Immortality (25 page)

T
HE
attractions of the Soul Narrative for the moralists extend even to its dark side: the belief in ghosts. There are countless tales of souls that do not go gently into the next world but stay here on earth to haunt the living. These ghoulish tales too have a didactic purpose, as the hauntings are very often portrayed as the result of some moral transgression. This is frequently some evil done to the deceased: in many cultures, improper burial is sufficient to set the spirit roaming, and violent murder is a surefire way to ensure a haunting—for example, as in the case of Hamlet’s father, who walks the earth until he is avenged. But equally, the cause of the restless spirit might be some wickedness they themselves committed, condemning them to either make amends or haunt the earth forever like the ghost of Jacob Marley in Charles Dickens’s
A Christmas Carol
, who was too miserly to deserve a proper place in the afterlife. Either way, such stories reinforce the message that we must be good in this life or we will get our comeuppance in the next.

Belief in ghosts has been found in so many different societies and worldviews that many anthropologists consider it a cultural universal. Even in modern, secular environments, this belief remains high—according to recent polls, for example, 42 percent of Americans believe in ghosts; in the United Kingdom it’s 38 percent. Given the implications of such a belief—that bodily death, contrary to all the evidence, is not the end—these are remarkable figures. But we
have already seen in the second part of the Mortality Paradox that we are predisposed to think of our own souls living on indefinitely; increasingly psychologists believe that similar cognitive mechanisms are at work when we think of other people.

We are used to imagining friends and family when they are not physically present, psychologists argue, and that same ability—very useful in ordinary life—causes us to continue to imagine them if they die. In other words, our sophisticated mental picture of the world includes these people, and we cannot so easily erase them from this picture overnight—especially if they have played a prominent role in our lives. The result is powerful feelings, even hallucinations, that the deceased are somehow still with us. Or in a word, ghosts.

It is tempting to think that the established religions frown upon such beliefs—certainly the clergy are often portrayed battling against the spirits of darkness. But wise priests have long recognized that belief in the Soul Narrative and belief in restless spirits go hand in hand. As early as 1681, the English clergyman Joseph Glanvill wrote a treatise denouncing skepticism about the existence of ghosts, suggesting it was the first step toward atheism and thence the end of civilization as we know it. Today, modern gurus in both the Eastern tradition, such as Deepak Chopra, and the Western, such as pastor James L. Garlow, mentioned in
chapter 6
, continue to cite ghost stories as evidence that souls are real.

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question of evidence plays a central role in the Soul Narrative. Believers in the Resurrection Narrative expect a miraculous act of God; therefore only faith in him could justify their hope of immortality. But belief in a soul has always been different: the existence of the soul was a hypothesis amenable to reason; the logicians of both ancient Greece and ancient India considered it to be the
best explanation for a host of empirical phenomena and puzzles of existence. So whereas Jesus, whose hope lay in resurrection, cried out for his God from the cross, Socrates, having rationally demonstrated that his true self was immortal and about to be set free, was able to drink the poisonous hemlock with utter composure.

But what is it that is supposed to prove the soul’s existence? First, there is the fact of life itself. There seems to be an unbridgeable gulf between things that are living and things that are not. For many cultures, such as the ancient Greek, it seemed clear that living things had some extra component that gave them their vitality, something that rocks, dust and water lacked. This animating principle was the soul: being alive and being ensouled were one and the same.

Second, there is the fact of consciousness. Some living things are not only able to move or grow but to think, imagine and believe. Once again, there seems to be a great gulf between material stuff, which is graspable, measurable and visible, and the realm of ideas, which float in our minds. Clearly minds are not like other things in the world, and their existence requires a special explanation: for many, that is the soul.

Third, there is the more esoteric evidence: the young Lhamo Dhondup’s ability to choose the rosary and walking stick that once belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama, for example. Even more elaborate stories of Indian children remembering past lives are regularly reported and are considered by many as proof that souls move from one incarnation to the next. And as we just noted, sightings of ghosts are believed by some to be evidence for the existence of the spirit and its survival beyond death.

