Scientific American
columnist Michael Shermer has a new column entitled “Why the 'You'
in an Afterlife Wouldn't Really Be You.” Arguing against both
spiritual concepts of an afterlife and technological concepts of a
“digital afterlife,” Shermer attempts to give three arguments
against the possibility of an afterlife.
His first argument
is without merit, as it depends on an unproven assumption. Shermer
argues:
First,
there is the assumption that our identity is located in our memories,
which are presumed to be permanently recorded in the brain: if they
could be copied and pasted into a computer or duplicated and
implanted into a resurrected body or soul, we would be restored. But
that is not how memory works. Memory is not like a DVR that can play
back the past on a screen in your mind. Memory is a continually
edited and fluid process that utterly depends on the neurons in your
brain being functional.
This argument is not
valid against any of these three ideas of an afterlife: (1) the idea
that you have some immaterial soul that will survive death in a kind
of natural way, without any divine intervention required; (2) the
Christian idea that the dead will be physically resurrected by some
divine agent; (3) the idea that minds may be uploaded into computers
in the future, providing people with a digital afterlife. The first
of these ideas does not depend on the idea that memories are
permanently recorded in the brain. A person believing in a soul may
believe that memories are stored largely in some soul, and may deny
the claim that memory depends on neurons (a claim scientists haven't
proven). The argument also does not debunk the idea of a physical
resurrection of the dead. In such a case the neurons of individuals
would presumably be recreated. The argument also does not debunk the
idea of uploading minds into a computer. If our memories now depend
on neurons (and there are reasons for doubting that), that is merely
a current dependence, that could in theory be overcome if some new
type of computer could be created that could store the equivalent of
human neural states.
In his second
argument, Shermer attempts to stretch out one of the arguments made
against mind uploading, and turn that into an argument against
believing in any type of afterlife. Mind uploading is the idea that
in the future it will be possible for people to transfer their
consciousness into a computer. The idea is that we will be able to
scan the human brain, and somehow figure out some neural pattern or
synaptic pattern that uniquely identifies an individual. Then, it is
argued, it will be possible to recreate this pattern in some
super-computer. It is claimed that this could be a method of getting
a digital afterlife. Some futurists claim that if someone were to
have his brain scanned and then have his neural patterns transferred
to a computer, that person could discard his body, and continue to
live on indefinitely within a computer.
Here is how Shermer
presents his second argument:
Second,
there is the supposition that copying your brain's connectome—the
diagram of its neural connections—uploading it into a computer (as
some scientists suggest) or resurrecting your physical self in an
afterlife (as many religions envision) will result in you waking up
as if from a long sleep either in a lab or in heaven. But a copy of
your memories, your mind or even your soul is not you. It is a copy
of you, no different than a twin, and no twin looks at his or her
sibling and thinks, “There I am.” Neither duplication nor
resurrection can instantiate you in another plane of existence.
Minus the clumsy
twin reference, this argument has considerable force against the idea
of a digital afterlife through mind uploading. If I were to scan
your brain and recreate your neural pattern inside a computer, that
seems to be making a copy of your consciousness rather than a
transfer of your consciousness, for two different reasons. The first
reason is that a transfer has been made to a totally different medium
(from a biological platform to an electronic platform). The second is
that the mind upload seems to leave open the possibility of your
biological body continuing after your mind upload has completed, and
that would seem to be the creation of a copy of your consciousness
rather than a transfer.
But the copying
argument has much less force (and perhaps no force) when used against
the idea of a physical resurrection of the dead. In that hypothetical
possibility, there is no transfer to a different medium. A physically
resurrected body would be the same (or mostly the same) as the body
that existed before someone died. Also, a physical resurrection
would presumably only occur for people who had already died. So there
would be no issue that both a source and a target (or copy) could
exist at the same time.
The copying argument
has no force at all against the idea of a soul that continues to
exist after a person's body dies. In such a case, presumably there
would be no copy at all made of anything. A person who believes that
the soul survives death does not tend to believe that the soul
suddenly appears at the moment of death, suddenly having a copy of
consciousness and memory that was stored in the brain. Such a person
will instead tend to believe that the soul was a crucial component of
the human mind all along (or perhaps was equivalent to the mind), and
that such a soul simply continues to exist when a person dies.
