Is There a
Hereafter?
Can individual consciousness survive physical death?
Disembodied consciousness is not verbally contradictory but is implausible and
would be undetectable. Can consciousness survive in another medium? This might
be achieved scientifically. Spiritualists present prima facie evidence
that it occurs already.
The criterion of personal identity is spatiotemporal
continuity of a body. If a living person were exactly duplicated, the
duplicate(s) would not be the original. If a dead person were duplicated once,
then that duplicate would initially believe himself to be the original
resurrected. However, by the criterion of spatiotemporal continuity, he would be
not the original person but a new person exactly like the original, a copy. This
would matter for legal purposes. The duplicate would not own the same property,
owe the same debts or be guilty of the same crimes as the original. If the
original had bequeathed his estate to the duplicate, then the latter would
own the same property. However, a bequest would not affirm their identity but
acknowledge their non-identity.
It might not matter to the duplicate that he was not the
original. I confidently predict that my duplicate would welcome the opportunity
to continue the life begun by the original. Starting with the same memories and
motivations, he would pursue the same goals. If challenged, he would probably
concede that he was not the original while remembering that that original had
sometimes felt that he was not the same person as his younger self. Until people
are duplicated, to remember what it was like to be a person who was alive
at an earlier time will be to be that person.
We adjust our concepts to fit new experiences. If there
were only one post-mortem duplicate, then we might, for some purposes, identify
a person not with a body but with a sequence of experiences and accumulating
memories. At least some duplicates would make this identification. It is
possible that such duplications occur in another realm.
If some entity, a soul or astral body, inhabited, then
left, the physical body and was the bearer of experiences and memories, then
there would be spatiotemporal continuity, though not of the physical
body, and the duplication of that body, or even just of its brain functions,
would not be necessary for the continuation of consciousness. However,
hypothetical astral bodies do not affect sensitive scientific instruments in
hospitals or elsewhere.
Scientists study brains, psychologists study consciousness
and philosophers try to relate them. None of these groups postulates any
separable entity interacting with the brain. Mental processes can now be located
in parts of the brain, although they are not simply identical with what is seen
to happen in the brain. A written description of an externally observed cerebral
process does not mean the same thing as a written description of a directly
experienced mental process. We cannot translate either description into the
other. The observed brain is an object of its observer’s consciousness whereas a
mental process refers to other objects of consciousness.
The Cartesian dualist view was that the brain contained
only: (i) a mathematical point that was its only link to the conscious mind;
(ii) unconscious inputs to and unconscious outputs from that point. Instead,
individually unconscious brain cells holistically generate consciousness. Thus,
neither subtler matter nor immaterial substance but grey matter qualitatively
transforms cerebrally processed sensory inputs into conscious sensations.
Therefore, duplication of brain functions would be necessary for the
continuation of consciousness.
Both Buddhism and Marxism, to which I will refer, require
merely a causal relationship, not an enduring substance, connecting earlier to
later psychophysical states.
Dead Men Here
and Now
It has not been demonstrated that duplications occur in
another realm. For the rest of this article, I will assume that neither the
Buddha nor Karl Marx still exists, not even as a duplicate in another realm.
Both died. Neither believed in souls or expected resurrection. Both believed
that all things were transient. Thus, in Buddhist mythology, even heavens and
hells are transitory. Marx was a materialist and the Buddha was possibly
influenced by materialism.
According to the Buddha’s teaching, he has survived neither
as a soul nor as a karmic consequence. Buddhists who did not want to acknowledge
that he no longer existed had to postulate a mysterious form of survival but we
need not believe this to meditate. The Buddha said that he would be known
through his teaching.
“The present” means either an instantaneous moment or the
current period. Every moment is present to those in it but past or future to
others. Here, “others” includes even the same people at different times. Some
historical periods are centuries or millennia in length. We share with the
Buddha and Marx a lengthy period of urban civilisation and philosophical
enquiry. We share with Marx a shorter period of economic dynamism, technological
innovation and social upheaval.
The Buddha saw the world as an endless flux which he
transcended. Marx saw capitalism as conquering the world but creating its own
grave digger, the working class. We can see both endless flux and
capitalism ruling the world, confronting an international working class. The
dead men address our experience: suffering caused by mental attachments within
an endless flux and alienation caused by capitalist relations of production. The
world has changed but remains the same place. Their influence is now and their
eras are current.
The Keys to
the Kingdom
If there were only one god and he was not a human
being, then, in the Kingdom of God, there would be only one throne and no human
being would sit on it. Therefore, the Kingdom of God would be anarchy. That is
not what Christians mean by it. Their Kingdom is an absolute monarchy, whereas
Buddhists and Marxists do not believe that the universe is ruled. Marxists hope to build a world federation of socialist
republics that will quickly become a classless, therefore stateless, society.
Monarchy, the figurehead of class division, cannot survive even in a ceremonial
role. Therefore, the phrase, “Marx’s kingdom,” would be inappropriate even as a
metaphor although Marx’s collaborator, Engels, described socialism as “…the
ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.” 1
The Buddha renounced kingship to seek the truth. If we see
the world as he saw it, then we might call it his “kingdom” but the Buddha could
only be a constitutional monarch.
1. Engels, F. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
(Moscow, 1978), p. 77.
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