Body, soul and personal identity revision sheet

A. What does the spec want you to know?

i. The nature and existence of the soul and the body/soul relationship – differing views

ii. Personal identity and the possibility of continued personal existence after death – immortality, resurrection, rebirth, reincarnation and replica theory

iii. Nature of Near Death Experiences and their value as evidence of survival beyond death

iv. Is the notion of personal post mortem existence coherent?

v. Do Near Death Experiences provide reasonable grounds for belief in the afterlife?

vi. Is the notion of soul coherent and are there reasonable grounds for belief in the existence of a soul?

B. Arguments FOR the existence of the soul

i. Plato: Life cannot emerge from a dead thing. Something living must have given life to the body “the soul is that which renders the body living” The immortal soul enters the body at birth and leaves it at death.

ii. Descartes:The knowledge argument

I know that I exist as a thinking thing- res cogitans. This is induibitable. To doubt that I exist is a sort of thinking and if I am thinking I must exist.

I can doubt that I have a body.

Mind has the property of being induibitable. Body has the property of being doubtable. Leibniz’s Law says that the same entity must have the same properties. Mind and body have different properties so mind and body are not the same entity

iii. Descartes’ argument from indivisibility

BODY- what are its properties? Divisible.

SOUL- what are its properties- indivisible.

Liebniz’s Law

Mind and body cannot be the same entity.

C. Counter arguments

i. To Plato: We are not a dead thing animated by a soul. We are a material thing which under conditions of life can perform certain functions. By analogy a toaster is a material thing that can perform certain functions. It is not animated by a toaster soul. There is no need to posit the existence of another, immaterial substance here. RUSSELL "Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities."

ii. To Descartes: Just because he thinks he has a soul with the essential property of thinking doesn’t mean that it exists or has those properties. He has misapplied Leibniz. By analogy Rachel thinks that Batman saved her from the Joker. She thinks that Bruce did not save her from the Joker. Does this prove that Batman is not Bruce? NO- Rachel has just got it wrong…like Descartes!

iii. Immaterial objects do not exist. (If you disagree find me one!)

iv. Souls and minds are just ways of talking about the functions of a person. If I say that I changed my mind I don’t mean that I went and got a new immaterial object! It is a manner of speaking which we have made the mistake of taking literally. Ryle- a category mistake (where is the university?)

v. If we did have a soul/mind it would be causally ineffective. How could an immaterial substance interact with a material one? You can’t make a cake with immaterial eggs and material flour.

vi. A mind is not made of material so it cannot be physically located. What would make a soul mine? How do I know I only have one?

D. Can we save life after death?

Well you could try to use REPLICA- Hick?

i. Hick wants to provide an account of an afterlife which does not rely on the existence of a soul as a separate substance.

ii. Replication does not depend on moral behavior- you get replicated because you are human not because you are good!

iii. Upon death, a ‘replica’ of you is placed in a special, separate place (usually thought of as a different ‘plane’ of existence). This ‘replica’ is exactly like you in every way. Hick asserts that the ‘replica’ of which he speaks is not the same as a replica (no quotes), of which one could potentially create hundreds. Hick maintains that there can only be one ‘you’ because we as human beings are individuals – if I had several versions of myself, I would not ‘be’ all of them, just one, and while the others would be eerily similar versions of myself I would not consider them to be the current me.

iv. Your dead body would, of course still exist. But this version of yourself is no longer you.

v. Recreation of the body in the resurrection world is a divine act, which Hick says might occur immediately, or perhaps after a certain wait (in accordance with a Judgement Day, perhaps.) When God does remake your body, he remakes you completely whole, as you were. There is not, at any point, a separation of body and soul or anything else.

Strengths

i. Hick has given an account of an afterlife which does not rely on dualism which we have seen raises a great many problems.

ii. Hick allows only one ‘replica’ to avoid one obvious objection from the problem of identity – if there was more than one ‘you’ at any one time, that would be a paradox – personal identity relies on numerical identity.

Criticisms

i. Paul Davies- it would be no consolation to me that a replica version of me were to suddenly be created upon my death because I would still be dead. Hick defends this objection by saying there can be only one ‘replica’ as if this makes a difference. I don’t see how this helps because there is no physical continuity. The version in the resurrection world would only think that it was me. How is a replica any consolation to me?

ii. Hick seems to ignore the question of punishment or judgement for sins – no matter how evil someone has been in life, their replica will still exist in the resurrection world no matter what.

iii. If the person who comes to exist in the replica world is EXACTLY like the person who dies then they will be at the point of death. If Hick says that people are recreated

iv. The question, then, is why this matters. Surely, it would be preferable for us all to be magically transformed into ‘us’ in our prime, rather than as an old (or dead) person. But the me I was in my prime IS NOT ME!

e.Nature Of The Soul

i. Plato- Plato thinks the soul is immortal, unchanging and immaterial. It animates the body. Without it we are a corpse.

ii. Descartes- Descartes thinks the body is a machine made of earth which regulates the body like a fountain keeper regulates the function of the fountain. Remember his example of the shepherd and the wolf.

