Ben Brinckerhoff

Problems in Philosophy

Arguments Against the Existence of the Afterlife

Humans fear death because we do not know what happens to us after we die. Some of us draw hope from the belief that we will in some way live on in an afterlife. This belief bases itself on the belief of an immortal soul. I will assume, for the sake of argument, that each and every one of us possesses an immortal soul. After examining the concept of an immortal soul, it becomes clear that the existence of an afterlife does not follow from this assumption.

A conclusion that holds that we possess immortal souls, yet denies the existence of an afterlife, seems to contradict itself. For how could my soul stop existing if it is truly immortal? Let me be more specific: our souls continue to exist throughout time, however upon death, the self that makes me “me” is wiped out. I define this “self” as the current frame of reference from which I experience and interact with my surroundings. This includes, but is not limited to, my personality and my memories. I am not currently experiencing my surroundings from exactly the same frame of reference that I did when I was ten. However, since I share some memories and similar personality traits, my frame of reference is close. When I die, however, I will no longer experience anything from my current frame of reference, and hence “I” will not experience anything at all. This is why, even while admitting that my soul lives on forever, I claim there is no afterlife, at least from my current subjective point of view.

David Hume argues this basic position in his work, Of the Immortality of the Soul, when he proclaims, “The most positive assertors of the mortality of the soul, never denied the immortality of its substance” (535). He cites the metaphysical claim that the entire universe consists of one of two substances – either matter or “spiritual substance” (Hume 535). All material things are made of matter. Presumably, the same matter could be part of many different objects and life forms throughout time. It may once be part of a dead tree, then decompose into nutrients in the soil, and then be soaked up by the roots of another tree. Hume concludes by analogy that “spiritual substance” is used the same way, that is, all the minds/selves of living things are created and recreated out of the same substance. All that defines me, therefore, is wiped out when my “spiritual substance” is reused to make a new mind/self upon my death (Hume 535).

This position is almost the exact opposite of the one held by Plato, who believed in an afterlife. He maintains, like Hume, that the universe can be broken up into two categories, but these categories have very different properties than the ones Hume describes. One group is the unseen, immaterial, unchanging, and immortal things. The gods and the forms (eternal abstract ideas that exist independently of all thought, like “equality, beauty, goodness, justice, [and] holiness”) fall into this category (Plato 529). These are things I can only know with my mind. The other is the material, ever-changing world, which I can understand through my senses.

Plato places the human soul (and the self that makes each unique from person to person), into the first category, because it “is not visible to the eye of man” (Plato 529). Since it is unseen like the gods and the forms, Plato concludes that it must also be unchanging and immortal, or as Plato says, “indissoluble” (Plato 530). Since the soul is unchanging and immortal, the qualities it had during life (the self) will remain after death. Hence the soul in the afterlife, being “indissoluble” will be the same one that existed here on earth.

The problem with his argument is that it depends entirely on his concepts of the spiritual/material categories, which are flawed. He assumes that if the soul shares some properties with the forms and gods (they are all unseen), then it must share all their properties. This presumes that the gods and forms share these properties as well.

Plato strongly argues that the forms are unchanging. He states that these ideas or essences are “always what they are, having the same simple self-existent and unchanging forms, not admitting of any variation at all, or in any way, or at any time” (Plato 529).

The fact is, these ideas are changing. The ideas of beauty, goodness, justice, etc., are different from person to person and from culture to culture. If we all agreed on these concepts, there would not be the disagreements and conflicts there are in the world today. These ideas even change in the same person over time. What I thought was good and just today will almost certainly not agree with my ideas of goodness and justice ten years from now. So, the forms, the gods, and the soul are similar in many ways (they are unseen), but do not all share identical properties. Just because the soul is unseen does not mean that it is necessarily unchangeable as well. The basis for Plato’s argument is untrue, and therefore his conclusions become questionable.

Plato’s other argument for existence of the afterlife is similarly unconvincing. He argues that we cannot truly comprehend and understand the forms, such as equality, through experience alone. This is because, as in the example of equality, I have never seen any two objects that are perfectly equal. All objects that appear to come close to equality are made of different substances or are flawed in some way. I have never seen true equality, only that which falls short of it. So how can I know what equality is? Plato claims that since I cannot acquire this knowledge through experience, and since I have been experiencing since birth, I must necessarily have acquired this knowledge before birth. And yet I still have this knowledge, so the process of birth let me retain the knowledge I had beforehand (Plato 528-529). The logical conclusion of Plato’s argument, by analogy, is that death also lets me retain the knowledge I had beforehand, namely the experience and memories I acquired during life (frame of reference) as well as the knowledge of the forms I acquired before birth.

