Mick Hartley

Psychologist Jesse Bering has an article in Scientific American on why we believe in an after-life. Here are his key concepts:

• Almost everyone has a tendency to imagine the mind continuing to exist after the death of the body.
• Even people who believe the mind ceases to exist at death show this type of psychological-continuity reasoning in studies.
• Rather than being a by-product of religion or an emotional security blanket, such beliefs stem from the very nature of our consciousness.

It sounds promising enough, but if you go on to read the article itself for further enlightenment, you may be disappointed. The attempt to analyse one of the defining features of humanity - our knowledge of, and fear of, our own death - involves, in the main, some rather silly experiments with students: those faithful stand-bys of the psychologist, recovering from a heavy night's drinking and tempted to participate as a way of postponing the dreaded trip to the library to meet the essay deadline. Thus:

Richard, I told the students, had been killed instantaneously when his vehicle plunged into a utility pole. After the participants read a narrative about Richard’s state of mind just prior to the accident, I queried them as to whether the man, now that he was dead, retained the capacity to experience mental states. “Is Richard still thinking about his wife?” I asked them. “Can he still taste the flavor of the breath mint he ate just before he died? Does he want to be alive?”

You can imagine the looks I got, because apparently not many people pause to consider whether souls have taste buds, become randy or get headaches. Yet most gave answers indicative of “psychological continuity reasoning,” in which they envisioned Richard’s mind to continue functioning despite his death. This finding came as no surprise given that, on a separate scale, most respondents classified themselves as having a belief in some form of an afterlife.

What was surprising, however, was that many participants who had identified themselves as having “extinctivist” beliefs (they had ticked off the box that read: “What we think of as the ‘soul,’ or conscious personality of a person, ceases permanently when the body dies”) occasionally gave psychological-continuity responses, too. Thirty-two percent of the extinctivists’ answers betrayed their hidden reasoning that emotions and desires survive death; another 36 percent of their responses suggested the extinctivists reasoned this way for mental states related to knowledge (such as remembering, believing or knowing). One particularly vehement extinctivist thought the whole line of questioning silly and seemed to regard me as a numbskull for even asking. But just as well—he proceeded to point out that of course Richard knows he is dead, because there’s no afterlife and Richard sees that now.

Students, eh? 

Does this advance our understanding in any way? Of course I appreciate the rationale: if we want to make psychology a science we have to observe people, we have to perform experiments which are replicable, and so on. Introspection is not enough. But, not for the first time when it comes to psychology experiments, I'm struck by how banal the whole effort is, and how trivial the findings. Have we learnt something new here? Can we now say that the belief in the continuance of mind after death has in some way been scientifically proven? Or are we not much better off, in fact, discovering what the philosophers and writers of the past have had to say? Wouldn't we learn much more about human beliefs and our strained relationship with the knowledge of our inevitable death by doing what those students are so reluctant to do, and spending some time in the library, reading?

So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the “simulation constraint hypothesis,” is that in attempting to imagine what it’s like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences—because that’s how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn’t “like” anything we’ve ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren’t good enough.

You've got to love “simulation constraint hypothesis". The man is definitely a name to watch.

But, to be awkward for a moment, death is “like” something we’ve experienced. It's like sleep. Every night we lose consciousness. Every morning it returns. There are all kinds of connections that could be made – and of course have been made – between sleep and death and dreams. But perhaps there are difficulties incorporating such thinking into the confines of the “simulation constraint hypothesis". Which is why Bering doesn't go there. As for the point that "we have never consciously been without consciousness", this strikes me as being trivially true rather than a keen insight into the human condition.

I suppose we should at least be grateful that he didn't do brain scans of the students while they were answering his questions. Or maybe that comes next.