1. Self, death and the afterlife (philosophy) revision

2. You need to cover
1. The nature and existence of the soul; Descartes’ argument for the existence of the soul
2. The body/soul relationship
3. The possibility of continuing existence

3. Key words Dualism Materialism Cartesian dualism Soul
Psyche – soul/mind/spirit
Forms
Qualia - a quality or property as perceived or experienced by a person
Dual-aspect monism

4. Plato on the soul: There IS a soul and the soul is immortal
Souls are trapped inside bodies and long to be free of them
Souls truly belong to a transcendental realm called the realm of the forms. This realm exists metaphysically, not physically. Metaphysics is the study of what lies beyond or outside of the ‘material’ realm that we live in now, the world we know through our senses. The material realm can be studied through science etc.
The soul therefore belongs to the study of metaphysics, not science
The soul has to exist as there is no other way for knowledge of the forms to cross from the transcendent, intelligible realm into the physical realm
The soul can be divided into 3 parts: reason (nous), emotion/spirit (thymos) and appetite/desire (eros). Our emotions and appetites (desires) pull us in separate directions and reason must control them (like a charioteer controlling two wilful horses) but each of these has a function in a peaceful and well-balanced soul

5. Aristotle on the soul
There IS a soul but the soul is NOT immortal. Unlike Plato and the medieval religious tradition, Aristotle did not consider the soul to be a separate, immortal occupant of the body; just as rower needs a boat to row, the soul ceases to exist at the death of the body.
The soul, which Aristotle calls ‘de anima’, is the animating force in our body, Unlike Plato, Aristotle believes the soul dies with the body
He argues that the soul has to exist as there is no other way to explain movement. The body cannot move itself, so movement must originate in some other place.
Aristotle argued in his book De Anima that the soul finds its source in the heart (i.e. it is not made by God)
Aristotle believed in a sort of hierarchy of souls- with a human soul being the highest, followed by animals and vegetables. He argued that it is rationality that gives our souls this higher status.

6. Descartes – there are two essential substances:
Matter – res extensa (extended substance)
Mind/soul – res cognita (mental substance

7. Descartes on the soul Descartes uses ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ interchangeably
I think, therefore I am
Descartes uses ‘mind’ and ‘soul’ interchangeably
Through a process of scepticism, known as the 3 waves of doubt, Descartes concludes that the existence of a sensory world (including bodies) is open to doubt. However, as long as we experience doubt we are thinking and therefore the existence of the ‘mind’ (i.e. an immaterial self) cannot be questioned
Argument from doubt – I can doubt that my body exists, but not that that I am a thinking thing (doubting is thinking), therefore I am not identical with my body. {modern philosophers tend to think that the brain and body are the same so refute this}
Argument from divisibility and non-divisibility – all bodies are extended in space so are divisible; minds are not extended in space so are not divisible, therefore minds are different to bodies. {Neuroscience – if the brain is damaged, the mind is damaged so is divisible}
Argument from clear and distinct perception – I have a CDP of my body as an extended non-thinking thing, so I and my body can exist apart therefore I am not my body. {this argument starts with the presupposition that God exists to guarantee his CDPs – a circular argument}

8. Descartes’ intermingling thesis
Nature…teaches me by these feelings of pain, hunger, thirst, etc., that I am not only lodged in my body, like a pilot in his ship, but, besides, that I am joined to it very closely and indeed so compounded and intermingled with my body, that I form, as it were, a single whole with it (Med VI, 159).

9. Descartes’ cogito establishes only that ‘there is thinking’ not that there is an ‘I’ who thinks.

10. Problems with dualism - Ryle
Gilbert Ryle openly mocked the Platonic idea of a soul being ‘trapped’ inside a body, using the term ‘ghost in a machine’ to point out the absurdity of something immaterial (not made of matter) living within something material (i.e. a body) – like visiting a university and seeing many different colleges, libraries, students but then asking ‘where is the university?’
Ryle also used the example of someone looking for the whereabouts of the team spirit during a cricket match to highlight the incoherence of the soul.
These are examples of ‘category mistakes’, which he says Descartes makes. The term ‘university’ is a term from another category, not the same category as the individual components (buildings and students) – so you should not expect to find a ‘mind’ over and above all the various parts of the body.

11. Descartes’ interactionalism
If the mind and body are radically different, how can they interact? Descartes suggests that the pineal gland is the point which the mind controls the body.
However, just because Descartes thinks he has found WHERE the mind and body interact, he has not shown HOW they do so. Because of the context of Descartes (17th century) he tries to find some mechanical way in which the mind and body work together, and there was also much mystery surrounding the pineal gland.

12. Physicalism: there is no body/soul relationship
Everything can be explained and described in terms of matter – therefore the ‘soul’ is not needed to explain the nature of persons, there is no soul. Physicalism is a reductive philosophy – just as ‘water’ reduces to H20 ‘mind’ reduces to brain.
All we experience is related to simple physical causes and science can provide all the answers to significant questions about life – e.g. alcohol and drugs can lead to a different concept of reality.

13. Functionalism
The idea that minds can function on different platforms. The mind is seen as an information-processing system (like a working computer programme).
Your heart – its function is to pump blood around the body; the function of a kettle is to boil water. The function of the mind is what it does – it processes data inputted through senses and generates an appropriate outcome
The functions of the mind can be multiply realised – think of a clock working through a number of different systems, e.g. electric, mechanical, digital etc. The platform on which a mind might run can be equally varied.

14. Do physicalist theories show that Cartesian Dualism is false?
They all show there are problems with the kind of dualism described by Descartes:
If mental and physical substance is totally different, there seems to be no way they can interact.
If the mind and body are linked, physicalism shows that if there is no physical body (i.e. death) there cannot be a mind (ghosts may challenge this argument)
There are explanations for experiences we put down to something ‘other’ than physical – drugs, temporal lobe epilesy etc.

