Is Pope Francis Really Dead? Is Anyone?

 

It seems to me there is no valid distinction between mind and soul. These are both terms for the perceiving consciousness plus the will. People tend to use “soul” if they are arguing that the mind is immortal.

I hold to this, firstly, by Occam’s Razor: there is no reason to multiply entities. Secondly, if the soul is not the perceiving consciousness, the “I,” it does not matter whether it is immortal. And if it is to be judged based on our acts of will, as all major religions affirm, it must include the will.

Now, does the perceiving consciousness survive the death of the body? Is it dependent on the physical brain?

Friend Xerxes write, “no one has ever come back from the other side to tell us what goes on there.”

This is not obviously true. As Xerxes himself notes, people have indeed revived after being declared dead; and they have reported experiences of the hereafter.

Granted, we call them “near-death experiences” rather than “after-life experiences.”

But there is a tautology here: “brain death” is actually defined as an “irreversible” loss of brain function. In other words, if anyone comes back from death, they were by definition not dead.

Are their experiences legitimate evidence for an afterlife?

Xerxes laments, “there is no way of testing the validity of their memories.”

But there is. Those returning to life have reported hearing and seeing things during the period when they were supposedly dead; and their accounts are confirmed by others present. So the consciousness survives the absence of all activity in the brain, at a minimum. And the claims of out of body experiences have also been confirmed: they were able to accurately report things they could not have seen from their body. So the consciousness is not tied to the body.

We cannot similarly independently confirm their reports of a world apart from the physical world, to which they journey. But we can confirm it by the fact that those experiences tend broadly to tally among different reports. As Xerxes notes: “Often they report seeing bright lights, moving down some kind of tunnel, being welcomed into a new world of peace and calm.”

It is on the same basis that most of us confirmed the existence and nature of Timbuctu, in the days before Google maps. The fact that those who had not actually been there cannot verify reports is immaterial.

Then there is the witness of Jesus. Xerxes laments that, having been resurrected, he said “not one word about the far side of death.”

He actually said a lot. This was all that “kingdom of heaven” stuff. He said after death would come a judgment, and that the good and just would enter paradise, while the evil and iniquitous would enter eternal flames. And that there was no passage between the two. More detail is given, albeit not by Jesus in the flesh, in the Book of Revelations and elsewhere in the Bible.

I imagine Xerxes means Jesus did not say any of this this after the resurrection. But, having already said it, what would have been the reason to repeat it now, or for the gospels to record it? Only if, based on his more recent experiences in the underworld, harrowing hell, his understanding had somehow changed. Presupposing, as well, that he was not omniscient, was not God, so that he could have misunderstood previously.

And then, as Xerxes reports from his own experience, there is the evidence of “ghosts.” People actually seem able to communicate with us, every now and then, after physical death. While I have not personally had such unambiguous experiences, many others have, including Xerxes, who has distinctly heard his deceased wife speak to him in the night, or felt her presence as she rose from the bed to use the facilities. Such stories are common.

There are other sources of evidence. While anything physical is transitory, appears and disappears, anything mental or spiritual is immortal, endures. The cat runs into the bushes and disappears. Yet the memory of the cat running into the bushes remains in my mind’s eye indefinitely; if it fades, it can be reinvoked. The mental cat is immortal.

You will say memories fade. But they do not die. We may have greater or lesser difficulty summoning them to consciousness, as time wears on, but they are there forever somewhere, and can resurface. A certain smell, a certain song, the taste of a madeleine…

Try that with the actual cat Sniffles you had as a child.

So it is of the essential nature of the mind to be immortal.

This is not yet to get into the medical reports of those with virtually no physical brain sometimes nevertheless demonstrating normal intelligence. This is not to get into the reported miracles of the saints or Indian yogis, like levitation, bilocation, praeternatural knowledge, and so forth; which broadly suggest mind can exist and act without dependence on the physical body. Given, of course, that such reports can be false.

The rational conclusion, therefore, based on the evidence, is that the mind or soul is immortal; that there is life beyond the life in the body. It is merely a materialistic prejudice to balk at the idea.

William Blake, or Bishop Berkeley, or Plato, would argue that the body and the physical world are the epiphenomenon. Only the mind is real. Blake wrote “the body is that portion of the soul visible to the five senses.”

Berkeley has never been disproven on this. People just don’t want to hear it.

