Evidence for Dualism?
Survival after Death
Despite my current confidence that minds are brains, I could be convinced otherwise by evidence that
is best explained by the supposition that minds are nonmaterial substances. By far the most powerful
kind of evidence would be observations showing that minds survive the loss of their bodies.
Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and proponents of most other religions firmly believe that our
mortal lives are only a small part of our existence. What would show that they are right?
Communication from the dead would certainly be compelling evidence that people survive the
destruction of their bodies. My parents are long departed, but if I were able to have conversations
with them that showed they were familiar with my activities since they died, I would have to consider
the hypothesis that their souls had survived their deaths. Of course, I would also need to rule out
alternative hypotheses, such as that the apparent conversations were fraudulently contrived, or that I
had succumbed to a mental illness that made me prone to hallucinations. But if communication with
the dead were a common part of many people's lives without the occurrence of fraud or psychosis, it
would be convincing evidence supporting dualism over the mind-brain identity theory. In the
nineteenth century, it was common for people to attend séances in which communication with the dead
was arranged by mediums, and there are psychics today, such as Sylvia Browne who appears on
television and tells people how their departed loved ones are doing. Many mediums and psychics
have been exposed as frauds, however, so the mind-brain identity theory can explain sporadic reports
of communication with the dead as resulting from a combination of fraud and wishful thinking.
Another possible source of evidence for the mind's surviving the brain is the occurrence of neardeath
experiences. People who have come close to death because of medical emergencies often
report that they experience going off into a tunnel with a bright light at the end, only somehow to be
pulled back. Even the famous atheistic philosopher A. J. Ayer reported a near-death experience that
temporarily weakened his conviction that death would be the end of him. However, reports of neardeath
experiences are only very weak evidence for the existence of souls, because science provides
plausible alternative explanations. Heart attacks and other medical conditions can cause shortage of
oxygen in the brain with cognitive effects that are heightened by people's expectations: many people
have heard about walking down a tunnel toward a light. Out-of-body experiences can be induced by
laboratory experiments that produce confusion between the senses, and may be due to neural
disruptions at the boundary between the temporal and parietal regions. Hence reports of near-death
experiences are like reports of communications with the dead in that we can explain them without
supposing that minds survive death.
If there is scant evidence for survival after death, why do so many people believe in their own
immortality? I think the two main reasons are religious faith and motivated inference. People acquire
belief in life after death (and, for Hindus, in life before birth) from their religious teachers, especially
their parents. As I remarked in the previous chapter, it is natural for children to acquire beliefs from
their parents and other seeming authorities, and these beliefs are often reliable. Life after death is a
part of a whole package of beliefs that includes God and the soul. Immortality is a particularly
attractive part of the package, as it provides a way of reducing fear of death and separation from
loved ones. Illness and the other difficulties of life are of small significance if you have the prospect
of eternal happiness in heaven, united with God and all the people you care about who have died
before you. Some religions, however, make survival after death less clearly attractive because of the
prospect of eternal punishment in some version of hell. The Greek philosopher Epicurus maintained
that the expectation that your existence will end should eliminate the fear of death because you will
then have no awareness of anything. Nevertheless, for most people the prospect of immortality is
positive. As Woody Allen remarked: “I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to
achieve it through not dying.” Unfortunately, the belief in a soul that survives death is faith based
rather than evidence based.