but the law of karma means that the soul is independent of any one particular embodiment. Karma is a natural law, not a law dictated by the Gods, so there is no judgement of individuals by the Gods.
Support for reincarnation comes from past-life regression and from direct past-life recall, particularly by young children (document in detail by Ian Stevenson)1918-2007). The evidence from both hypnotic regression and past-life recall is discounted by most philosophers, usually on the basis of weak research procedures, the tendency of those who believe in reincarnation to invent or to unconsciously ‘find’ evidence, and cryptomnesia.
In favour of past-life recall, some of the evidence for it is difficult to dismiss, not least because the main factor in the recall is often that the child concerned remembers a traumatic death. That appears to be an important factor in triggering past-life memory.
In terms of being the same person throughout its incarnations, there is no continuity of memory or psychology, or body or brain, between incarnations, so identifying a person as the ‘same person’ at any stage of the process would seem to be impossible.