These three arguments are no longer as obviously convincing as they were two thousand, two hundred, or even just twenty years ago. We saw in
chapter 3
that the scientific consensus has long turned against the idea that an animating principle is required to explain life. The modern understanding of how life works, from the
organism down to individual organs, to tiny cells and to DNA, leaves no room for spiritual substances. The first of the ancient arguments for the existence of the soul we can therefore leave aside.

The third argument, based on ghosts and other spooky sightings, is also best left to one side. Those who have attempted to investigate these phenomena in order to draw substantive conclusions have invariably come away disappointed. Rarely do ghost stories or past-life recollections bear much scrutiny, and even where no fraud or invention is involved, other explanations for what happened are usually at least as plausible as the existence of an active spirit world. If this sounds to some readers like short shrift, it is worth noting that the Society for Psychical Research, founded in London in 1882 by some of the most eminent thinkers of the day to explore paranormal phenomena in a positive spirit, failed in over a hundred years of open-minded investigations to find any widely persuasive evidence of supernatural happenings.

However, one source of purported supernatural evidence for souls is worth mentioning: that of so-called out-of-body experiences (OBEs). The classic case is that of a patient whose heart has temporarily stopped beating and who seems to experience leaving their body, perhaps looking down on it, or perhaps traveling down a tunnel of light where they are met by deceased family or other benevolent beings. These experiences can be life-changing for those who have them and are often interpreted as reinforcing their religious beliefs.

That people sometimes experience such things as traveling down a tunnel of light is not disputed. The popular perception of such experiences is, however, skewed: many people are not aware, for example, that the classic case described above forms only a minority of such experiences, which vary greatly in detail and intensity and do not occur only when a patient is near death. Indeed, experiences much like an OBE can be induced by certain drugs or by electrodes stimulating part of the brain. Attempts have therefore been made to
test the veracity of claims to be floating outside the body—for example, by putting up signs in emergency rooms that could be read only from a vantage point above the patient. So far, no hard evidence of a person genuinely leaving his or her body has resulted.

In order to conclude that the existence of souls really is the best explanation for out-of-body experiences—or for haunted houses, or for a Tibetan child choosing one rosary over another—we would first need a plausible account of what the soul is and how it could survive the body. Given the ambiguity of the evidence, without a strong theory of the soul a naturalistic explanation is likely always to be preferable. This therefore brings us to the case for the second argument: for the soul as mind.

Although large numbers of people today profess belief in a soul, many are vague when pressed on exactly what they think it is. But if the soul is to be your vehicle to immortality, then it must capture some fundamental essence—the real you—such that if your soul lives on after the death of your body, you can be assured that
you
live on. In the West, this “real you” is usually taken to mean your mind—that conscious part of you that thinks, feels, remembers, dreams. When you float out of your dying body or arrive in heaven, you expect at the very least to have conscious awareness and intact memories and beliefs.

The case
for
the existence of the immortal soul therefore rests upon the mind being independent of the body and dependent instead upon some spiritual essence that can survive bodily death. If, on the other hand, the mind is entirely dependent on the body, then we would have to conclude that the mind dies when the body dies, and there would then be little of us left over to call the soul. The crucial question for the plausibility of the Soul Narrative is therefore whether your mind or consciousness can, like the captain of a sinking ship, leave your dying body to continue its existence, or whether, as one of Socrates’s skeptical friends put it, your mind ceases with
the destruction of your body just as the music of a harp ceases with the destruction of the harp. Let us consider the evidence.

