Does anyone ever survive his or her bodily death ? Could anyone? No speculative questions are older than these, or have been answered more frequently or more variously. None have been laid to rest more often, or — in our times — with more claimed decisiveness. Jay Rosenberg, for instance, no doubt speaks for many contemporary philosophers when he claims, in his recent book, to have ‘ demonstrated ’ that ‘ we cannot [even] make coherent sense of the (...) supposed possibility that a person's history might continue beyond that person's [bodily] death’. (shrink)

A new and simplified edition of Myers' major work, originally published in 1903. Previous editions had relegated all illustrative case material to cumbersome appendices. The editor of this edition has abridged this material and integrated it into the body of the text. The result is a more manageable and readable volume.--J. M. W.

Because every single one of us will die, most of us would like to know what—if anything—awaits us afterward, not to mention the fate of lost loved ones. Given the nearly universal vested interest we personally have in deciding this question in favor of an afterlife, it is no surprise that the vast majority of books on the topic affirm the reality of life after death without a backward glance. But the evidence of our senses and the ever-gaining strength (...) of scientific evidence strongly suggest otherwise. -/- In The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life after Death, Michael Martin and Keith Augustine collect a series of contributions that redress this imbalance in the literature by providing a strong, comprehensive, and up-to-date casebook of the chief arguments against an afterlife all in one place. Divided into four separate sections, this essay collection opens the volume with a broad overview of the issues, as contributors consider the strongest available evidence as to whether or not we survive death—in particular the biological basis of all mental states and their grounding in brain activity that ceases to function at death. Next contributors consider a host of conceptual and empirical difficulties that confront the various ways of "surviving" death—from bodiless minds to bodily resurrection to any form of posthumous survival. Then essayists turn to internal inconsistencies between traditional theological conceptions of an afterlife—Heaven, Hell, karmic rebirth—and widely held ethical principles central to the belief systems undergirding those notions. In the final section, authors offer critical evaluations of the main types of evidence for an afterlife. -/- Fully interdisciplinary, The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case against Life after Death brings together a variety of fields of research to make that case, including cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, personal identity, philosophy of religion, moral philosophy, psychical research, and anomalistic psychology. As the definitive casebook of arguments against life after death, this collection is required reading for any instructor, researcher, and student in philosophy, religious studies, and theology. It is sure to raise provocative issues new to readers, regardless of background, from those who believe fervently in the reality of an afterlife to those who do not or are undecided on the matter. (shrink)

The paper begins by briefly engaging critically—on theological grounds—with Dean Zimmerman’s defense of Peter van Inwagen’s Christian Materialist idea that we are identical with our bodies, and so survive bodily death by not actually undergoing bodily death. Next, I consider the view of the mind-body relation that Dean himself is tempted by, namely Emergent Substance Dualism, arguing that it is best seen as a fig leaf that at most works to avoid offending contemporary anti-theistic “traducian” sensibilities. (...) In displacing Emergent Substance Dualism, I set out a Neo-Aristotelian account of essence and embodiment that allows for—indeed entails—the possibility of our surviving the death of our bodies. Along the way a characterization of ontological reductionism is given, which avoids the incoherent thought that reduction goes by way of identity. The characterization makes evident why mental events and states are not reducible to physical events. Finally, two non-reductive relations between mental and physical events, namely subserving and implementing, are defined, and then used to characterize the relation of embodiment, and explain how certain mental acts can be “difference-makers” in the physical realm. I only aim to show that given the manifest failure of psycho-physical ontological reduction, this new account of survival adds no further mystery to the mind-body problem. (shrink)

This paper—written for nonspecialist readers—asks whether life after death is in any sense possible given the apparent fact that after we die our remains decay to the point where only randomly scattered atoms remain. The paper argues that this is possible only if our remains are not in fact dispersed in this way, and discusses how that might be the case. -/- 1. Life After Death -- 2. Total Destruction -- 3. The Soul -- 4. Body-Snatching -- 5. (...) Radical Resurrection -- 6. Irreversibility -- 7. Atomic Reassembly -- 8. The Transporter -- 9. Replicas and Originals -- 10. Survival and Causal Connections. (shrink)

In its October 2001 issue, this journal published a series of articles questioning the Whole-Brain-based definition of death. Much of the concern focused on whether somatic integration - a commonly understood basis for the whole-brain death view - can survive the brain's death. The present article accepts that there are insurmountable problems with whole-brain death views, but challenges the assumption that loss of somatic integration is the proper basis for pronouncing death. It examines three major (...) themes. First, it accepts the claim of the "disaggregators" that some behaviors traditionally associated with death can be unbundled, but argues that other behaviors (including organ procurement) must continue to be associated. Second, it rejects the claims of the "somaticists," that the integration of the body is critical, arguing instead for equating death with the irreversible loss of "embodied consciousness," that is, the loss of integration of bodily and mental function. Third, it defends higher-brain views against the charge that they are necessarily "mentalist," that is, that they equate death with losing some mental function such as consciousness or personhood. It argues, instead, for the integration of bodily and mental function as the critical feature of human life and that its irreversible loss constitutes death. (shrink)

