The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (15 page)

In many cases, religious or spiritual participants rejected the possibility that Richard’s bodily and perceptual states (such as being thirsty or being able to taste) survived his death by submitting that these types of mental states were “physical things” or “functions of the body,” whereas Richard’s emotional, desire, and knowledge states went on because they were “spiritual things.” But, of course, cognitive neuroscientists would largely disagree with that assessment.

Being aware of the illusory nature of the problem does little to quell our fears. Even when we desperately want to believe that our minds end at death, that “nothingness” is just a reification, a trick of the mind, it is a real struggle to think practically in this way. Who, for instance, wouldn’t squirm along with the character of Pablo as he finds himself uncomfortably living through the immediate aftermath of his pending execution in Sartre’s short story “The Wall” (1939)? In this tale set during the Spanish civil war, Pablo is a resistance fighter imprisoned with two other inmates and led to believe that he’s to be shot dead at dawn by a firing squad while standing blindfolded against a prison yard wall. “Something’s the matter,” Pablo says to his cell mates. “I see my corpse; that’s not hard but I’m the one who sees it, with my eyes. I’ve got to think…think that I won’t see anything anymore and the world will go on for the others. We aren’t made to think that.”
¹¹
Ironically, nearly forty years after writing this story, a confused and elderly Sartre awoke in a hospital bed only to tug on his nurse’s shirtsleeve demanding to know if he was dead.

So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the “simulation constraint hypothesis,” is that in attempting to imagine what it’s like to be dead, we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences—because that’s how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn’t
like
anything we’ve ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren’t good enough.

For us extinctivists, it’s kind of like staring into a hallway of mirrors—but rather than confronting a visual trick, we’re dealing with cognitive reverberations of subjective experience. In Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s existential screed,
The Tragic Sense of Life
(1912), one can almost see the author tearing out his hair contemplating this very fact. “Try to fill your consciousness with the representation of no-consciousness,” he writes, “and you will see the impossibility of it. The effort to comprehend it causes the most tormenting dizziness.”
¹²

Wait, you say, isn’t Unamuno forgetting something? We certainly do have experience with nothingness. Every night, in fact, when we’re in dreamless sleep. But you’d be mistaken in this assumption. Thomas W. Clark puts it this way: “We may occasionally have the
impression
of having experienced or ‘undergone’ a period of unconsciousness, but, of course, this is impossible. The ‘nothingness’ of unconsciousness cannot be an experienced actuality.”
¹³
The same, of course, goes for that exhaustively long epoch that was life before us—that vast, yawning stretch of time before our conception that we similarly never experienced. In fact, some preliminary evidence found by one of my graduate students, Natalie Emmons, suggests that young children reason about their preexistent minds just as they do for minds in the afterlife, looking back on this “state” as though they were a psychological entity awaiting life.
¹⁴

If psychological immortality represents the intuitive, natural way of thinking about death, then we might expect young children to be particularly inclined to reason in this way. As an eight-year-old, I watched as the remains of our family’s golden retriever, Sam, were buried in the woods behind our house. I knew very well that her brain, which was responsible for her thinking and behavior, was among these ashes. Still, I thought Sam had a mind, somehow separate from her physical brain, capable of knowing I loved her. That Sam’s spirit lived on was not something my parents or anyone else ever explicitly pointed out to me. Although she had been reduced to no more than a few ounces of dust, which was in turn sealed in a now waterlogged box, it never even occurred to me that reasoning about my dead dog’s feelings was a rather strange thing to be doing.

Yet if you were to have asked me what Sam was experiencing now that she was dead, I probably would have muttered something like the type of answer Gerald P. Koocher reported hearing in a 1973 study published in
Developmental Psychology
. Koocher, then a doctoral student at the University of Missouri–Columbia and later president of the American Psychological Association, asked six- to fifteen-year-olds what happens when people die. Consistent with the simulation constraint hypothesis, many answers relied on everyday experience to describe death, “with references to sleeping, feeling ‘peaceful,’ or simply ‘being very dizzy.’”
¹⁵

Koocher’s study in itself doesn’t tell us where such ideas come from. Fortunately, this question can be explored using scientific methods. If afterlife beliefs are a product of cultural indoctrination, with children picking up such ideas through religious teachings, through the media, or informally through family and friends, then one would reasonably predict that psychological-continuity reasoning increases with age. Aside from becoming more aware of their own mortality, after all, older kids have had a longer period of exposure to the concept of an afterlife. In fact, however, recent findings show the opposite developmental trend. In a 2004 study reported in
Developmental Psychology
, Florida Atlantic University psychologist David Bjorklund and I performed a puppet show for two hundred three- to twelve-year-olds. Every child was presented with the story of Baby Mouse, who was out strolling innocently in the woods. “Just then,” we told them, “he notices something very strange. The bushes are moving! An alligator jumps out of the bushes and gobbles him all up. Baby Mouse is not alive anymore.”
¹⁶

Just like the adults from the previously mentioned study, the children were asked about the dead character’s psychological functioning. “Does Baby Mouse still want to go home?” we asked them. “Does he still feel sick?” “Can he still smell the flowers?” The youngest children in the study, the three- to five-year-olds, were significantly more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than were children from the two older age groups. But here’s the really curious part. Even the preschoolers had a solid grasp of biological cessation; they knew, for example, that dead Baby Mouse didn’t need food or water anymore. They knew he wouldn’t grow up to be an adult mouse. Eighty-five percent of the youngest kids even told us that his brain no longer worked. Yet, in answering our specific questions, most of these very young children still attributed thoughts and emotions to dead Baby Mouse, telling us that he was hungry or thirsty, that he felt better, or that he was still angry at his brother. One couldn’t say that the preschoolers lacked a concept of death, therefore, because nearly all of the kids realized that biological imperatives no longer apply after death. Rather, they seemed to have trouble using this knowledge to theorize about related mental functions.