But why do I need prior knowledge of the forms to understand such concepts as equality and the other forms? I can understand equality through imagination. I can imagine a situation in which an object is copied exactly, and then I would have two objects that would be equal in the perfect sense. Imagination is the faculty that allows me to think of things that I have not, and possibly will never see.

Consider if you will, a science fiction writer, who invents ideas for her novels. From where did she get the concept of an alien species, or some distant future technology, or any other abstract notion used in her book? Can Plato actually say that she must have had these ideas given to her before birth? For she has never, and almost certainly never will see an alien, yet this idea resides clearly in her mind.

The claim that knowledge of the forms is gained before birth does not make sense for other reasons as well. Plato claims that the ideas of equality, beauty, etc. are immortal and unchanging, and that we all acquire these truths before birth. But if we all receive the same ideas before birth, then why do we all have such different concepts of these forms? I mentioned earlier that many of the conflicts between people can be traced back to fundamental difference of these ideas. Why do people disagree on, for example, capital punishment if we all were given the same fundamental understanding of justice before birth? It is clear that we could not have gained knowledge of these ideas before birth, but rather formed them through a combination of experience and imagination and hence, Plato’s argument for the existence of an afterlife is flawed.

Hume, like Plato, uses argument by analogy when comparing our experiences before birth to those after death, but he reaches a very different conclusion. He reasons that if we don’t care about what happened to us before we were born, we should also not care about what goes on after life (Hume 535). Similarly, he argues that we will have the exact same experience before death as we did after birth, or more accurately, since we had no experience prior to birth, we will have no experiences after death.

One might argue with Hume’s last conclusion by saying that perhaps we did indeed have experiences before birth, and so its possible we will have them after death as well. But this objection is pointless, for even if we did have experiences before birth, it is clear that we do not remember them now. Birth has wiped out any sense of self, or frame of reference. I argue by analogy that even if the “spiritual substance” lives on, the current self will be wiped out by our death in the same manner as any possible previous self was wiped out by birth.

Hume also raises a logical question concerning the idea of an afterlife. If all souls are unique and immortal, then quite simply, where do they all go? The classical idea of heaven or hell is a kind of metaphysical expanse where souls reside. It seems that such a place would have to be infinitely large to encompass all the souls past, present and future of all the beings in the universe (Hume 537). But Hume overlooks an important detail that doubles the strength of this objection. He himself points out that if the soul is immortal, and will exist for all time, it must also, by definition, have existed for all time: “what is incorruptible [meaning imperishable] must also be ingenerable” (Hume 535). If all souls are immortal and existed before life as well as after, where were all the “blank” souls kept before they existed in this life? Any explanation involving limitless realms of souls sounds, at the very least, ridiculous.

Hume’s idea of “spiritual substance” makes more sense in this regard. Continuing his previous analogy with matter, it would logically follow that since there is finite amount of matter in the universe, there is only a limited amount of “spiritual substance” in the universe as well. Since the limited amount of substance gets reshaped into minds over and over again, Hume’s theory does not have to deal with infinitely large realms of souls.

Besides the idea of “spiritual substance,” Hume makes another important argument against the existence of an afterlife. He points out that, contrary to Plato’s idea of a clear distinction between unchanging mind and changing body, the mind (Hume also calls it the soul) and body are very closely intertwined. They progress the same throughout life: they start feeble and weak, and grow stronger through life, and then weaker again in old age. When the body is intoxicated with drugs, the mind feels the effects. When the body is sick, the mind cannot concentrate as readily and is in confusion. Therefore, the conclusion is drawn that the mind and body, which are so closely connected throughout life, would similarly end at death (Hume 537).

An interesting question arises in light of Hume’s insights about the connection between mind and body. The state of mind, or frame of reference, changes as the body changes, according to age, health, etc. Let’s assume for a moment that the self is preserved when we die, that we actually do experience an afterlife in our frame of reference. The question becomes: which state of mind/frame of reference, and therefore self, is passed on? If a man dies when drunk, does his drunk self exist for all eternity? What of the infant who dies? Does this child stay in a state of infanthood forever? What of the old, senile man who dies? Will he stay senile, even if most would not consider his senile self his “true self”? It’s clear the belief in an afterlife has serious logical flaws inherent in it.