The so-called “problem of personal identity” can be viewed as either a metaphysical or an epistemological issue. Metaphysicians want to know what it is for one individual to be the same person as another. Epistemologists want to know how to decide if an individual is the same person as someone else. These two problems converge around evidence from mediumship and apparent reincarnation cases, suggesting personal survival of bodily death and dissolution. These cases make us wonder how it (...) might be possible for a person to survive death and either temporarily or permanently animate another body. And they make us wonder how we could decide if such postmortem survival has actually occurred. In this essay I argue, first, that metaphysical worries about postmortem survival are less important than many have supposed. Next, I'll consider briefly why cases suggesting postmortem survival can be so intriguing and compelling, and I'll survey our principal explanatory options and challenges. Then, I'll consider why we need to be circumspect in our appraisal of evidence for mind-body correlations. And finally, I'll try to draw a few tentative and provocative conclusions. (shrink)

William Hasker thinks that his emergent dualism provides a plausible account of the mind’s survival of bodily death, giving it a crucial advantage over physicalism. I do not share this appraisal. Emergentism by its very nature works against the (immediate) survival of death. The analogies that Hasker employs to overcome this initial implausibility fail due to factual errors, and his position ends up in no less a difficult position than the physicalism that Hasker rejects. Hasker’s (...) attempt to escape this difficulty results in what is effectively an abandonment of emergentism, and the adoption of a more traditional dualism. (shrink)

William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience is one of the world's most popular attempts to meld science and religion. Academic reviews of the book were mixed in Europe and America, however, and prominent contemporaries, unsure whether it was science or theology, struggled to interpret it. James's reliance on an inherently ambiguous understanding of the subconscious as a means of bridging between religion and science accounts for some of the interpretive difficulties, but it does not explain why his overarching question (...) was so obscure, why psychopathology and unusual experiences figured so prominently, or why he gave us so many examples and so little argument. To understand these persistent puzzles we need to do more than acknowledge James's indebtedness to Frederic Myers's conception of the subconscious. We need to read VRE in the context of the transatlantic network of experimental psychologists and psychical researchers who provided the primary intellectual inspiration for the book. Doing so not only locates and clarifies the underlying question that animated the work but also illuminates the structural and rhetorical similarities between VRE and Myers's Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death. In contrast to the individual case studies of hysterics, mediums, and mystics produced by others in this network, both Myers and James adopted a natural-history approach in which they arranged examples of automatisms to produce a rhetorical effect, thus invoking science in order to evoke a religious response. Where Myers organized his examples to make a case for human survival of death, James organized his to make a case for the involvement of higher powers in the transformation of the self. Read in this way, VRE marks a dramatic shift from a religious preoccupation with life after death to a religious preoccupation with this-worldly self-transformation. (shrink)

This book critically examines the case for and against the belief in personal survival of bodily death. It discusses key philosophical questions. How could a discarnate individual be identified as a person who was once alive? What is the relationship between minds and their brains? Is a 'next world' conceivable? The book also examines classic arguments for the immortality of the soul, and focuses on types of prima facie evidence of survival: near-death experiences, apparitions, mediumistic (...) communications, and ostensible reincarnation cases. (shrink)

This paper presents and defends that an afterlife in which a person receives a new body after his or her old body is destroyed (as it is on some notions of bodily resurrection) is conceptually impossible. The main idea behind this argument is that such an afterlife would conceptually require that a person be a kind of thing that could be rendered plural. But since persons are not that type of thing, such an afterlife is not conceptually possible.

In 2021, the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (hereafter, BICS) sponsored an essay competition (hereafter, the Contest) designed to solicit the best evidence for the hypothesis that human consciousness survives bodily death, and more specifically, evidence that would prove this hypothesis beyond a reasonable doubt. The summer 2022 issue of the Journal of Scientific Exploration featured a special subsection on the BICS contest and its winning essays. Robert Bigelow and Colm Kelleher outlined the motivation, design, and judging criteria (...) for the competition. Keith Augustine provided an extensive critical commentary on the contest design and eight of its prominent winning essays. Stephen Braude and several coauthors responded to Augustine’s criticisms, and Augustine provided a reply to Braude and his collaborators. Finally, the subsection concluded with a collaborative paper in which Etienne LeBel, Adam Rock, and Augustine proposed a more rigorous experimental design for testing the survival hypothesis. Augustine presented important criticisms of the Contest and several of its prominent winning essays. Moreover, many of his criticisms apply to survival literature in general and so are instructive for the wider survival debate. And Braude, one of the most important contributors to the survival debate since C.D. Broad and C.J. Ducasse, was at the helm of the reply to Augustine. Although the response to Augustine raised important concerns about skeptical assessments of the evidence for survival, it was hamstrung with several defects. 1. Preliminaries 2. Problematic Aspects of the Reply to Augustine 3. What is the Question? Honing in on the Actual Disagreement 4. Inference to Best Explanation 5. Confirmation Approaches to Evidential Support -- 5.1 Evidential Justification -- 5.2 When Does an Observation Favor One Hypothesis Over Another Hypothesis? The Law of Likelihood -- 5.3 When Should We Up Our Confidence in a Hypothesis? Incremental Confirmation -- 5.4 How Can We Determine the Net Plausibility of a Hypothesis? Bayes’ Theorem and Posterior Probabilities -- 5.5 Which of Two Hypotheses is More Probable than the Other? Principle of Contrastive Posterior Probabilities -- 5.6 When Does Evidence Justify Believing a Hypothesis? Principle of Absolute Confirmation -- 5.7 Survivalist Confusions about Bayesian Analyses -- 5.8 The Washing Out of Priors -- 5.9 The Subjectivism Objection -- 5.10 Summing Up Insights from Confirmation Theory -- 6. Back to Braude 7. Varieties of Skepticism 8. Neurophysiological Evidence and the Survival Hypothesis 9. The Data from Mediumship 10. The Alleged Improbability of Fraud and Other Counterexplanations 11. Mediumship and the Logic of Confirmation 12. The Significance of Failed Tests 13. Survivalist Rescues and Contrastive Confirmation 14. Evidential Support without Predictions -- 15. The Testability Problem -- Concluding Remarks. (shrink)

