Do we survive death?

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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It is not necessarly the atheist who maintains that we do not survive death. Saducees, Paul knew, believed that we do not survive death, while the Pharisees believed in the survival of the soul after death. That was the position that eventually “won”.
In our day many long-held ideas, like the dogma that this world was at the center of the universe or at least our solar system, with the sun circling it, have fallen into disrepute due in part by the efforts of natural scientists. What about the soul and it’s immortality?
So many questions are tied already to this question, such as “what is the self?”, what is it that we call “I”? When is it and when is it not and how do we tell the difference? But today we have questions that are no longer answered as easily as in the days when religion held the first and last word. For example, once epilepsy could very well be interpreted as demonic possession and blindness tied to sin. Although we do have suspected psycho-somatic events, for the most part very few religious leaders use the language of old and most scientists stick to material causal chains, limiting their inquiry as to how a person becomes ill rather than to why or by whom.
The question of whether we have a soul that survives death is also the question if “we” survive death, because the atoms that compose our bodies may be transformed but not destroyed, but we are not our electrons and protons. Yet that leads me to wonder: “Will I survive old age?”…never mind death; will this quality of matter I call “I” survive the deterioration of the matter which my body is made of? There is no consolation in the explanation that there is no soul-body divide and that “we” are our bodies, but perhaps there is some truth in all of that. What happens to the soul of an Alzenheimer patient, or a person who suffers from dementia?
My “I” has been in constant change. There is an “I” at 10 years of age that though completely different from this “I” of mine now. I can imagine that there will be an “I” that supplants the one I wear today which shall be different. Difference is not total. A “fact” remains which is “identical” through the process of aging…might not be anything more than the fact that these “I” occur at the same locality…but which it? How do I identify it? And is it not the same to identify “it” as “identifiying myself”? But do I really identify it or simply make the interpretation that I have arrived at “myself”? To put it in another way: There are, I believe, different “I’s” through different ages in my life. Which “I” encompases myself or which serves as the rule by which the other instances are measured? Suppose that I did survive death, not just in soul but in body. In which body will I like to spend eternity in? Same, as which “I” would I like to remain forever? Perhaps there is no choice involved. Perhaps the “I”, the Soul is a conglomerate of all these different “I’s”. Perhaps, like a ship, a Soul is made of different pieces of wood but none of which sufficient in and of themselves to be called properly a “Ship” or, in this case, “Soul”. But the analogy has it’s limits. The Ship requires it’s wood to exists as ship, while the idea and content of any “I” is often fantasy where memory is declared. We may have Souls like ships, formed by the accumulation of different “I’s”, but unlike wood, each “I” is ill defined, as much fantasy as it is memory. It is such propensity for fantasy that allows language to speak of any “I” at all.
We are like MMA champion George St Pierre who talks about being the champion so he is no longer fighting for the belt. The belt, in my analogy means the “I”. “I am” says as much as I am the champion. But GSP is the champion of today. Tomorrow he will have to train, again and again to fight.When he walks in the next time into the Octagon, he is as much the champion as he is a pretender. He fights, on that day, also for the belt. He imagines himself as being the champion, but he is not. One is the champion for a day because we change from day to day. Today he had the stamina, the training, the luck, to outlast BJ Penn, but we age, like Randy Couture and may find ourselves walking with a belt that belonged to a younger, better trained and luckier version of ourselves and not to our latest self. We are “champions” as idea and not necessarly in fact.

I invite you all to join the discussion but please take the time to provide a complex response to a complex subject. UFC references are not a requisite.

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Omar, I can’t fathom any sort of continuance beyond death… I do agree that the self is better thought of as a fluid, dynamic thing rather than a stable presence, but it seems your thinking wants both, i.e., you also mention a constant fact that persists through the changes…

Given I affirm a changing self, to me the self is always dying. To live is to die, so to speak, until we reach that final death when, well, game over. I think the death Christianity and other religious traditions help us overcome is not our ultimate physical death, but the death of ourself, which comes each instant of our life.

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Something else we should worry about, perhaps more than our death and whether we surive it: the death of another, or whether others survive… When it’s my death I’m faced with - which given the fluid nature of the self is an everyday affair - should my concern be whether I survive it, which makes little sense given it’s my death, or whether others survive it, in the sense my death pays for their life? That my death begets life? That there is eternal life whether it is my life or not?