Clark takes the “hard-boiled and thoroughly modern materialist view of death”- the belief that we stop existing after death (Clark 556). He says that while many claim to believe this, they actually imagine existing in some sort of void or limitless blackness. He cites quotes that refer to the experience of death in this way, such as a quote that show many famous thinkers, including Shakespeare and Isaac Asimov, have thought of death as a kind of “eternal night.” Clark maintains that we fear death because we fear experiencing this nothingness, and claims after thinking about death clearly, we should not fear it at all.

Clarke argues that there is no experience after death. Specifically, this means that there is no way you could experience nothingness. You will not exist in a void, and the nothingness will not “be” in any sense. You, simply, will not be. Furthermore, Clark insists that we shouldn’t fear not existing.

He argues his point by stating that all of life is subjective, that is, from one’s own point of view. I experience consciousness only from this point of view and hence I can never experience my own lack of consciousness. Think of it this way: when I was put to sleep for surgery, I had no knowledge that I was unconscious. I didn’t lie there thinking, “Well, I am unconscious now. Boy, this is boring. Nothing is going on.” Clarke claims that we don’t experience the nothingness of being unconscious, and hence we won’t experience death in any way. We will simply not be. And how can we fear that which we will not be around to experience?

The surgery example also brings up another point: from my own subjective point of view, I am always existing. In the previous example, the last thing I remembered was the surgeon talking to me, and then a fuzzy feeling came over me. The next thing I remember was the sleepy feelings of just waking up. I didn’t experience my own unconsciousness, and therefore, from my point of view, it didn’t happen. The only way I know that I was unconscious is from my understanding of time. I wake up and see that the world is different than when I last remember it, so I conclude I must have been unconscious for a time. So, from my own subjectivity, I am always conscious, since any time spent unconscious is not missing (in the sense of emptiness or blank space), but simply non-existent.

Clark has shown that subjectivity can jump small gaps in time (as in my surgery example). It follows then that the time I am unconscious does not matter (to me) and so subjectivity can jump large gaps in time as well. It doesn’t matter if I am unconscious for five minutes or for one hundred years, since any time I am not aware of myself seems to pass instantly to me.

Clark asks us to consider the idea that a man is unconscious for one thousand years, through some sort of freezing process. But perhaps the freezing process is imperfect, and the man wakes up a little different. People, including himself, would identify him as the same person he was before, but perhaps he is a little crankier. Clark claims that this man’s subjectivity has remained continuous, even though his frame of reference has changed slightly. The man simply goes to sleep, and, from his point of view, wakes up instantly, feeling a little different.

Clark goes on to claim that if this man wakes up a very changed person (so changed in fact, that those who know him don’t even consider him the same person), there are still no gaps in subjectivity. The original self ceases to be conscious, and instantly (from the person’s point of view) the new self wakes up, feeling very different from before (but still feeling as though he has always existed). Consciousness continues instantly, only now with a very new frame of reference.

Since personal subjectivity can jump time and changes in context (different people), Clark reasons, that it can jump, in a sense, to other people. This is his strongest conclusion: when you die, experience will go on forever as far as experience itself is concerned. This is called general subjectivity. He says that I may die today, but somewhere else, someone is conscious and is having experiences, and feels as though he/she always have, just like I did when I was alive. Even if every being in the universe died and no one existed for one million years, the next being to be conscious would immediately continue general subjectivity. As far as any conscious being is concerned, the preceding million years went by in less than an instant. Clark insists that, in a way, we can look forward to this general subjectivity after we die – I may cease to exist, but subjectivity itself goes on forever.

I agree with Clark on the existence of general subjectivity as a concept. It’s not hard to accept the fact that experience and subjectivity will continue long after my death. What I don’t understand is why I should look forward to this in even the slightest sense. What does it mean to “look forward” to something? What kind of things do we “look forward” to? We may look forward to a birthday, or to seeing an old friend, or to being done with a paper. In short, we look forward to positive future personal experiences. I look forward to seeing an old friend because I will be conscious of the enjoyable experience when it occurs. No one truly “looks forward” to being remembered by his/her friends and family, or any other event to which they themselves will not experience (either directly or indirectly). I cannot “look forward” to any sort of afterlife, either literally or through general subjectivity, in which my current frame of reference is not present.

The reason humans want to believe in an afterlife is due to the fact that we want to continue experiencing our surroundings from the current frame of reference. In light of the arguments presented, it is clear that while the immortal soul exists, an afterlife does not. Furthermore, the idea of general subjectivity continuing after death holds no more comfort for me than Hume’s idea that my “soul stuff” will be used to create another person. These ideas only offer no afterlife in a way I care about because there is no promise of continued experience, which is what we all really want when looking for a belief to help us face death.