Prolonged survival after the declaration of death by neurologic criteria creates ambiguity regarding the validity of this methodology. This ambiguity has perpetuated the debate among secular and nondissenting Catholic authors who question whether the neurologic standards are sufficient for the declaration of death of organ donors. Cardiopulmonary criteria are being increasingly used for organ donors who do not meet brain death standards. However, cardiopulmonary criteria are plagued by conflict of interest issues, arbitrary standards for candidacy, and (...) the lack of standardized protocols for organ procurement. Combining the neurological and cardiopulmonary standards into a single protocol would mitigate the weaknesses of both and provide greater biologic and moral certainty that a donor of unpaired vital organs is indeed dead. (shrink)

The current debate between Thomists of the corruptionist view and the survivalist view revolves around the most appropriate interpretation of Thomas’ texts about the persistence of the person after death. The present article criticizes both views, and offers a new interpretation of Thomas which is capable of resolving the problem. However, the main scope of the paper consists in offering an alternative theory to the hylomorphic view of the person, and introduces a more adequate and coherent theoretical framework to (...) make explicit the ontological status of the human being and their place in the world. The result will be the explication of the holistic-configurational theory of the person from structural- systematic philosophy that shows how the personal configuration persists after bodily death because of its intentional-systematic location in the whole of Being, determined by the prime facts intentionally coextensive with Being. Keywords: Hylomorphic view. Survival of the person. Structural-systematic philosophy. Thomism. (shrink)

Man has always hoped to survive his bodily death, and it is a central tenet of many religions that such survival is a reality. It has been supposed by many that one form such survival might take is reincarnation in another body. Subscribers to this view include Pythagoras, Plato sometimes, and a large number of Eastern thinkers. Other thinkers have, of course, disputed that reincarnation is a fact, and some have even denied that it is a (...) possibility. But seldom has it been claimed by its opponents that reincarnation is a logical impossibility. (shrink)

Human bodies have a totally different mode of existence from those collections of mental properties (intelligence, will power, consciousness, etc.) that we call minds. They belong to the ontological category of physical substances or entities, whereas mental properties belong to the ontological category of properties or attributes, and as such can exist only so long as their physical bearers exist. Mental properties “emerge” (in a sense that makes emergence ubiquitous throughout the natural world) when the constituent parts of a biological (...) organism—especially its brain—are configured in certain sorts of ways. A view of reality that is both conceptually coherent and scientifically comprehensive makes the very idea of surviving one’s bodily death literally absurd. -/- 1. The Cheshire Cat Fallacy: “A Grin Without a Cat” -- 2. Two Main Arguments for Substance Dualism - 2.1 An Appeal to the Logic of Identity and Difference - 2.2 An Appeal to the Noncogitative Nature of Matter -- 3. A Host of Problems for Substance Dualism - 3.1 The Inexplicability of Mind-Brain Dependence - 3.2 The Inexplicability of Mental Causation - 3.3 The Violation of Scientific Laws - 3.4 Minds as Miracle-Workers - 3.5 Problems about Our Embryological and Developmental Histories - 3.6 Problems about our Evolutionary Histories - 3.7 Which Stage of the Soul or Mind Survives? - 3.8 Where are our Disembodied Souls Supposed to Survive? -- 4. The Argument from Leibniz’s Law Presupposes a Category Misallocation - 4.1 The Fallacy of Reification - 4.2 Resisting the Reifying Lure of Language - 4.3 Dualistic Consequences of Reifying Mentalistic Terms - 4.4 Allocation to Ontological Categories - 4.5 Locke’s Partial Solution to the Category Misallocation - 4.6 Ryle on Category Mistakes and “the Ghost in the Machine” - 4.7 Ryle’s Important Insight: To Have a Mind is to have a Set of Mental Properties - 4.8 Interim Summary -- 5. The Emergence of “Minds” from Incogitative Matter - 5.1 Locke’s A Priori Argument - 5.2 Locke’s Argument Refuted by Counterexamples - 5.3 The Concept of Emergence Defined - 5.4 Rival Concepts of Emergence - 5.5 The Ubiquitousness of Emergent Properties - 5.6 The Metaphysics of Emergent Materialism - 5.6.1 Substance Monism - 5.6.2 The Doctrine of Property Dualism is Misconceived - 5.6.3 Emergent Properties of Different Kinds - 5.6.4 The “Hierarchy” of Sciences - 5.6.5 The Broad Spectrum of “Mental” Properties -- 6. The Metaphysical Impossibility of Survival - 6.1 Mind-Brain Dependence - 6.2 The Issue of Mental Causation - 6.2.1 The Bogeyman of Epiphenomenalism - 6.3 The Violation of Scientific Laws - 6.4 Minds as Miracle-Workers - 6.5 Our Embryological and Developmental Histories - 6.6 Our Evolutionary Histories -- 7. Conclusion. (shrink)