Is there life after death? When we ask this we can’t turn selfish… It’s not whether our own personal life carries on after it dies, but whether our death brought life to another…

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Reminds me of Housman’s “The Knife”:

I need but stick it in my heart
and down will fall the sky,
the earth’s foundations will depart
and all you folk shall die.

The thought I have about all this, from a lapsed initiate buddhist ex-catholic perspective, is the thought that, ultimately, for the pedestrian spiritualist, the primary purpose for practicing the exercise of meditation is so that, at the moment of death, I have the presence of mind to be in an auspicious emotional state, such that my rebirth would be a fortunate one, on the way to annihilating my ego, which is apparently not such an easy thing actually to accomplish… effort, effort, everywhere I look… :frowning:

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The funny thing is we aren’t that far from making this a practical matter. I’m fully convinced that limitless life extension will be available in the future. It seems rather clear that old age is an evolved trait, and will a little genetic mucking it will be capable to turn aging off.

So what would you do, if you had the option of continuing this existance forever? Will the belivers abondon their thoughts of afterlife for life everafter? And when there are 400 year old people, will they keep the same name, the same personality, the same debt? It’s facinating stuff.

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Maybe, but you can’t turn cancer off with replicating cells.

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We have gotten no closer than the cave men who first developed souls as to where the universe came from, nor have we acquired the first clue about the fate of our spirits when we die. These seminal sources of all doubt in this world, are better faced head on than trying to live the lie of fantasies as answers.

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One of the interesting things about cancer is that it is unrelenting cell replication… In other words, one of the genetic problems we need to overcome is the limited number of times our cells can divide/replicate. Cancer, perhaps, holds the answer…

Even if we could harness/control the power of cancer though, we would still have to face the fact that after each replication our genetic information deteriorates (which is why our skin eventually sags and our brains dull). Even the potential for ceaseless cell division doesn’t change the fact that we’d require constant genetic therapy to improve, reinforce, or at least slow the deterioration of our dna…

But even if engineering perfectly solves the problem of aging I don’t think the relevance of religious scripture will diminish. In fact, scripture will become even more important… Scripture shows us how to live, so that with an eternal lifetime to live its significance becomes paramount…

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Hello Alyoshka:

— Omar, I can’t fathom any sort of continuance beyond death… I do agree that the self is better thought of as a fluid, dynamic thing rather than a stable presence, but it seems your thinking wants both, i.e., you also mention a constant fact that persists through the changes…
O- Yes, otherwise we would not even recognize any changes whatsoever. To declare that all is flux you require a stable platform that serves as reference of non-flux. Now, our choice of platforms might be arbitrary, but we cannot do without.

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Omar–

I was struck by the title of your thead because by definition death is the one thing we do not survive. When the ancients wrote about Hades they must have been speaking of death. The impossibility of discussing the content of death objectively resulted in paradoxical metaphorical statements in mythological narratives. To that we can add intimations of immortality experienced in dreams and near death experience. But they too are paradoxical from an existential perspective. The New Testament Resurrection Event stands in contradistinction to death not as a life-in-death symbol.

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Omar,

I’m not so much interested in recognizing that change is always taking place… To prove that nothing stays the same would take an inductive argument, and I think these are weak and futile especially in this case since the proof would have to verify against all beings, past, present and future… So I agree you’d need a stable base from which to perform such an inductive proof, but even if accomplished all that would be proven is that relative to that stable base everything changes… It doesn’t say whether things change in themselves, if I can use such a phrase, which is more precisely what I would want to show…

So really, I don’t think it’s possible to show whether all is in flux or whether all stays the same… I’m more taking it for granted than trying to prove it. I’m kind of like Thales who simply says “All is water”, or God who says “All is dust”. I’m not trying to prove or recognize this fact; I’m simply taking it as fact!