15. But dualism in some form may still be a valid option
Dualists think it is obvious that mind and matter are separate (e.g. using your free will)
Dualism is still the most popular religious approach to the mind and life after death
NDEs may provide some evidence for dualism
The ‘Hard Problem of consciousness’ is not yet solved (page 83)

16. Thomas Nagel -what is it like to be a bat?
All mammals has conscious experiences and those conscious experiences occur in countless different forms that are unimaginable to us. The ‘what-it-is-likeness’ of a bat’s subjective experience is alien to us.
Whatever organism we are talking about what it is like to be that organism cannot be reduced to a physical description so no physicalist theory (even Functionalism) can explain qualia in purely physical terms.
Nagel is not saying that physicalism/materialism is wrong, but he is saying that the mind-body relationship cannot be understood without including objective and subjective experience.

17. Dual-aspect monism p.84-85
There is only one kind of substance (so it is not dualism) and nor is it physicalism which reduces mind to matter.
ONE kind of entity, but that entity has two aspects.
Link to process theology -

18. Continuing personal existence after death – what would this be like and is there any evidence?
Personal identity as physical, involving spatio-temporal continuity of the body and brain (you cannot do without your brain and still be a person; your brain/body occupies a unique location in space and time throughout its life)
Personal identity as metaphysical, involving continuity of consciousness (what is ‘really real’ about a person is there unchanged conscious awareness)
Personal identity as psychological continuity of personality and memory (Parfit) – we are a bundle of mental events, which means persons have a ‘narrative identify’ – they form the subject of a connected narrative from birth to death, which gives the [false] impression of being a self.

19. Parfit’s Bundle Theory
Identity depends on the number of features not on some core of ‘self.’
We have to abandon any idea of some enduring ‘identity’ in persons
You do not survive death as the ‘same person’ as you change consistently throughout life anyway. You have continuity with your ancestors though genetics and with your immediate ancestors through psychological connectedness (their memories of you). When you die your children will be psychologically connected to you, but you do not survive in any deeper sense.

20. Possible existence after death? Hick’s Replica Theory
A unity of physical body and the mind or soul – they cannot be separated
He argues that, given certain circumstances, it would be possible that the dead could exist after death as themselves if an exact replica (and the same person) of them were to appear
As a resurrection replica in a different world altogether, a resurrection world inhabited only by resurrected persons. This world occupies its own space distinct from that with which we are now familiar.
This replica cannot be located on earth and could occur at death or after an interval determined by God (Hick argues that as God is all-powerful, it is no problem for God to create a replica body of the dead person) Hick argues that he is demonstrating that resurrection of the body is logically possible – not that he believes this is the answer.

21. Evidence of reincarnation – Ian Stevenson
Generally associated with Eastern thought – in Hinduism the most common belief is that the soul enters another body (not necessarily human) the nature of which is determined by karma. It assumes a single entity passes from body to body.
This is compatible with physicalist/materialist views that see the self as necessarily embodied, but requires in addition the sense that the embodied self accumulates karmic character and therefore is independent of any one particular embodiment.
Support for this – past-life regression (hypnotherapy used to discover forgotten memories) and direct past-life recall (often in young children, research carried out by Ian Stevenson).

22. H.H Price
The afterlife will be mind based – like a dream state, Cartesian-type souls will be able to perform bodily actions
The environment will corr4ewpond to the individual soul’s deepest desires and memories – this environment would not have to conform to the laws of physics.
Disembodied souls will communicate telepathically and communicate with other persons in the afterlife by projecting an image of themselves to each other.
Price is not trying to prove this disembodied existence but is trying to show that the concept is at least coherent (mainly because parapsychological phenomena provides some support for it, e.g. mediums).

23. Richard Swinburne
The conscious self can continue to exist after the death of its body because all it needs is something to replace the function that the brain has in its present life.
Substance dualist – humans are made up of material body and non-material soul.
Light bulb analogy (p96)
In principle a conscious self could continue to exist after death in a disembodied state, because the concept of ‘me’ is an immaterial substance distinct from my body, so God could make it continue to exist.
The alternative is that God could connect the soul to its old body or to a new body

24. There might not be any continued existence after death
From a physicalist/materialist understanding of the nature of a person (and neuroscience) it may be evident that the body and brain both decay so no longer exist in any recognisable form.

25. Daniel Dennett (b.1942)
Information presently stored in the brain could be uploaded onto a different platform, like a computer. This gives a possibility of survival after death.
Dennett describes the self as a ‘centre of narrative gravity’ and the phenomena of the consciousness as ‘the activities of a virtual machine realised in the astronomically adjustable connections of a human brain.’
This is a functionalist approach to the mind-body problem.

26. NDEs – evidence of life after death?
Common features page 98-99
Negative interpretations:
SUPERNATURAL EXPLANATION 2. Physiological explanations a) PHARMACOLOGICAL B) PHYSIOLOGICAL C) NEUROLOGICAL 3. psychological explanations
Positive interpretations – impact
on religious believers?

27. ‘Not explanation but an evasion’
Myth
Dawkins’s view on the soul is far removed from Plato
The ‘soul’ = a mythological concept created by the ancients to explain mysteries of consciousness
Just like God became the explanation for the gaps in science…the ‘soul’ provides a convenient explanation of the mysteries of human personality and consciousness
‘Not explanation but an evasion’

28. But some things are still a mystery!!!
Where does consciousness come from then?
Dawkins would say that because it was once deemed impossible that scientists could make statements about personality based on genetics, which they can do now, then eventually they will be able to unlock the mystery of consciousness

29. Is this possible?