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doctrine of the soul stems from a time before the insights of modern science, when philosophers (Aristotle, for example) believed that the brain was nothing more than an elaborate cooling mechanism for the blood. The body seemed a crude and unreliable construction—clay roughly molded by the gods. It seemed inconceivable that this matter could be responsible for the richness of memory, the mystery of creative thought or the profundity of religious sentiment. Much more rational instead to attribute the glory of the human mind to the soul, the divine spark, than to the workings of the overcooked-cauliflower-like object in our skulls.

Nonetheless, some thinkers—including Aristotle—were skeptical about the mind outliving the body. We have seen that early Jews and Christians also believed immortality could only be granted through the reassembly of the complete man or woman, flesh and all. As science and medicine advanced, evidence for a very close relationship between mind and brain grew. The mischievous skeptic Voltaire, for example, said that he could not help laughing when told that a person’s mental faculties could outlive their brain—a response most unwelcome in the Catholic France of the 1730s. In a treatise first published after his death, he wrote that “as God has connected the ability to have ideas to a part of the brain, he can preserve this faculty only if he preserves this part of the brain; for preserving this faculty without the part would be as impossible as preserving a man’s laugh or a bird’s song after the death of the man or the bird.”

Some of the most compelling early evidence for the dependence of the mind on the brain came from cases of people with brain damage. Probably the most celebrated is that of Phineas Gage, a railway foreman working in the U.S. state of Vermont. A large part of the front of his brain, called the left frontal lobe, was destroyed in 1848
when a metal pole was forced by an explosion through his cheek and out the top of his head, landing some eighty feet away. Remarkably, Gage survived and physically made a full recovery. But more remarkably, at least to the scientific community of the time, the accident altered Gage’s personality in surprising and dramatic ways. Whereas previously a responsible, diligent and respected worker, he is said to have become “capricious,” “fitful” and “irreverent,” unable to hold down a steady job. A localized brain injury seemed to have caused a change in Gage’s moral character, a part of his personality about as closely associated with the God-given soul as any could be.

We do not in fact have enough details about the Gage case to draw substantive conclusions from it alone. But fortunately we don’t have to: both the capacities of medicine to keep alive people with brain damage and of science to systematically study such cases have increased exponentially in the intervening decades. The result is a wealth of data on how injuries to particular parts of the brain can eliminate or substantially alter core aspects of the mind. It is now well documented how specific brain injuries can, for example, destroy a person’s capacities for emotion, memory, creativity, language and, as in the Gage case, respect for social norms and decision-making, as well as a person’s ability to process sense perceptions such as sight and sound. All these are model examples for faculties that would previously have been attributed to the soul. The crux of the challenge is this: those who believe that the soul could preserve these abilities after the total destruction of the brain in death must explain why the soul cannot preserve these abilities when only a small portion of the brain is destroyed.

To make this point clear, we can take the example of sight. If your optic nerves in your brain are sufficiently badly damaged, you will no longer be able to see—you will go blind. This tells us very clearly that the faculty of sight is dependent upon functioning optic nerves. Yet curiously, when many people imagine their soul leaving their body, they imagine being able to see—they imagine, for example,
looking down on their own corpse or on their own funeral procession. They believe, therefore, that their immaterial soul has the faculty of sight. But if the soul can see when the entire brain and body have stopped working, why can’t it see when only the optic nerves have stopped working? In other words, if blind people have a soul that can see, why are they blind?

This question has no satisfactory answer, and indeed some thoughtful theologians, such as Thomas Aquinas, have accepted that a soul without a body cannot see—seeing is something done by a body and brain with eyes and optic nerves in working order. But we now know that, just as damage to the optic nerve can destroy the faculty of sight, so damage to other parts of the brain can destroy faculties like memory and reason. Increasingly, evidence suggests that
all
aspects of the mind and personality are in this way dependent upon the brain. So, paralleling our question about the blind person, we can ask of someone with brain damage who is unable to think rationally or feel emotions: If they actually have a soul that is able to think rationally or feel emotions, why can’t they think rationally or feel emotions? Why would localized brain damage stand in the way when destruction of the whole brain and body does not?