I remember being intrigued by the title of this book years ago, as it is a revised and updated version of an earlier work of Michael Grosso. The title seems to imply that we all have a choice as we are leaving the physical body, the option of expiring into nothingness or moving to a realm beyond the material world. I wondered why one would choose the former, and exactly who is making that choice? By the time one finishes the (...) logical sequence of evidence, history, and theory that unfolds in the book, it becomes clear that the title’s inference is not what some might expect. Grosso believes that there are no final choices. Accepting finality is not logical when one comes to believe that our consciousness survives bodily death, and he believes that physical death is not permanent extinction, but a gateway to more living. The underlying and not so subtle message in the book has not only stood the test of time, but has become more relevant in view of today’s state of affairs. Considering the increasing threat of nuclear obliteration, climatic shifts, world divisiveness and conflict, natural disasters, pollution, famine, mass shootings, drug epidemics, and refugees roaming the planet, are these potential calamities something that could jolt the collective mind into a greater spiritual reality? The author has an interesting theory based upon near death experience research. (shrink)

"The book examines the conceptual difficulties that are raised by the belief that all, or some, persons survive death. Two versions of the belief are considered: the belief in disembodied personal survival, and the belief in bodily resurrection. In each case, two questions are raised: Can we give intelligible content to supposed accounts of the form of life such a survivor might lead? Can we give intelligible content to the claim that such a being is identical with (...) one of ourselves? The author argues that it is only with regard to the second question that interactable difficulties of logic arise, but he suggests that these difficulties defeat the belief in disembodied survival altogether, thus leaving the belief in bodily resurrection with a very puzzling status. In the course of the argument the themes of disembodied perception, spirit agency, and reincarnation are discussed, and recent philosophical discussions of some of the puzzles of personal identity are considered."--front flap. (shrink)

This article develops an argument in defense of the claim that Aquinas holds that there are some kinds of activities which can be performed only by persons. In particular, it is argued that Aquinas holds that only persons can engage in the activities proper to a rational nature, e.g., the activities of intellect and will. Next, the article turns to discuss two implications of this thesis concerning Aquinas’s concept of a person. First, the thesis can be used to resolve a (...) prominent scholarly debate concerning Aquinas’s views on the possibility of human persons surviving their bodily deaths. Second, it also points to a problem with a leading interpretation of Aquinas’ account of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. Finally, the article concludes by discussing how a correct interpretation of Aquinas’s views on these matters is related to a broader scholarly debate concerning the history of the Western concept of a person. (shrink)

According to several recent polls, more than 80 percent of Americans believe in life after death. Of those, many adhere to their beliefs because of religious faith. Beyond religion, though, there is increasing scientific examination of life after death hypotheses. Both religious and secular believers are more frequently using empirical research to answer the key questions of how consciousness may transcend corporeal life and death. These essays from leading survival theoreticians scientifically assay the issues and evidence. (...) Interdisciplinary in nature, it covers diverse topics including the origins of life after death hypotheses; theoretical, methodological and empirical approaches to afterlife research; hallucination experiences; evidence for consciousness survival; birthmarks and previous-life memories; suicide; and spirit participation. Concluding chapters discuss the future of afterlife research and offer a new interpretation of consciousness survival. (shrink)

What happens to us when we die? According to Christian faith, we will rise again bodily from the dead. This claim raises a series of philosophical and theological conundrums: Is it rational to hope for life after death in bodily form? Will it truly be “we” who are raised again or will it be post-mortem duplicates of us? How can personal identity be secured? What is God's role in resurrection and everlasting life? In response to these conundrums, (...) this volume presents joint work of leading philosophers and theologians on life after death. So this volume is an impressive demonstration of interdisciplinary cooperation between philosophy and theology. Various models are offered which depict what resurrection into an incorruptible post-mortem body might look like. (shrink)

Narain, Vin It seems that primitive man, everywhere and in every culture, had an instinctive belief in some sort of existence after death. For the primitive psyche perhaps there was no other way to come to terms with the dread and mystery of death. As the traditional religions evolved, elaborate myths were created, claiming that every man had an immortal soul that survived his bodily death. In a masterstroke (deliberate or otherwise) traditional religions linked the fate (...) of this immortal soul with good behaviour in this life. Ordinary people, conditioned as they were from early childhood to adapt to regimes of earthly reward and punishment, readily accepted this vastly magnified scheme of reward and punishment that extended into eternity. Morality, which really had its roots in human nature, became a prisoner of reward and punishment. 'RAP morality' is perhaps a good name for it. RAP morality gave religion an iron grip on the lives of people. (shrink)

