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.

Spider Sense

 

Friend Xerxes has recently returned from a group tour of Southeast Asia. As one of the exotic experiences the tour company laid on for their charges, they got to see a woman hunt tarantulas, defang them, and let them crawl over their arms. Then she fried the spiders, and the tourists could opt to sample them.

Xerxes was upset that the tarantulas were killed. Aren’t we humans arrogant, he asks, to assume that only we are sentient? 

I wonder if he has ever been to a slaughterhouse.

“Sentient” is not the word he should have used here. Sentient means responsive to the physical senses. Everyone believes that spiders are sentient. 

So why are we any better than spiders? Are we indeed simply being arrogant, or “speciesist”?

Dating back at least to Aristotle, animal and human souls have indeed always been understood in to be fundamentally different. There are different words for them in Greek. Humans have psyche. Animals have anima.

What’s the difference? 

A common answer is “reason,” or “free will,” but that may not be right. Animals can figure out simple puzzles, and this has always been known. See Aesop’s fable of the crow and the pitcher. Dogs can be wilful, and understand when they have been a “bad dog.” 

On the other hand, I read somewhere that when the behaviourists and the linguists teach higher apes to talk using sign language, the one thing they cannot do is answer questions in the conditional. They cannot understand hypotheticals.

Animals, even those most closely related to us, cannot retain narratives in the mind of what is not present. This suggests the faculty that makes us human is the imagination. And this seems to have been understood throughout the ages:

“Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me! 
The present only toucheth thee: 
But Och! I backward cast my e’e, 
On prospects drear! 
An’ forward tho’ I canna see, 
I guess an’ fear!” – Burns, “To a Mouse”

Now consider the account of the creation of man in Genesis:

Genesis 1:

“So God created mankind in his own image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.”

Genesis 2: 

“Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

God created man “in his own image”; and what does that mean? Not to look like God, for God is a spirit. What is a spiritual image? Literally, or rather, etymologically, “imagination.” God is the great architect of all, the creator: creation is his image. Creation is in his image.

He then created man as a potter forms a pot. That too reveals his image: the human potter, the artist, acts in the image of God. In creation, God breathes his spirit into us—literally, or etymologically, he “inspires” us. 

What is the point of man’s creation? To tend the garden. As with pottery, this is a matter of taking the material God has created for us, and forming it by art. The intended end result, according to the Book of Revelation, is a celestial city, the New Jerusalem, one great work of art, a collaboration between God and man.

“One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.” 10 And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. 11 It shone with the glory of God, and its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel, like a jasper, clear as crystal. 12 It had a great, high wall with twelve gates, and with twelve angels at the gates. On the gates were written the names of the twelve tribes of Israel. 13 There were three gates on the east, three on the north, three on the south and three on the west. 14 The wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb.

“15 The angel who talked with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city, its gates and its walls. 16 The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide. He measured the city with the rod and found it to be 12,000 stadia in length, and as wide and high as it is long. 17 The angel measured the wall using human measurement, and it was 144 cubits thick. 18 The wall was made of jasper, and the city of pure gold, as pure as glass. 19 The foundations of the city walls were decorated with every kind of precious stone. The first foundation was jasper, the second sapphire, the third agate, the fourth emerald, 20 the fifth onyx, the sixth ruby, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth turquoise, the eleventh jacinth, and the twelfth amethyst. 21 The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate made of a single pearl. The great street of the city was of gold, as pure as transparent glass.”

For this reason, a human life, and a human soul, is of infinitely greater value than an animal life.

We commonly understand a further distinction between plants and animals. Animals are sentient; plants are not. Plants are not conscious. They do not have the five senses. An animal life is therefore of greater value, their death of greater meaning, than a plant life. So vegetarianism.

There is another traditional distinction. There is the Christian pescetarian tradition: during the Lenten and Friday fasts, you are to eat no meat, but are allowed fish and seafood. Buddhist monastic “vegetarianism” follows similar rules: one is allowed seafood. Why is this where the line is drawn, and not at vegetarianism?

Because cold-blooded creatures lack emotions. They do not feel anger or love or fear. 

How do we know this?

Because they do not nurse their young.  Any creature that does not care for its young apparently has no emotional life. This is no doubt why the Devil himself is represented as reptilian, as a snake or dragon. They operate on sheer self-interest, lacking love or empathy.

Of course, they are really amoral, not immoral; they have no moral sense. Spiders presumably operate like robots, following their programming, their instinct. But there is therefore no moral issue in killing them, any more than in turning off a light.

This is why cannibalism is not cool, but it is cool to swat a mosquito.

