These examples suggest that we have some strong opinions about what makes something a unique human person, and they make for some interesting thought experiments.37 For example, imagine that Jim is involved in a terrible car crash and ends up in the hospital, where all the doctors can do is to offer a brain transplant. Consider these different scenarios. Jim’s brain is transplanted into a human donor’s body. Jim’s brain is transplanted into a donor body, but his memory is accidentally wiped clean during the operation. Or Jim’s brain is transplanted into a highly sophisticated cybernetic body. After the transplantation, Jim’s original body is destroyed. Which, if any, of these patients is still Jim?
Adults are more likely to say that Jim is still Jim if his memories are left intact, irrespective of whether his brain ends up in a human donor body or an artificial cybernetic one. Our conscious experience of our own minds and memories inclines us to think of minds being unique and the source of personal identity. We certainly don’t think our own minds and memories could belong to other people. So Jim is like Officer Murphy. He is the product of his mind and memories, and if these can be transplanted, even into an artificial body, he remains Jim. However, the patient with the brain but no memories is deemed to be more human than the cybernetic body containing Jim’s brain with memories. This pattern reveals that people consider humans in terms of a physical body and a unique mind that can exist separately.
What about minds existing independently of brains? Most laypeople think that the mind is separate from the brain. After all, the majority of humans have lived their lives never knowing that they possessed a brain, let alone knowing what it might be useful for. Also, as we will see later, people think that it might be possible to copy a body through some form of technology, and possibly even duplicate a brain, but they are less likely to think that a mind could be similarly copied. Moreover, if we could download the mind into another brain, most people assume that the identity associated with that brain would also change with the new mind. So we are naturally inclined to see minds as unique identities that can exist independently of the brain. If this distinction is drawn from an early age, it is easy to see how it leads us to the position that minds are not necessarily tethered to the physical brain. If this is so, then the mind is not subject to the same destiny as our physical bodies. Such reasoning allows us to entertain the possibility that the mind can outlive the body.
AFTERLIFE
In my experience, most Western parents don’t talk with their children about death unless they are comfortable with religious explanations. As someone who does not believe in an afterlife, I have found it very difficult to discuss death with my young daughters. It’s too painful and awkward. To begin with, you don’t have a happy ending, as you do with religion. Also, by discussing death, you are acknowledging that we are all destined to die one day. I will die, and my children will die. It’s the ultimate separation anxiety for both parent and child. This makes for a very uncomfortable reality check. All those oxytocin moments seem hollow, artificial, and ultimately pointless when faced with the prospect of death. I would imagine that most atheist parents like me probably avoid discussing death with their children to spare them the difficulty in coming to terms with an existence that has no purpose. So young children are understandably confused by death. They do not know that all life comes to an end. They do not know that they are going to die one day. They do not appreciate that death is inevitable, universal, irreversible, and final.38 There are two main reasons for this. First, they cannot conceive of death because they lack a mature understanding of the biological cycle of life and death. As we saw earlier in discussing creationism, children conceive of life as always existing. Second, because of their intuitive dualism, they conceive of death in psychological terms and, in doing so, they can’t imagine themselves being dead. So death is understood as the continued existence of the individual, but somewhere else.
Most pre-schoolers think that death is like buying a one-way ticket to a new address with no prospect of return or home visits. When Grandpa has moved on, he has gone to another place. Even if the address is heaven, at least he still exists somewhere. Or they think that death is like sleeping. Certainly ideas of ‘departing’, ‘passing over’, and ‘resting in peace’ are culturally acceptable to tell children and conceptually easier to grasp. No wonder the practice of burying someone in a box under the ground is a very disturbing notion for many pre-schoolers.
When pre-school children were asked in a 2004 study about a mouse that had been killed and eaten by an alligator, they agreed that the brain was dead, but they thought the mind was still active.39 They understood that bodily functions like the need to eat and drink would stop, but most thought the mouse would still be frightened, feel hungry, and want to go home. Even adults who classified themselves as extinctivists – those who think the soul dies when the body does – said that a person killed in a car crash would know that he was dead.40 Our rampant dualism betrays our ability to understand that body and mind are tethered together in an inseparable union. When our body packs up, so should our mind. We cannot know we are dead.
Only as children start to learn about what makes something alive do they begin to understand the opposite process of what makes something dead. As we will see in the next chapter, a grounding in biology emerges late in development, and only then do children start to appreciate the mechanics of death.41 But understanding the mechanics and inevitability of death does not get rid of the belief in the immortal soul. Religion and secular supernaturalism encourage such beliefs, but we must recognize that the concept of the immortal soul originates in the normal reasoning processes of every child. For example, children raised in a secular environment may express fewer afterlife beliefs than children raised in a religious household, but they still retain notions of some form of mental life that survives death.42 We do not need to indoctrinate our children with such ideas for them to persist.43 It appeals to our supersense to think that we can continue to exist after our deaths.
WHAT NEXT?
Neuroscience tells us that the physical brain creates the mind. Our rich mental experiences, the sensations, perceptions, emotions, and thoughts that motivate us to do anything, are patterns and exchanges of chemical signals in the complex information-processing of a biological machine. But the mind has no real existence substantiated in the physical world. Psychology is the scientific study of the mind, but the mind does not exist in any material sense. Rather, the mind is the natural operating system that runs on the input and output of the brain’s activity. We can study its operations, but we would be wrong to think that the mind occupies a material existence independently of the brain.
However, that’s not what we experience when we consider ourselves. We are real, and we exist in the real world. When we think of ‘I’, we do so in terms of our mind. We experience our mind as an individual motivated by beliefs, desires, emotions, regrets about the past, concerns about the present, and plans for the future. We experience our mind as occupying the machine we call our body. We see our bodies as structures that can deteriorate but we rarely see the structure of our own minds. Even after mental illness, periods of delusion, or temporary intoxication, we usually explain changes in our mind as a result of ‘not being ourselves’. This is because we are our minds. The body does not create us. Rather, we are the one who controls it. The philosophical position of substance dualism is the natural way to experience our conscious mind as distinct and separate from our bodies.