Why is afterlife the most important question in life?
Philosophy ·I died as a mineral and became a plant, I died as a plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? – Jalaluddin Rumi.
The title might render the post a religious, dogmatic and pseudoscientific post, but believe me, I promise to change your mind (assuming there is freewill!) by the end of the post. So hold on and think with me! The question that I will ponder on today is related to the possibilities after death. What happens after death. In the first part of the post, I will argue that
You cannot logically prove that a living person ceases to exist after death.
To understand this statement, one should understand what is life and death. These are eternal questions in itself and in no way can they be fully understood without an extensive discussion. What I mean by life is not a biological question, rather I assume that humans have life as defined in biology despite its debates and controversies. A living human is thus a physical entity which is capable of performing day to day transactional activities of interacting, and its subjective mental activities like thinking, hoping, loving, remembering and so on. Death on the other hand is an intricate subject. The usual sense in which we understand death is when the biological activities and metabolism of the body ceases to function. The body is dead when this happens. What about the person? To answer this question, we must first understand who is the person? For the outside world, the person is really just the body since the outside world infers the existence of the person only through his body. There is no other way for the person to interact with the outside world but via the body. So for the outside world, the person ceases to exist after death. But we really do not care about the outside world in questions like these. What happens to us as individuals is the only important question. What about the mental contents of the person? The likes and dislikes, memories, happy feelings, sadness, the tendencies that person had aquired in this life and so on. One can argue that the metal contents of the person is contingent upon the existence of a physical brain. Infact, modern neuroscience has been successful in associating different parts of the brain to different mental activities. So one can conclude that the mental contents of the person also ceases to exist after death. There is one more important point that we must consider. There is a “first person subjective experiencer” or consciousness associated to each person which like these mental contents is not accessible to the outside world. The mind is an object to this experinecer but the experiencer never becomes an object. Note that this experiencer cannot be reduced to any “objective thing” as it can never be objectified. The existence of a physical brain and body is just a medium of expression of the existence of this experiencer and not a precusror to it. In the previous post, it was argued that a person should identify himself with this ever present awareness/experiencer. Thus the death of a person does not immediately imply that the experiencer “in” the person also “dies”. What happens to this experiencer after death is a profound conundrum. There are philosophies based on the nature of this consciousness and the reality of the world around us but I leave the discussion of these philosophies for later.
It is also not clear whether the experiencer associated with a person survives death. Since there is no way this experiencer can be objectified, it is not possible to prove that it survives death. The question remains. There are only two possibilities, either death vanquishes the experinecer and any trace of existence of the person succumbs to death or the experiencer survives death and then there are further difficult unaswerable questions. Let us ponder on the first possibility a bit.
If death is the ultimate end of everything without hope then what should be done with this very short existence? This very possibility is horrifying. All religions are based on the contrary assumption that death does not engulf the real self – the experiencer. The first case renders all religions and spirituality pointless. You can live this life the way you want doing whatever you like to find pleasure and happiness. Nothing is worth doing and nothing in this life bears meaning. No moral theory is good enough to be followed and if everybody truely believed in this possibility, the human race would soon go to dirt.
The second possibility is much more important. If the experiencer still exists after death, what is its fate. Does it embody another body, a human or an animal? Does is remain as it is, existence itself? Questions are many and there are no answers which can be proved in the limits of logic. Religion and spirituality provides answer but they first assume that this possibility is true. The famous “law of Karma” propounds that the deed we do in our previous life set in motion powerful forces which inevitably bear results and decides the fate of this individual experiencer. This experiencer, after the body dies, goes on to bear other bodies either a human or animal according as decided by the law of Karma. These are subjects of belief and I should not be talking about these. If it happens that this experiencer gets another life as a living organism, it will go through all the sufferings and pain all over again. And why just once, this possibility also implies that we must have gone through many many lifes with its own sufferings and pain before this very life. Moreover, finding a way out of this cycle of birth and death would be the most sensible thing to do in life. This would provide with a meaning and goal of our lives. Such is the implication of this possibility.
In conclusion, the question whether there is an afterlife in the sense argued above seems to be the most important question of life as it will determine the course of actions we must take. All available answers to this question require one or another belief. Thus we must find our own ways to find the answer to this queston. I will discuss my approach and its logical foundations in a later post.