Science, Subjectivity, and Life after Death.

In a recent article about the nature of consciousness the author Jesse Bering asserts that the mind is created by the brain, and that therefore when the brain quits working the mind is gone. Then going further Dr. Bering states that "the dead are inanimate carbon residue." (SA Mind, 19(5) 34-41, Oct/Nov 2008) This is a relatively common view among scientists, and is reflected in numerous articles related to the one above. 

But there is a problem with this assertion. Dr. Bering notes that the dead are remembered and thus have at least an objective existence that carries on within the minds of those who knew them. Which reminds us that the "self" is always and only a social self. It exists within a matrix of minds. While it may most strongly identify with and be identified with a particular body this experience itself is mediated by society and shaped by culture. The actual embodiment of the self is much broader than the brain and its associated body. 

The social nature of self-hood is well recognized in most cultures. This is why although their pictures of an "afterlife" are naturally anthropomorphic, the concept of an "afterlife" is not necessarily naive. While the "hungry ghosts" of Chinese myth may seem like a mere superstition they are in fact imagined as acting out a role in interpersonal relationships just like the role a person in their condition would act out. And their actions are really taking place in the fearful, vengeful, spiteful, hateful minds of those who knew them because they are experienced as causing fear and anxiety. Is it really naive to ascribe to them subjectivity and agency? 

How else would one imagine them? Why is ascribing such subjectivity and agency to them different from ascribing it to an embodied person sitting across the table and behaving in ways that have the same effects? The human brain is the body of many selves. Projecting them into other brains is a useful exercise but it is impossible to verify whether it is an accurate representation of reality. We know what people are doing in our mind, we're only guessing what they are doing in theirs.

There are roughly three ways that cultures have more thoughtfully (albeit in thoughtful myths) expressed the reality that those whose bodies have died go on living. That most familiar to Christians asserts that the self, having put away one body, inhabits another body especially created for the new environment of God's Reign. I'll reference II Corinthians and I Thessalonians for those who care to read the efforts of Paul to describe how a self remains embodied when its original body is gone. 

Many indigenous religions believe that the self is diffused into nature and its community. The people and their environment then become its embodiment and the realm in which to observe how whatever remains of its subjectivity is acted out. (The worldview of the Iban, whose culture I had a chance to study are only one example.)

And then there are the religions (Hinduism and Buddhism we know best) that build a picture of life after death in terms of karma, or more generally a network of causality that may or may not condense into a new living creature that embodies the old self. But regardless, the self endures in its power as a cause of effects yet to happen.

(As aside: these three frameworks are not mutually exclusive.)

In none of these three frameworks is the self simply disembodied. But neither is it imagined as having ceased. Because it is self-evident that it has not. So long as the dead person continues to have an effect on the living then surely it is reasonable to ascribe the cause of those effects to that person. 

Of course if one believes in God as understood in the Western traditions (which is in no way dependent on belief in an afterlife) then it is God who is the ultimate embodiment of all selves. Whether they are objects remembered or subjects given agency will depend on how God's nature is interpreted. 

Religion is often thought to be a naive and now outdated response to the environment driven by human evolution, both biological and social. Yet in the same volume on The Mind in which Dr. Bering wrote other neuroscientists noted that the relationship between brain and mind remains largely unknown and even lacks a robust theoretical framework through which such knowledge might be pursued. The direction of cause and effect in that dialectic is not uni-linear. What is naive is believing that the dead are merely "an inanimate carbon residue." So maybe there is wisdom in a broader dialogue between science, religion, and philosophy.