William James states “Immortality is one of the great spiritual needs of man,” yet the arguments presented in his LECTURE ON IMMORTALITY, while interesting and ingenious, are somewhat less than conclusive in proving that human beings can survive bodily death. Therefore I attempt to clarity the notion of “individual survivor” through an analysis and discussion of various approaches to the problem, before returning to a further examination of James’ thought in the “Final Impressions of a Psychical Researcher,” the (...) THEORY OF THE SOUL, the PRINCIPLES OF PSYCHOLOGY, the VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE and a PLURALISTIC UNIVERSE. James’ often neglected Christian position provides the key to a better understanding of his thought on the topic, and allows me to conclude on a cautiously optimistic note on the possibility of a philosophical proof for human survival. (shrink)

When a Christian refers to the future full realization of the kingdom of God in an afterlife, it is typically assumed that she is expressing beliefs about the existence and activity of God in conjunction with supernatural beliefs about an otherworldly realm and the possibility of one’s personal survival after bodily death. In other words, the religious language is interpreted in a realist fashion and the religious person here is construed as a religious believer. A corollary of (...) this widely-held realist view is the assumption that if one were to conclude that there is no good reason to believe the asserted claims—for example, no reason to believe that we may survive our bodily deaths in a heavenly realm—then there is no reason to engage in the use of such religious language and the practices which accompany it. I argue that this assumption is false—that there is a meaningful way to use such language in a religious context that does not rest on believing supernatural claims. Against the backdrop of Kant’s discussion of a kingdom of ends understood as a regulative ideal, I argue that religious discourse about the kingdom of God being brought to fruition may be reinterpreted as a useful fiction to draw our attention to and engage our emotions with a distinctive ideal of restorative justice. Though I and others have previously offered fictionalist accounts of language about God, I extend the view here to some religious language about the afterlife. (shrink)

Whereas traditional abolitionist arguments call for putting an end to capital punishment, French-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida emphasizes its survival, writing that “even when it will have been abolished, the death penalty will survive.” My dissertation interprets this perplexing claim by attending to the specificity of Derrida’s discourse on survival or survivance, contending that the death penalty serves an irreducible role in the constitution of the (individual or collective) subject, such that, even in the event of its (...) abolition, some form of the death penalty must continue. Through close readings of Heidegger, Kant, Nietzsche, Freud, Michel de Montagne, and Victor Hugo, as well as Shakespeare, linguist Émile Benveniste, Hungarian psychoanalysts Abraham and Torok, and the nineteenth-century political theorist Juan Donoso Cortés, the dissertation provides an account of the function of the death penalty as a specific institution within the modern penal system of a collective political body and as the legacy of ancient political economies based on sacrificial rites. This analysis interprets the death penalty both structurally and specifically, accounting for the indissociable relationship between the institution and its conceptual structure more broadly. Survivance, I argue, only ever occurs through an other, leaving open the question of the survival of the death penalty to the dissemination of indefinite and unpredictable forms that could consist in its abolition. (shrink)

The ancient Neoplatonic doctrine that the rational soul has one or more vehicles—bodies of a semi-material nature which it acquires during its descent through the spheres—plays a crucial part in Marsilio Ficino’s philosophical system, especially in his theory of sense-perception and in his account of the afterlife. Of the soul’s three vehicles, the one made of more or less rarefied air is particularly important, according to Ficino, during the soul’s embodied existence, for he identifies it with thespiritus, the pneumatic substance (...) based in the brain which was believed to serve as an instrument for perception and imagination. He refers to the vehicles in his arguments against the theory of the transmigration of souls into the bodies of animals, claiming that the imaginative suffering experienced after death by souls in their aerial bodies are much more acute than the physical pain they might feel in bodies made of flesh and blood. Since the power of the imagination, for Ficino, is stronger than that of the four senses, the soul’s perceptive activity is more intense after death, when it has lost its earthly body and lives instead in a body made of air. The vehicles, moreover, provided Ficino with evidence for the individual immortality of souls, a doctrine that he was attempting to demonstrate philosophically against the position of Averroes and his followers. In his view, the vehicles ensured the survival after death of two faculties which were intimately connected to personal identity: the imagination and memory. By pointing out the role of the vehicles in transporting the soul’s innermost representations and memories through the universe, Ficino was able to show that the distinguishing traits of our personality are not lost with bodily death, but survive along with the vehicle that carries them. (shrink)

Dreams of chase or pursuit, falling, sex, flying, nudity, failing an examination, one's own and other's death, fire, teeth falling out and some other themes experienced, even if only rarely, by many people all over the world have been labelled 'typical dreams'. This essay argues that typical dreaming, rather a syndrome of themes than monothematic, reflects an extraordinary state of mind and brain. Odd and particularly memorable perceptions, as well as emerging awareness of sleep and dreaming -- i.e. parallels (...) to lucid dreaming, sleep paralysis, complex partial seizure, epileptic and migraine auras, and aspects of dreaming after trauma -- can be traced with some plausibility in all prominent variants of typical dreaming. When viewed from this perspective, for example, dream pursuers are much more a shadow of the bodily self than a metaphor for the psycho- biographical situation or evolutionarily implemented sparring partners who make dreamers fit for the struggle for survival during waking hours. (shrink)

