Why we can't imagine death

Scientifc American has a fascinating article by Jesse Bering that explores why every culture has at least some notions of an after-life:

Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead, too?

And yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.

The common view of death as a great mystery usually is brushed aside as an emotionally fueled desire to believe that death isn’t the end of the road. And indeed, a prominent school of research in social psychology called terror management theory contends that afterlife beliefs, as well as less obvious beliefs, behaviors and attitudes, exist to assuage what would otherwise be crippling anxiety about the ego’s inexistence.

According to proponents, you possess a secret arsenal of psychological defenses designed to keep your death anxiety at bay (and to keep you from ending up in the fetal position listening to Nick Drake on your iPod). My writing this article, for example, would be interpreted as an exercise in “symbolic immortality”; terror management theorists would likely tell you that I wrote it for posterity, to enable a concrete set of my ephemeral ideas to outlive me, the biological organism. (I would tell you that I’d be happy enough if a year from now it still had a faint pulse.)

Yet a small number of researchers, including me, are increasingly arguing that the evolution of self-consciousness has posed a different kind of problem altogether. This position holds that our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it’s this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start.

Read it all here.

Posted on October 26, 2008 12:00 PM | |
Comments (3)

Thanks for this article. No, we can't imagine not imagining.

I remember a vivid dream in which I was in a house that was blown up -- and at the moment of the explosion, I was on a hill nearby watching the fireball. Our sense of continual existence is connected with the inexorable illusion that we are spiritual pilots sitting behind the window of our eyes, steering this meaty machine. But the evidence is that consciousness is produced by the organism. There is no proof that consciousness is something non-material that exists independent of the body. Brave of Episcopal Cafe to publish this view, which pretty much sweeps aside the supernatural traditions of the faith. I'm for it.

I've opined here before that Christianity is a story we tell, buttressed by tradition and authority. Evidence for it at this late date is lacking. Each of us holds it as an opinion. It's been a productive story, and I hope we can continue in its path, but selling it as fact, a Truth conserved in the Church, is less and less possible.

Murdoch
Husband of Garydasein

Posted by garydasein [TypeKey Profile Page] | October 26, 2008 4:59 PM

I am content to be here in this time and space (or so I believe!) --- what is next I will either know or not. But as Woody Allen's father in one of his movie's says:
I'll be dead. That much I know.

Posted by Ann Fontaine [TypeKey Profile Page] | October 26, 2008 6:57 PM

Suppose the mind with its thinking, feeling process were an overlay onto a state of pure consciousness without content but the very ground of our being and all existence, and at death we were to return to that state of pure bliss. Wouldn't we be able to say with Paul, "Death, where is thy sting?"

Posted by A L MacArthur [TypeKey Profile Page] | November 13, 2008 2:31 AM

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