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Hello Alyoshka:

— So really, I don’t think it’s possible to show whether all is in flux or whether all stays the same… I’m more taking it for granted than trying to prove it. I’m kind of like Thales who simply says “All is water”, or God who says “All is dust”. I’m not trying to prove or recognize this fact; I’m simply taking it as fact!
O- Fair enough. Now I am not trying top have it both ways, meaning that I recognize the change involved but presume of some intact quality. As a simple existentialist argument, it states the questions and picks an answer and then picks at that answer like a scab. A “saturated self”, as Gergen would call it, is posited, but my question is:“Which of the selfs that make up a person’s life, and even my life, stands to survive?” I can imagine a counter-argument that the diversity is only apparent or that a solid, unique entity, emerges from the multiplicity of selfs, so that a man is not any given moment or any independent self, but what emerges in his entire life, or the entire conglomerate. The building is one but within the building you find many offices with people doing different things. My retort to such arguments is that they are limited by the ability of the analogy or metaphor and usually fails because the analogy has a well established set of boundaries while the self or selfs, is made up of fuzzy boundaries, fantasy and missing bits.
Since “we” (our idea of self) do not necessarly survive old age, why supose that it has any chance after death? I don’t care if we really survive death, but asks those who believe in such immortality to define it’s character. How do they imagine it to be or how do they say it must be? Once it was pretty easy to imagine soul as the little man within, but now we see that it is a commission, with some constituents with false citizenship and others citizens lost and unaccounted for; so what the hell survives death? What is immortal?

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For the record, Thales had some evidence for his claim all is water. Plants seem to spring from water. Water sustains life in people. Alsmost everything he had available to crush up, leaves, soil, small animals, would produce water. Water easily transforms into ice or vapor, why not other things? Without the benefit of modern science, it was a pretty good hypothesis. Of course, without the benefit of someone like Thales, we would have never developed science. We’d still be blaiming the gods for everything.

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No.

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LostGuy: Thales had evidence, sure, I’m not denying that. There is plenty of evidence for all is water, which to me means all is change or all is dust, just as God sent a flood… But as much evidence as may be there is still no proof… Thales had no proof. God has no proof. I have no proof… Just statements for which there is lots of evidence.

Omar: I’m seeing unity in life in the series of reactions from birth to death that constitute a life. Each self is a response to the given world, so that the essential nature of the self is to respond, or that each self is a response… There is a responsibility that persists from one self to the next, tying the current moment to all past, as if responsibility was the connective tissue that unites a life. By this I mean the current self, even though different from all past selfs, is still responsible for what all past selfs did. In other words, if I killed a man in the past I am no less responsible for it now than I was when I did it, when my self was actually a murderous self… If this responsibility wasn’t there, my current self wouldn’t be responsible for it, and this I cannot accept.

I cannot accept it because I feel responsible for what I did in the past. Given my feelings of shame and my desires to be forgiven I can’t honestly say I think each moment is a whole new self. If I say such a thing I also say that no one is responsible for anything they did in the past, and only for what they do right now.

So as to your final question, I think our responsibility is the only thing that persists through life and stands to survive. And in a sense, responsibility is life (or perhaps its life is responsibility)… How is it that you know if someone is dead? They don’t respond… Life is responding (and as such responsibility) just as death is given by the no-response (have you read Levinas?)…

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We don’t even know what we ‘are’ with absolute certainty.

How can we know if we ‘survive’ death? How can we know what ‘survives’ death? Is there a common, irrefutable and clear definition of ‘death’ to begin with?

It’s just funny that you ask for ‘complex’ responses, Omar, when you yourself are pretty aware that this sort of topic can only lead to mere conjecture and redundancy.

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Alyoshka:

— I’m seeing unity in life in the series of reactions from birth to death that constitute a life. Each self is a response to the given world, so that the essential nature of the self is to respond, or that each self is a response… There is a responsibility that persists from one self to the next, tying the current moment to all past, as if responsibility was the connective tissue that unites a life. By this I mean the current self, even though different from all past selfs, is still responsible for what all past selfs did.
O- That all seems quite arbitrary. You say “There is” but do not show “how” there is or how this came to be. Now I got a question: Do you include the chemical composition of the brain as part of the world or as a reaction to the world?

— In other words, if I killed a man in the past I am no less responsible for it now than I was when I did it, when my self was actually a murderous self… If this responsibility wasn’t there, my current self wouldn’t be responsible for it, and this I cannot accept.
O- I do not see reaction to the “world” as sufficient glue to tie moments of a single being. A person who suffers from dementia may still react to the world, but may fail to recognize his own family, a recall that is indicative of a link to prior selves. Secondly, I can, as most courts of law, see cases were the person did not possess the faculties that are needed to assume responsibility. It is not automatic. Responsibility requires a freewill. Philosophers who reject the existence of freewill, like Bertrand Russell, whom Hitchens models himself after, considered crime as a disease to be cured. If I am determined by a disease (and in some cases it is so) then I am as much of a victim as my victim of circumstances which I did not choose and of a reaction I could not control.