Version française: Dean Zimmerman défend l’affirmation œcuménique selon laquelle il est possible que toutes les personnes humaines survivent à la mort biologique du corps quelle que soit la théorie plausible de l’identité personnelle adoptée. Dans cet article, je présente certains principes à propos de la survie qui sont pertinents pour n’importe quelle théorie plausible de l’identité personnelle et pertinents pour une survie qui nous intéresserait. Appliqués à certains cas particuliers d’êtres humains, ces principes rendent l’affirmation œcuménique soit fausse, soit difficile (...) à croire rationnellement. -/- English version: Dean Zimmerman defends the ecumenical claim that it is possible for all human persons to survive the biological death of the body regardless of the plausible theory of personal identity adopted. In this paper, I present some principles about survival that are relevant to any plausible theory of personal identity and relevant to any survival of interest. When applied to some particular cases of human beings, these principles make the ecumenical claim either false or difficult to believe rationally. Keywords: Dean Zimmerman, Personal Identity, Survival. (shrink)

Preface/Introduction: The question under discussion is metaphysical and truly elemental. It emerges in two aspects — how did we come to be conscious of our own existence, and, as a deeper corollary, do existence and awareness necessitate each other? I am bold enough to explore these questions and I invite you to come along; I make no claim to have discovered absolute answers. However, I do believe I have created here a compelling interpretation. You’ll have to judge for yourself. -/- (...) What follows is the presentation of three essays I have worked on over the past several years seeing publication for the first time. “Hollows of Experience” was written first as an invited chapter for a collection on the ontology of consciousness. However, when cuts became necessary, my chapter got the knife. Its length has prohibited it from publication in any print journal. “Myth and Mind” was written next as a journal article, but as my involvement with it grew so did its length, so it has also idled on my websty awaiting its call. “From Panexperientialism to Conscious Experience” was written most recently, but it is the only one to have been available to the public elsewhere than my own website. Under the name, “The Continuum of Experience”, it was Target Article #95 on the recently closed Karl Jaspers Forum (for discussion purposes only). -/- I have put them in a different sequence here, for reasons of logical sense. Up first, “Panexperientialism” deals with an idea difficult for many to accept, namely that conscious experience is a particular mode of symbolically reflected experience that is largely unique to our species. However, I aver that experienced sensation in itself (as found, for example, in autonomic sensory response systems) goes “all the way down” into nature, and thus the title, panexperientialism. -/- Understanding this idea is helpful to dealing with the focus on language in Part I of “Hollows”, next, since here speech and general symbolic interaction in general are found to be the catalysts for the creation of our consciously experienced world (our “lived reality”). In Part II, however, I explore how experienced sensations must be coeval with existence, and, with even greater temerity, how all this sensational existence might have arisen within some literally inconceivable background of awareness-in-itself that yet has a dynamism that occasionally breaks into existence as experiential events and entities. (The latter may sound wacky, but physicists and cosmologists are themselves attempting to come to terms with that which seethes with vast potential energy in what they refer to as the quantum vacuum.) -/- “Myth and Mind” was put third since it deals with a major lacuna in “Hollows” — that presumed prehistoric period when members of our species made the painful crossing of the symbolic threshold into the beginnings of cultural consciousness. Speech plays a central role here, too, but I look more at narrative structures from the dawn of self-awareness when ritual and myth became vital to human survival. Why would fantastic stories and bizarre rituals be necessary? I speculate that growing foresight led to the unavoidable realization of certain mortality, from which, in turn, emerged the secondary realization that we were now alive. In contrast to our yet-to-come death, we have life here and now, and by ritually identifying with a symbolically expanded mythic, i.e., sacred, reality, we may continue to live on after bodily death, just as our ancestors and loved ones must also do. Language and mythmaking are necessary to avoid mortal despair and they remain at the core of human consciousness. -/- As Ernst Cassirer (1944) has noted, language and myth are “twin creatures”, both metaphoric webs over a reality we can never wholly comprehend. We live in the symbolic and construct our works of imagination and wars of conquest to make life meaningful, to feel immortal, and to sense that we ourselves participate in a reality greater than ourselves. No doubt we do, but this does not mean our culturally constructed self-identities survive the death of our bodies, and it does not imply that our symbolic concepts can ever indicate the ultimate truth. We simply must symbolize an extended reality that was sacred to our ancestors: “Is it not our way, as illusory as it may be, to force continuance on our world and our life in the face of their inevitable ending? Are we not compelled to extend those imaginary horizons as far as we can despite the terror and the sometime joy their extension incites? Is their closure not a form of death?” (Crapanzano, p. 210) -/- Of course, this leaves me in the uncomfortable position of being forced to admit that this venture of mine must inevitably be another attempt at meaningful mythmaking. But what else could it be? This is certainly not a scientific proof though it is indeed an academically rigorous exploration. (Just try to count the citations!) I hope the reader will judge my thesis on the basis of its coherence, the sense of meaning it evokes, my intellectual responsibility, and, finally, the engagement it inspires. If you have read my expositions and found yourself immersed in the timeless questions I here call forth, I would call these writings successful (even if you violently disagree with my answers). -/- I am very grateful to Huping Hu for granting me this special issue of JCER in which to present my ideas in some detail. He has patiently dealt with my exuberant approach and allowed the many changes I kept coming up with right until the final publication date. I also wish to thank the many potential commentators who politely replied to my invitation, and, even more, I thank those who made time to write actual commentaries. -/- References -/- Cassirer, E. (1944). An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven/London: Yale UP. -/- Crapanzano, V. (2004). Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Chicago: U of Chicago Press. -/- Gregory M. Nixon University of Northern British Columbia Prince George, British Columbia, Canada Email: [email protected] Websty: http://members.shaw.ca/doknyx. (shrink)

