[tt] Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death

[Eugen Leitl]

(not deep, but what the heck)

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=never-say-die&print=true

Scientific American Mind -  October 22, 2008

Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death

Why so many of us think our minds continue on after we die

By Jesse Bering

Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.

Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s
done.

But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.

I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

It should strike us as odd that we feel inclined to nod our heads in
agreement to the twangy, sweetly discordant folk vocals of Iris Dement in
“Let the Mystery Be,” a humble paean about the hereafter. In fact, the only
real mystery is why we’re so convinced that when it comes to where we’re
going “when the whole thing’s done,” we’re dealing with a mystery at all.
After all, the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body.
And the mind is what the brain does—it’s more a verb than it is a noun. 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.

Curiously Immortal

The problem applies even to those who claim not to believe in an afterlife.
As philosopher and Center for Naturalism founder Thomas W. Clark wrote in a
1994 article for the Humanist:

Here ... is the view at issue: When we die, what’s next is nothing; death is
an abyss, a black hole, the end of experience; it is eternal nothingness, the
permanent extinction of being. And here, in a nutshell, is the error
contained in that view: It is to reify nothingness—make it a positive
condition or quality (for example, of “blackness”)—and then to place the
individual in it after death, so that we somehow fall into nothingness, to
remain there eternally.

Consider the rather startling fact that you will never know you have died.
You may feel yourself slipping away, but it isn’t as though there will be a
“you” around who is capable of ascertaining that, once all is said and done,
it has actually happened. Just to remind you, you need a working cerebral
cortex to harbor propositional knowledge of any sort, including the fact that
you’ve died—and once you’ve died your brain is about as phenomenally
generative as a head of lettuce. In a 2007 article published in the journal
Synthese, University of Arizona philosopher Shaun Nichols puts it this way:
“When I try to imagine my own non-existence I have to imagine that I perceive
or know about my non-existence. No wonder there’s an obstacle!”

This observation may not sound like a major revelation to you, but I bet
you’ve never considered what it actually means, which is that your own
mortality is unfalsifiable from the first-person perspective. This obstacle
is why writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe allegedly remarked that “everyone
carries the proof of his own immortality within himself.”

Even when we want to believe that our minds end at death, it is a real
struggle to think in this way. A study I published in the Journal of
Cognition and Culture in 2002 reveals the illusion of immortality operating
in full swing in the minds of undergraduate students who were asked a series
of questions about the psychological faculties of a dead man.

Richard, I told the students, had been killed instantaneously when his
vehicle plunged into a utility pole. After the participants read a narrative
about Richard’s state of mind just prior to the accident, I queried them as
to whether the man, now that he was dead, retained the capacity to experience
mental states. “Is Richard still thinking about his wife?” I asked them. “Can
he still taste the flavor of the breath mint he ate just before he died? Does
he want to be alive?”

You can imagine the looks I got, because apparently not many people pause to
consider whether souls have taste buds, become randy or get headaches. Yet
most gave answers indicative of “psychological continuity reasoning,” in
which they envisioned Richard’s mind to continue functioning despite his
death. This finding came as no surprise given that, on a separate scale, most
respondents classified themselves as having a belief in some form of an
afterlife.

What was surprising, however, was that many participants who had identified
themselves as having “extinctivist” beliefs (they had ticked off the box that
read: “What we think of as the ‘soul,’ or conscious personality of a person,
ceases permanently when the body dies”) occasionally gave
psychological-continuity responses, too. Thirty-two percent of the
extinctivists’ answers betrayed their hidden reasoning that emotions and
desires survive death; another 36 percent of their responses suggested the
extinctivists reasoned this way for mental states related to knowledge (such
as remembering, believing or knowing). One particularly vehement extinctivist
thought the whole line of questioning silly and seemed to regard me as a
numbskull for even asking. But just as well—he proceeded to point out that of
course Richard knows he is dead, because there’s no afterlife and Richard
sees that now.

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 1913 existential screed, The Tragic Sense of Life, 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.”

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. Clark puts it this way
(emphasis mine): “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.”

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. Still, I thought Sam had a mind capable of knowing I loved
her and I was sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye. 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 it was a strange idea.

Yet if you were to have asked me what Sam was experiencing, I probably would
have muttered something like the type of answers 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 15-year-olds what
happens when you 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.’ ”

A Mind-Body Disconnect

But Koocher’s study in itself doesn’t tell us where such ideas come from. The
simulation-constraint hypothesis posits that this type of thinking is innate
and unlearned. Fortunately, this hypothesis is falsifiable. If afterlife
beliefs are a product of cultural indoctrination, with children picking of
the mind, on the other hand, has no survival value and is, in an evolutionary
sense, unnecessary.

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 hunter-horticulturalist children from the
Shuar region of Ecuador were. Even today’s urban children 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.

The Culture Factor

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. So 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 an
architectural scaffolding process, whereby 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 on the street’s “I believe there’s
something” brand of philosophy—but it’s made of the same brick and mortar
just the same.

In support of the idea that culture influences 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 interviews is tweaked to include
medical or scientific terms, psychological-continuity reasoning decreases. In
this 2005 study published in the Journal of Cognition and Culture, seven- to
11-year-old children in Madrid who heard a story about a priest telling a
child that his grandmother “is with God” were more likely to attribute
ongoing mental states to the decedent than were those who heard the identical
story but instead about a doctor saying a grandfather was “dead and buried.”

And in a 2005 replication of the Baby Mouse experiment published in the
British Journal of Developmental Psychology, psychologist David Bjorklund and
I teamed 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. The
type of curriculum, secular or religious, made no difference. With increasing
age, however, culture becomes 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.

Free Spirits

The types of cognitive obstacles discussed earlier may be responsible for our
innate sense of immortality. But although the simulation-constraint
hypothesis helps to explain why so many people believe in something as
fantastically illogical as an afterlife, it doesn’t tell us why people see
the soul 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. Yet almost nobody has such a
belief.

Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn’t cease to
exist simply because you couldn’t see them. Developmental psychologists even
have a fancy term for this basic concept: “person permanence.” Such an
off-line social awareness leads us to tacitly assume that the people we know
are somewhere doing something. As I’m writing this article in Belfast, for
example, my mind’s eye conjures up my friend Ginger in New Orleans walking
her poodle or playfully bickering with her husband, things that I know she
does routinely.

As I’ve argued in my 2006 Behavioral and Brain Sciences article, “The Folk
Psychology of Souls,” human cognition is not equipped to update the list of
players in our complex social rosters by accommodating a particular person’s
sudden inexistence. We can’t simply switch off our person-permanence thinking
just because someone has died. This inability is especially the case, of
course, for those whom we were closest to and whom we frequently imagined to
be actively engaging in various activities when out of sight.

And so person permanence may be the final cognitive hurdle that gets in the
way of our effectively realizing the dead as they truly are—infinitely in
situ, inanimate carbon residue. Instead it’s much more “natural” to imagine
them as existing in some vague, unobservable locale, very much living their
dead lives.