— I cannot accept it because I feel responsible for what I did in the past.
O- I know that is how you and I and every normal person “feels”, but the question is if such a feeling has scientific basis, or a chain of causation other than in our imagination? Seems like we create a link from self to self, regardless of whether tha link actually exists or not. Physically, objectively, we can agree with Hume and scientists who rip our selves in a million pieces. But subjectively, psychologically, we have a need or instinct or predisposition to expand our experience into the past and into the future and it is prehaps what allows us to reason about anything. But you said something very interesting. The self is a reaction and so it is itself a memory. It is never immediate or coexistent with the moment but a reaction to a moment just past…we are talking millionths of a second, but nonetheless it is “behind” in time. My subjective “now” occurs in my objective “future”. Therefore I can see why we share this ability to “feel” ourselves responsible, or feel as if were are just one person and not thousands in the course of a life. But we concede involutary change…every now and then, as in, for example, age. We concede that age changes us against our will, not just physically but psychologically. Did something stupid at 21 years of age? Chalk it up to being young and restless. Does it removes responsibility? Well in courts of law, some debate is going on as to whether a seven year old child stands responsible for pulling the trigger on some people. A young girl (7 or 8 years old) may have sex with a mature man. Shall we hold her responsible for her actions? Shall we treat her choice the same way we treat a 30 year old woman’s choice? I think not.

— Given my feelings of shame and my desires to be forgiven I can’t honestly say I think each moment is a whole new self.
O- Feelings that say a lot. The feeling of shame is dependant on our ability to recall an episode or a past self. Even if we are no longer that same person our memory of that action is then tied to our idea of wholeness and guilt ensues. But what if you could not remember? Ignorance is bliss. The second feeling is the need to be forgiven. This is the self spreading into the future or it’s assertion of it’s own survival as a unity into the future. Unlike the past which have to content with recall, the future is wilfully invented and can be just about anything our imagination can create. The idea of being forgiven has only one roadblock: It has to coincide with another’s idea of forgiveness or the terms of forgiveness. As with God, so with other beings. A contract is struck. I may do something I regret deeply and feel responsible for my deed and suffer the bite of remorse. I ask for forgiveness and/or I try to make restitutions for my act. Suppose it was an accident- I may still feel all of these. Now I may have to pay money for my act or do time for it. I am already ashamed of my act so that time behind bars to “think” is redundant. But I may still feel guilty enough that I wish to do the time or whatever else to make restitution and earn forgiveness. Now “forgiveness” cannot be earned…it can only be given and we have no universal theory as to what makes a person forgive another, but more on that later. So here I am, and the day comes for my release. I want to see my victims to hear that they have forgiven my transgression, but they say that they hate me and wish that I was dead, even though I have asked in attrition for forgiveness and did time. At this time myidea of fair exchange, or fairness, disagrees with their idea and I become their “victim”, for I now consider them as unjust. I may understand their hate, but only by my forgiving them. And my need for forgiveness? Where shall it come from? Not just from the victim saying “I forgive you” but from a sense of justice within me that says when I have done enough to earn forgiveness.
Now let us look at the “victims” point of view. Why wouldn’t they forgive such a man? It depends on the crime and their sense of fairness, of course, but also in their ability to forget. Remembering opens wounds. Remembering tie today with the past and here is where the self is whole in the eyes of others. You are not the man feeling remorse, nor the man who spend time in prision…no. You are that self, that “murderous” self, then as right now. For this reason, as with God, so with others. A new birth has to be believed in. A new start a new self, a detached self, able to condemn what were his ways because they stand as an Other and not as his own unity or whole self. A born again christian speaks shamelessly about his past sin because he sees them as stripped from them and feels that he is seen by the congregation as free from them, born again in an impressive change of selves. “Sin no more” for you are not that self anymore. It is a memory but the recollection of an-other.