This paper explores William Ockham's account of memory with a view to understanding its implications for his account of the nature and persistence of human beings. I show that Ockham holds a view according to which memory (i) is a type of self-knowledge and (ii) entails the existence of an enduring psychological subject. This is significant when taken in conjunction with his account of the afterlife. For, Ockham holds that during the interim state—namely, after bodily death, but prior (...) to bodily resurrection—we retain and recall our embodied experiences. This entails that the subject of our embodied psychological states can survive in a disembodied state and continue to engage in characteristic rational activities—a claim that appears to run against Ockham's own commitment to a hylomorphic conception of human beings (as essentially material). A central aim of this paper is to explore the prospects for reconciling Ockham's account of interim memory with his account of human beings. (shrink)

Many religiously minded materialist philosophers have attempted to understand the doctrine of the survival of death from within a physicalist approach. Their goal is not to show the doctrine false, but to explain how it can be true. One such approach has been developed by Peter van Inwagen. After explaining what I call the duplication objection, I present van Inwagen’s proposal and show how a proponent might attempt to solve the problem of duplication. I argue that the very (...) features of the view that aid the proponent in responding to the duplication objection entails the possibility of an impossible state of affairs—that two distinct persons can at the same time be identical with the same bundle of material simples. The religiously minded materialist is caught between the horns of a dilemma. One’s view regarding human persons must be robust enough to account for personal identity over time, and so not fall to the duplication objection. At the same time, the view must not entail the possibility of two persons temporarily having complete coincident existence. (shrink)

Immortality is the indefinite continuation of a person’s existence, even after death. In common parlance, immortality is virtually indistinguishable from afterlife, but philosophically speaking, they are not identical. Afterlife is the continuation of existence after death, regardless of whether or not that continuation is indefinite. Immortality implies a never-ending existence, regardless of whether or not the body dies (as a matter of fact, some hypothetical medical technologies offer the prospect of a bodily immortality, but not an afterlife). (...) Immortality has been one of mankind’s major concerns, and even though it has been traditionally mainly confined to religious traditions, it is also important to philosophy. Although a wide variety of cultures have believed in some sort of immortality, such beliefs may be reduced to basically three non-exclusive models: (1) the survival of the astral body resembling the physical body; (2) the immortality of the immaterial soul (that is an incorporeal existence); (3) resurrection of the body (or re-embodiment, in case the resurrected person does not keep the same body as at the moment of death). This article examines philosophical arguments for and against the prospect of immortality. A substantial part of the discussion on immortality touches upon the fundamental question in the philosophy of mind: do souls exist? Dualists believe souls do exist and survive the death of the body; materialists believe mental activity is nothing but cerebral activity and thus death brings the total end of a person’s existence. However, some immortalists believe that, even if immortal souls do not exist, immortality may still be achieved through resurrection. Discussions on immortality are also intimately related to discussions of personal identity because any account of immortality must address how the dead person could be identical to the original person that once lived. Traditionally, philosophers have considered three main criteria for personal identity: the soul criterion , the body criterion and the psychological criterion. Although empirical science has little to offer here, the field of parapsychology has attempted to offer empirical evidence in favor of an afterlife. More recently, secular futurists envision technologies that may suspend death indefinitely (such as Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence, and mind uploading), thus offering a prospect for a sort of bodily immortality. (shrink)

This article explores through the lens of Type 1 Diabetes what a body in fluctuation feels, and what kind of ecosystem has to be recreated to be able to survive, an ecosystem made of sensations, senses, sensors and more. It investigates the complexity of relying on sensations that appear or disappear, on other beings that have their own agendas, or on machines that could help or kill. It describes the fear of feeling estranged from one’s ‘extended body’ when it functions (...) alone, it tracks the experience of low blood sugar through the memory of the body or the instruments left in its surroundings. It is a story about the fiction of bodily integrity, of the combat between life and death, and of the impossibility of controlling the texture of life. (shrink)

Describes beliefs concerning immortality, looks at the evidence supporting and refuting life after death, and speculates on the nature of eternal life.

Abstract. Could a person or mind be uploaded—transmitted to a computer or network—and thereby survive bodily death? I argue ‘mind uploading’ is possible only if a mind is an abstract object rather than a concrete particular. Two implications are notable. One, if someone can be uploaded someone can be multiply-instantiated, such that there could be as many instances of a person as copies of a book. Second, mind uploading’s possibility is incompatible with the leading theories of personal identity, (...) insofar as these assume the mind is a concrete particular. Moreover, because David Chalmers (2010; 2012; 2014) defends mind uploading without construing minds as abstract, I show Chalmers’ argument to be unsound. (shrink)