Simply the Best

 

Being materialists, we are inclined to think of memories as not being a real. Of course they are not material: but consider the possibility that the memory is a real, objectively existing place, where everything goes and stays when it is not present to our senses. Because, literally, we know that this is so. Nothing actually fades from memory; its existence is not dependent on our consciousness of it, on our perceiving it. This is what objective existence means. 

Yes, we may for the moment not remember. But we know that every memory is still there, and can arise again to consciousness unpredictably at any moment—perhaps inspired by the smell of lilacs, a tune on the radio, or the taste of a madeleine.

Can we then also remember things that happened to someone else? 

Why not, since memories are objective? And this could explain the many uncanny reports of remembering “past lives,” and the many apparently collective memories described by Carl Jung, which he calls the “collective unconscious.” The evidence is there; we only ignore it because it does not fit our prejudices.

We also know that people we remember can do things we do not will them to do, or that we do not expect. In dreams, for example; or in our waking fantasies. So in the case of remembered people, their consciousness, their will, also survives.

Most cultures have thought this. This is the foundation of their belief in an afterlife. In Korea, there is a mudang who channels the soul of Douglas MacArthur. She even has the corn cob pipe. MacArthur is not gone; he lives in memory, and occasionally speaks through her.

Properly speaking, all memories are immortal. They are in some vast storehouse somewhere. But there are actually two things we call “memory.” There is this storehouse, and there is our ability to recall items from it. If someone is not recalled easily, their existence in memory is lacking in energy. They are indistinct and wraith-like: literally starved for attention.

Some people, by the force of their personality or their talents, are uniquely memorable. They are not necessarily good people; just memorable people. And these are the ones Chinese Taoism, or Korean shamanism, will call “Immortals.”

This is why people keep thinking they see Elvis at the drug store, or Hitler in hotels in Brazil. They are too memorable to fade from immediate consciousness. 

This is why Roman emperors were commonly declared gods at death, and given sacrifices. This is why the Greek gods demand sacrifices. This is why the Chinese burn paper gifts for their ancestors, and put food at their graves. Our remembering them is their food.

I suspect that Tina Turner is immortal in this sense.

A Ghost Story

 

Darkmoon, Pixabay.

Xerxes has seen a ghost. He had a vivid experience one night recently, while lying fully awake, of the weight of his wife getting out of the other side of the bed, shuffling off to the bathroom, then returning.

His wife died a year ago.

He also sometimes hears her speak.

Xerxes dismisses, although he cannot explain, the experience:

            “Tradition says that there is a soul, distinct from the physical body. The body ends, but the soul carries on.

            Reason balks at that distinction. We are embodied souls. All that makes us unique individuals depends on the combination of body and spirit. Our minds need sensory input from our bodies; without bodies, our minds cease to function, even to exist.

            Once we are gone, reason says, we are gone. Period.”

He gives no reasons he think this—he just says “reason.”

Many important philosophers reason the opposite: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Leibnitz, Descartes, Berkeley. Most of the world’s cultures reason the opposite.

Are they all wrong? Perhaps; but one at least needs to present one’s reasons.

“Our minds need sensory input from our bodies.”

This is easily shown to be false. We can think in a darkened room. We can dream while asleep.

You mean we need original sense-impressions at some point in order to form these mental images? Aristotle or Locke thought so. But Plato, for example, thought sense-impressions merely reflected ideal forms already in the mind. Berkeley pointed out that we have no idea whether the physical senses exist except in our mind—let alone the things we imagine they perceive. All perceptions, for all we know, are purely mental.

“without bodies, our minds cease to function, even to exist.”

All the evidence goes the opposite way. Everything mental seems to be eternal; only the physical can die. Anything that dies or disappears physically persists mentally. We call this “memory.” And aside from memories, abstractions, mathematics, emotions all seem immortal. You will say a memory or an emotion may “fad.” Yes, fade; but not die. It is always still there somewhere, and something as trivial as the taste of a madeleine or a particular smell may bring it all flooding back.

No need to even go into ghosts. Or so-called “near-death experiences” in which the consciousness survives clinical death, or out-of-body experiences. They are no doubt evidence, but they are needless evidence of the almost self-evident.

Some atheists claim that belief in an afterlife is merely “wishful thinking.” That might be true, if you invented a religion that believed only in a heaven, and not purgatory or hell. None do.

Essentially every human culture has come to the same obvious conclusion, based on the hard logic and the evidence.