From an evolutionary perspective, some scholars believe that a coherent theory about psychological death is not necessarily vital. Anthropologist H. Clark Barrett of the University of California at Los Angeles, argues instead that understanding the cessation of bodily “agency” (for example, that a dead creature isn’t going to suddenly leap up and bite you) is probably what saved lives (and thus genes) in the ancestral past. According to Barrett, comprehending the cessation of the mind, on the other hand, has no survival value and is, in an evolutionary sense, neither here nor there.
¹⁷

In a 2005 study published in the journal
Cognition
, Barrett and psychologist Tanya Behne of the University of Manchester in England reported that city-dwelling four-year-olds from Berlin were just as good at distinguishing sleeping animals from dead ones as were hunter-horticulturalist children from the Shuar region of Ecuador.
¹⁸
So even today’s urban children, who generally have very little exposure to dead bodies, appear tuned in to perceptual cues signaling death. A “violation of the body envelope” (in other words, a mutilated carcass) is a pretty good sign that one needn’t worry about tiptoeing around.

On the one hand, then, from a very early age, children realize that dead bodies are not coming back to life. On the other hand, also from a very early age, kids endow the dead with ongoing psychological functions, using their theory of mind. This conception may be at least partially why the idea of brainless zombies seems to us so implausible and the stuff of horror movies, limited to only a handful of cultures, whereas some type of spiritual afterlife, with the mindful souls of the deceased passing on to the other side, is by contrast strikingly mundane. So just where do culture and religious teaching come into the mix, if at all?

In fact, exposure to the concept of an afterlife plays a crucial role in enriching and elaborating this natural cognitive stance; it’s sort of like constructing an architectural scaffolding, except in this case culture develops and decorates the innate psychological building blocks of religious belief. The end product can be as ornate or austere as you like, from the headache-inducing reincarnation beliefs of Theravada Buddhists to the man in the street’s “I believe there’s
something
” brand of philosophy—but it’s made of the same brick and mortar. The idea of an afterlife, whatever the specifics, is guided by our intuitions, and these intuitions are enabled only by our illusion-generating theory of mind. Again, our theory of mind allows us to think about our own brainless minds after death, as well as those of our dead loved ones. From a basic cognitive science perspective, then, the specific nature of the afterlife belief is largely irrelevant; it makes no difference whether the soul is believed to ascend, descend, transmigrate, slumber, hover, or recycle. The point is that the soul is likened to personal consciousness, or some mindful “essence” of the individual, and is seen as being curiously immortal all the same.
¹⁹

In support of the idea that culture enhances our natural tendency to deny the death of the mind, Harvard University psychologist Paul Harris and researcher Marta Giménez of the National University of Distance Education in Spain showed that when the wording in children’s interviews is tweaked to include medical or scientific terms, psychological-continuity reasoning decreases. In their 2005 study published in the
Journal of Cognition and Culture
, seven- to eleven-year-old children in Madrid who had heard a story about a priest telling a child that his grandmother was “with God” were more likely to attribute ongoing mental states to the decedent than were those who had heard the identical story but instead about a doctor saying a grandfather was “dead and buried.”
²⁰

And in a 2005 replication of the Baby Mouse experiment published in the
British Journal of Developmental Psychology
, David Bjorklund and I teamed up with psychologist Carlos Hernández Blasi of Jaume I University in Spain to compare children in a Catholic school with those attending a public secular school in Castellón, Spain. As in the previous study, an overwhelming majority of the youngest children—five- to six-year-olds—from both educational backgrounds said that Baby Mouse’s mental states survived after death. The type of curriculum, secular or religious, made no difference. With increasing age, however, culture clearly became a factor: the kids attending Catholic school were more likely to reason in terms of psychological continuity than were those at the secular school. There was even a smattering of young extinctivists in the latter camp.
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What we can make of this overall collection of findings on children’s reasoning about the mind after death is that education matters, but perhaps not as much as is commonly thought. Rather than simply being inculcated by religious adults, the default belief in young children is that mental capacities survive death, albeit in some vague, unarticulated way. It would be somewhat misleading to interpret these findings as meaning that toddlers have “afterlife beliefs,” because, as we’ve seen, the afterlife is a variable social concept that is enriched and given texture and specific cultural details through social transmission. Instead, young children are best envisioned as being naturally
prepared
to endorse the concept of an afterlife because it matches their own intuitions about the continuity of the mind after death. Just as our species’ teleo-functional reasoning, erroneously applied to the category of human existence, biases us naturally toward creationist explanations and beliefs in destiny, so, too, does our theory of mind, erroneously applied to the stateless state of death, orient us toward belief in the afterlife.

The types of cognitive obstacles we’ve covered so far may be responsible for our innate sense of immortality. But although the simulation constraint hypothesis helps explain why so many people believe in something as fantastically illogical as an afterlife, it doesn’t tell us why we so often see the soul as unbuckling itself from the body and floating off like an invisible helium balloon into the realm of eternity. After all, there’s nothing to stop us from having afterlife beliefs that involve the still-active mind being entombed in the skull and deliriously happy, or perhaps hallucinating an eternity in the seconds before brain death. Yet almost nobody has such a belief. Rather, Pessoa sums up most people’s gut feelings in
The Book of Disquiet
(1916):