The paper concerns the metaphysical possibility of life after death. It argues that the existence of a psychological duplicate is insufficient for resurrection, even if psychological continuity suffices for personal identity. That is because our persistence requires immanent causation. There are at most three ways of having life after death: if we are immaterial souls; if we are snatched bodily from our deathbeds; or if there is immanent causation ‘at a distance’ as Zimmerman proposes--but this requires an (...) ontology of temporal parts. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to relate the critical core of Jesus Conill’s last book, Bodily Intimacy and the Human Person. From Nietzsche to Ortega and Zubiri, with the problem of nihilism, as a structure that survives in our contemporary societies, especially in the context of neurosciences, technology and our way of relating to both. After outlining the key insights of the book, especially its innovative conception of bodily intimacy, I will retrieve some contributions from Nietzsche’s notes (...) regarding nihilism, to show that after the “death of God”, other instances take his place, the logics of nihilism remain intact and underly the majority approach of neurosciences. I will conclude that the elements presented by Conill for a strong intimacy and subjectivity will be necessary for the task, still pending, of overcoming nihilism. (shrink)

The Journal of Scientific Exploration is devoted to the open-minded examination of scientific anomalies and other topics on the scientific frontier. Its articles and reviews, written by authorities in their respective fields, cover both data and theory in areas of science that are too often ignored or treated superficially by other scientific publications. This issue of the Journal is devoted to a single multifaceted topic: mediumship, and mental mediumship in particular. The authors of the lead paper describe several varieties of (...) mediumship, and propose that the psychosocial and cultural aspects of mediumship are as important as its psychophysiological features. They consider the differences between spiritism and spiritualism, the relevance of the trance state to mediumship, and the extent to which processes properly considered mediumistic infiltrate many everyday human activities. The next paper surveys some of the major nonparapsychological issues that have fascinated researchers into mediumship. These include the nature and prevalence of the mediumistic trance, the varieties of mediumistic mentation, the evolution of mediumship over time, the dramatic capabilities of the subconscious, and the relationship between mediumship and psychopathology. The third paper focuses on positive aspects of mediumship, and in particular its connection with various forms of artistic and practical creativity, as well as its potential for personal development or transformation. The fourth paper considers whether mediumship ever indicates that human personality survives bodily death, or whether even the best cases instead indicate psychic functioning among the living. The author surveys types of mediumship that have been especially relevant to this question, and advocates the revival of so-called proxy sittings with mediums. The final paper recounts a period in France's recent history during which a group of researchers lobbied to have parapsychology broadened into a multidisciplinary field embracing (in additional to strictly experimental and proof-oriented investigations) wide-ranging enquiries that could be applied to mediumship and other apparent instances of psychic functioning in real-life settings. This issue of the JSE is then filled out, as usual, with correspondence and substantive book reviews. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractWith DNA damage being a primary anti-cancertarget, a need has arisen for the development of an approach that is a harmlessfor normal tissues but allows for cancer cell-specific cytotoxicity. Previous researchfrom K. Gurova's suggests that small compounds, namely curaxins that bind theDNA can cause chromatin instability and cell death in a cancer cell-specificmanner. In this brief perspective commentary, we investigate how the scientificcommunity has further developed this anti-cancer approach.

Some, like the Scholastics, held that nonhuman animals could not survive bodily death and would therefore be absent in any afterlife. Against them, I argue that all sentient animals lacking moral agency are immortal and that their immortality is good for them. Call this thesis Animal Immortalism. This paper offers two arguments for Animal Immortalism: the Faultless Harm Argument and the Just Compensation Argument. According to the former, because death and eternal misery are harms to sentient animals (...) to which they neither consent nor are liable (given their lack of moral agency), these harms to them are unjust. Thus, a perfectly just God would prevent their death and eternal misery, and would therefore provide them with a good afterlife. According to the latter argument, nonhuman animals who suffer pre-mortem unjust harms are owed compensation, which only an eternally good afterlife can provide. Thus, a perfectly just God would provide them with an eternally good afterlife. The chapter concludes by evaluating and rejecting several objections, including the Gappy Existence Objection, the Transworld Unluckiness Objection, the Anti-Animal Rights Objection, the Boredom Objection, and the Agency Objection. (shrink)

Survivors of the Black Death confronted a world changed very much for the worse, or so we often say when ignoring nuance. There is no denying that many chroniclers wrote from a situation of real anxiety about an uncertain future. Many locales felt the effects of severe wage inflation and dramatic price fluctuations, some work regimes intensified, social mobility increased, and the utility of traditional safety nets failed to provide against localized food scarcity. Nevertheless, we should view with caution (...) descriptions of plague-induced economic and social dislocation leading to anarchy and decadence, which can become colorful exaggerations, especially when buboes and piled bodies get added to the narrative mix. In recent years many researchers have begun to confront the overload of stereotypes about postplague living to which a human inclination to prurience and some vast historical lacunae have led us. Edwin Hunt, James Murray, and others have found men and women in late-medieval Europe seizing latent economic opportunities in the midst of their difficult circumstances, stimulating producer innovations and encouraging a consumption boom. The medical practitioners studied by Jon Arrizabalaga and John Henderson did not surrender to the defeatism often ascribed to them. And despite the evidence that social stress made room for extremism—flagellant self-abuse, attacks upon Jewish communities, urban riots and rebellions—in government and the world of custom pragmatic flexibility insulated foundational institutions against radical upheaval. Important continuities bridged the pre- and postplague eras. Plague epidemiology has also grown more complex in response to a keener understanding of the morphology of disease agents and the historical shaping of disease categories. (shrink)