iii. Aquinas – He believes that we will be physically resurrected. He quotes this verse. ‘I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth, and I shall be clothed again with my skin’"-(Job 19:25-26) Aquinas also quotes Aristotle: "the soul is united to the body as form to matter". |He believes the body is the matter of the soul. The soul is superior, but both body and soul are necessary for definition of ourselves.

iv. Hinduism- Atman =the non-material self, which never changes. Distinct from both mind and external body. The real self is beyond race, gender, species and nationality. Ideas of reincarnation arise naturally from this concept.

v. Buddism- Anatman There is no "self" in the sense we generally understand it. What we think of as our self (our personality or ego) are temporary creations of the skandhas. (Sanskrit meaning "aggregate." Buddhists believe that an individual is a combination of five aggregates of existence. These are: Form, Sensation, Perception, Mental formations, Consciousness)

vi. Materialism: The soul is simply a metaphorical way of talking about brain states or behaviors which we have made the error of taking literally. Ryle- the example of the visitor to the university. We are our body and its functions.

f.Personal Identity

i. Qualitative and numerical identity.

ii. Dualism- Dualists think that my personal identity depends on my having the same soul over time. Question to think about- if all my thoughts, feelings and memories were transferred to another soul who would be me?

iii. Psychological Continuity- My identity depends on my thoughts, ideas and feelings. Locke thinks that memories are essential to identity. He thinks that if Bert remembers his wedding day and if , on his wedding day he remembered his first day at school then he is the same person as the schoolboy.

iv. Physical Continuity- My identity depends on there being a continuity of the matter that I am made of. Of course Bert now is not made of the same molecules as he was back then but at the time that each molecule changed most of his molecules stayed the same. Bernard Williams thinks that identity depends on more than half of the brain being the same but other people think that it is not just the brain that matters.

v. Thought Experiments: We thought about the implications for identity theory of thought experiments like transplants (Which would you rather be, someone who is a brain donor or someone who receives a brain transplant? If you could go in the Star Trek transporter would you still be you when you arrived? What if the you in the transporter room did not dematerialize? Who would you be then?

g. Near Death Experiences

i. What are NDEs? a range of personal experiences associated with impending death- possible sensations range from detachment from the body, sensation of levitation, fear, total serenity, security, or warmth, the experience of absolute dissolution, the presence of a light, which may be interpreted as a deity.

ii. Dr. Raymond Moody- From a study of 150 people who had “clinically died” or almost died, Moody concluded that there are nine experiences common to most people who have had a near death experience. These are:

a. hearing sounds such as buzzing

b. a feeling of peace and painlessness

c. having an out-of-body experience

d. a feeling of traveling through a tunnel

e. a feeling of rising into the heavens

f. seeing people, often dead relatives

g. meeting a spiritual being such as God

h. seeing a review of one's life

i. feeling a reluctance to return to life

iii. NDE Accounts- Joyce Hawkes, a scientist, with a PhD, fell out of a window. As she fell out, she felt that her spirit/ soul had left her to go to another reality. "I think what I learned was that there truly is no death, that there is a change in state from a physical form to a spirit form, and that there's nothing to fear about that passage," Plato The Myth of Er

iv. Dr. Sam Parnia – 3 year study to determine if people without heartbeat or brain activity can have an out-of-body experience with veridical visual perceptions. "evidence is now suggesting that mental and cognitive processes may continue for a period of time after a death has started" and describes the process of death as "essentially a global stroke of the brain. Therefore like any stroke process one would not expect the entity of mind / consciousness to be lost immediately".

v. 1990s, Dr. Rick Strassman research on the psychedelic drug (DMT) -theory that a massive release of DMT might cause near-death experience phenomenon.

vi. Richard Kinseher 2006 Sensory Autonomic System – brain senses oncoming death- no experience has ever been like this and the brain scans everything in order to find a stored experience which is comparable to the input information of death. The brain is searching for a coping mechanism out of the potentially fatal situation.

vii. Susan Blackmore says NDE peace/euphoria might be due to release of endorphins and the random activity of neurons as the brain lose3s organization (neural noise) “If you started with very little neural noise and it gradually increased, the effect would be of a light at the centre getting larger and larger and hence closer and closer....the tunnel would appear to move as the noise levels increased and the central light got larger and larger....If the whole cortex became so noisy that all the cells were firing fast, the whole area would appear light.” Pim van Lommel "With a purely physiological explanation such as cerebral anoxia for the experience, most patients who have been clinically dead should report one." Accordingly, a lack of predictable experiences should cast doubt on wholesale explanations of NDEs.

viii. Near Death Experience patients are not dead! They are really poorly…dead means dead- you don’t come back from that and recount the experience.

ix. If a patient says they saw something while unconscious what were they seeing with? If one’s spirit is immaterial how can it be located in order to look back at the old body from the ceiling.

x. Some say NDEs prove something because they are universal but does this just indicate that they are a function of human biology?

	Created by Nick Purches-Knab over 10 years ago

Note on Body soul personal identity, created by Nick Purches-Knab on 17/12/2013.

Body soul personal identity