You Will Live Forever. Deal with It.

 

Friend Xerxes has made a declaration in his most recent column:

“Nor are we, as some like to believe, immortal souls temporarily housed in human bodies.”

He does not explain this claim.

To Christians, the Bible is a final authority. The Bible seems utterly definitive in saying this is exactly what we are. 

“And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

But the Bible also agrees with all other ancient authorities. The pagan Romans and Greeks also held this to be so—that the soul goes on to an afterlife. The Egyptians, Chinese, and Hindus held it to be so. The native people of North America held it to be so. The aborigines of Australia held it to be so.

An appeal to authority is not definitive. But if you are going against all authority, the onus is on you to make your case. As Chesterton observed, you cannot tear down a fence simply because you do not understand why it is there. Nobody has the right to tear down a fence until they do understand why it is there. If you were to proclaim that there was no such place as Africa, you would need to explain why all the atlases are wrong.

Xerxes perhaps hints at an argument in the parenthetical comment, “as some like to believe.” This suggests that people believe in an immortal soul and an afterlife because they find it comforting. This is a familiar claim from Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins.

But why is it not at least as comforting to suppose that at death, consciousness simply ends? What sounds bad about eternal rest? This is the very goal of Buddhism: nirvana, “extinction.” It is the goal of Advaita Vedanta Hinduism: moksha, “release.”

The afterlife, on the other hand, Christian, pagan, Hindu, or Buddhist, implies judgement and just punishment. This cannot be comforting to those conscious of having done wrong. And, according to Christian teaching, we are all worthy of condemnation; nobody can assume salvation.

Remember Hamlet’s famous soliloquy.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep

No more; and by a sleep, to say we end

The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks

That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,

To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,

For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come..

 

It is he who denies the afterlife who is indulging in wishful thinking—whistling past the proverbial graveyard.

Beyond the voice of universal authority, there is empirical evidence—scientific evidence--here and now of the immortality of the soul.

First, it is all but conclusively proven by some “Near Death Experiences” that consciousness continues after physical death, and in the absence of detectable brain activity. There are also examples of people with virtually no brain tissue who nevertheless are conscious and can function normally—suggesting that consciousness is not dependent on the physical brain. The brain may only be, more or less as Descartes suggested, a conduit between consciousness and the physical world, more or less as the eye or hand is. Second, “ghost stories” are common all over the world: encounters with disembodied souls.  Many are purely empirical accounts: people see things, people hear things, people feel things. If we do not accept these claims, or accept the simplest explanation for them, isn’t it often only for the unscientific reason that they do not fit materialist preconceptions? They are common all over the world: encounters with disembodied souls. And note that we do not, on the whole, find ghost stories comforting. Believing in an afterlife is not wish fulfilment. Our most natural reaction is fear. 

Hamlet suggests the analogy of sleep and dreams. We know that consciousness persists when the senses shut down in sleep. Why wouldn‘t it persist in physical death, when the senses shut down permanently? We all have the experience of consciousness continuing without our physical senses. By contrast, do any of us have any kind of empirical experience of ceasing to exist?

In our experience, sensed objects die or decay or disappear, but thoughts do not. I see a hummingbird at my feeder. After a few minutes, he is gone. Nevertheless, I am still able to see a hummingbird in my mind. Everything is immortal in memory, in thought form: sensations, thoughts, emotions, urges. We may no longer feel the emotion. We may no longer consent to the idea. Yet we can still summon them to consciousness; we are aware of them.

You might object that memories too fade over time. Perhaps this is what Buddhists are counting on. But is it true? Over time, we may have trouble retrieving a particular memory; but it does seem it is always still there somewhere. The taste of a madeleine, as Proust relates, can bring it all back vividly. A smell, a familiar melody—returning to a place. Wilder Penfield could stimulate vivid memories with electric probes.

So it looks as though all things, once created, continue to exist forever in some metaphysical place, the “storehouse memory,” or “storehouse consciousness,” to use the Buddhist phrase. This is perhaps also where abstract eternal concepts reside: the truths of mathematics or logic, the concept of justice, moral good and evil, beauty, truth, and so forth. Plato’s realm of ideal forms, the Bible’s Kingdom of Heaven. 

Berkeley pointed out that this realm is more immediate, clear, and certain than the physical world. The existence of the physical world is a mere hypothesis, and an unnecessary one. As Christians, we hold it to be real, on authority. Most cultures do not.

We are immortal souls, temporarily housed in human bodies. At the end of time, we will again be housed in physical bodies, but perfected ones.

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.