— So as to your final question, I think our responsibility is the only thing that persists through life and stands to survive.
O- But it is a feeling. You are saying that feelings exists with no body? And I say that feelings of guilt, like feelings of self, are determined by brain states. A person may still be alive but with amnesia and feel no guilt because they cannot remember what they should be guilty for. Life persist but feelings need not survive. Now how shall we define responsibility? By what we feel responsible for or by what others feel? If by others feelings then even if I feel no guilt, as I have no memory, I may have a continuous Self in the eyes of others who perhaps need that sense of having a scapegoat rather than having no object whatsoever to feel hate towards. And as far as us being the judges of our own responsibility, have you ever told someone: “It’s not your fault” and they did not believe you. How many patients are out there who were molested as children and were made to think that they were responsible for the whole entire thing by the spouses of the molestors? Are their selves determined by the survival of such cruel and unjust feeling of responsibility? “Our” responsibility is a matter of perspective then and could die as easily as with a brain cell.

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Fabiano…what a lucky man you are. Brazil… Is that a picture of a beach in Brazil?

What is this “absolute certainty”? We are not discussing math here, as your study of Hume will tell you. So throw out any hope for absolutes. If you agree, that is enough. The only source of authority and absolute certainty is our subjective. I exist. I can assert that with no confirmation or proof by argument. It simply IS what I am certain of. Now, if you actually doubt your own existence then that is another story.
Do we need to define death? You have family, don’t you? Do you say that all of your family is “alive” or are there some family members that are “dead” or that have “died”? You probably use the word with the same consistency as me, so why do we have to define death. This is not an exercise in formal logic in which irrefutable concepts leads us to inevitable conclusions, but an existentialist argument, explained by narrations of life. That is why I advised for “complex” responses.

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[size=85]hmm, I have often heard that I’m very lucky for being Brazilian: the climate, the tranquility, the women… Unfortunately, my country is FAR, very far from being the paradise portrayed by tourist propaganda. However, you would have to live here to understand that…[/size]

[size=85]no[/size]

when we can’t have absolute certainty, we are only left with beliefs, weak and strong beliefs. I just think that it’s quite useless to ask for existencialist arguments for the existence of life after death when you’re pretty sure that all we can do is to offer you our own conjectures and beliefs concerning this subject. I do not really ‘believe’ that there is an after-life, because it seems pretty pointless to me, but since I can’t prove that this is really true, I must admit that this is no more than a belief. I actually believe that we don’t survive death, I don’t really know it. In fact, I think I will never know it for sure.

That’s going to sound pretty redundant, Omar, but please tell me, why should I wish to survive death? Why wouldn’t one life be enough?

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Hello Fabiano:

Hey, I know what you mean. I am from Puerto Rico and I have seen the commercials and recognize nothing in them of the place I knew.

— when we can’t have absolute certainty, we are only left with beliefs, weak and strong beliefs.
O- Very well. We are finite beings. What else could we expect?

— I just think that it’s quite useless to ask for existencialist arguments for the existence of life after death when you’re pretty sure that all we can do is to offer you our own conjectures and beliefs concerning this subject.
O- Is that a strong belief or a weak belief? Existentialist’s arguments are quite useful actually since, as you say, “we can’t have absolute certainty”. What we do have are beliefs. Existentialist arguments simply state our doubts and beliefs. Existentialism does not require “un fin”, in fact it negates the possibility as it smacks of essentialism. What is or isn’t useful is again is a matter of opinion or preferrence. What would you rather do? You much rather offer Absolute Truth or Absolute Certainty so that we are left with facts and errors? Is this what you call “useful”? Arguments are always made out of conjectures and beliefs concerning a subject. I ask then for what to you must seem useless.

— I do not really ‘believe’ that there is an after-life, because it seems pretty pointless to me, but since I can’t prove that this is really true, I must admit that this is no more than a belief. I actually believe that we don’t survive death, I don’t really know it. In fact, I think I will never know it for sure.
O- See? Was that so bad?

— That’s going to sound pretty redundant, Omar, but please tell me, why should I wish to survive death? Why wouldn’t one life be enough?
O- Different question. I asked “what”, not “why”. I don’t wish to survive death…I don’t even know what we mean by the question. If perhaps you can answer “what may survive death?” then I may understand the relevance of desire. What I mean is that I am not clear as to what “we” “are”. At the time of death, what is it that survives? Only whatever we can still remember? Are we a sequence of memories? And since our memories can be enhanced by vain immagination, is it not even the historical memory that survives death but my ideal of a self?