Imagine a person who
has worn a heavy lead coat all his life, and has worn a dark glass
fishbowl over his head all his life. Under the soul concept, we may
regard death as being rather like a person shedding that heavy lead
coat and dark-glass fishbowl, with the heavy lead coat and dark-glass
fishbowl being the restrictions of movement and perception associated
with a human bodily existence. Under such a concept, there is no
copying at all, but more like a kind of jettisoning, rather like a
soaring rocket jettisoning a no-longer-needed fuel tank, with the
body being what is jettisoned. Such a concept of the survival of the
soul is completely free from difficulties involving copying, because
no copying at all is assumed.
Shermer's third
argument has no force against any concept of an afterlife other than
a digital afterlife. Using the odd term “POVself,” he argues as
follows:
If
you died, there is no known mechanism by which your POVself would be
transported from your brain into a computer (or a resurrected body).
A POV depends entirely on the continuity of self from one moment to
the next, even if that continuity is broken by sleep or anesthesia.
Death is a permanent break in continuity, and your personal POV
cannot be moved from your brain into some other medium, here or in
the hereafter.
Such reasoning based
on continuity might have some force against the concept of a digital
afterlife by means of mind uploading, but probably not very much
force as Shermer has stated it. For he's used the phrase “there is
no known mechanism,” which is hardly going to discourage futurists
who will claim that such a mechanism will be invented in the future.
The reasoning here also has no force against either the possibility
of a physical resurrection of the dead or the idea of a soul
surviving death. A Christian believing that the dead will be
physically resurrected will believe that this is done through divine
agency, so it is futile to argue that such a thing cannot occur
because there is “no known mechanism” by which it would occur.
The person believing in a soul that survives death need not believe
that any transfer, copying or moving occurs to allow a person to
survive death. Such a person will tend to believe that the essence of
a person – what makes you you – has already resided in your soul
all along, not in your brain; and such a person is not required to
believe that anything is transferred from the brain to the soul when
a person is died. Under the idea of a soul, there is no break in
continuity when a person survives death.
Neuroscientists have
always followed the principle: explain every conceivable mental
activity as being something caused by the brain. But what we must
remember is that Nature never told us that all our memories are
stored in brains, or that our thoughts are generated by brains. It
was neuroscientists who told us that, not Nature. For example, we
have no understanding of how 50-year-old memories can be stored in
brains, given all the rapid molecular turnover that occurs in brains.
Below is a quote from a recent scientific press release, citing a
comment by a neuroscientist.
Neuroscience
has also been struggling to find where the brain stores its memories.
“They may be ‘hiding’ in high-dimensional cavities,” Markram
speculates.
Such a quote (which
has a “grasping at straws” sound to it) gives a very strong
impression that neuroscientists have no real basis for being
confident claiming that long-term memories are stored in the brain.
The type of evidence neuroscientists cite for their claims is often
weak evidence that doesn't hold up to critical scrutiny, such as
dubious brain scanning studies which typically take minor 1%
differences in brain activity, and try to make them look like
compelling signs of what the brain is doing, when they are no such
thing.
The idea behind a
soul or spirit can be summarized as follows. You have a soul or
spirit that is not at all a brain thing. You also have a brain, which
serves largely for the purpose of localizing or constricting your
mental activity, making sure that it stays chained to your body. The
main purposes of the brain are things like control of autonomic
functions, response to tactile stimuli, coordination of muscle
movement, the coordination of speech, and the handling of sensory and
auditory stimuli. There may also be some brain function relating to
storing kind of what we may call “muscle memories,” which we use
for performing particular physical tasks. These are all things
related to living and surviving as a corporeal being. But things
such as abstract thinking, conceptual memory and long term memory may
be functions of a human soul. So when you die you may lose those
things that you needed to continue walking about as a fleshly being,
but may still have (as part of your soul) those things that were
never necessary for such an existence (no cave-man needed to form
abstract ideas, think philosophical thoughts, or remember his
experiences as an 8-year-old).
This idea may seem
old-fashioned to some, but a strong argument can be made that it is
compelled by fairly recent evidence, and that in such a sense it is
not at all old-fashioned. It is only in recent years that we have
discovered what a very high degree of molecular turnover occurs in the
brain, which makes it so hard to maintain that 50-year old memories
are stored in the brain, as discussed here. It is only in the past 50 years that we had
research such as John Lorber's, showing astonishingly high mental
functioning in patients who had large fractions of their brains (or
most of their brains) destroyed by disease. It is only in the past
130 years that experimental laboratory evidence has been repeatedly
produced for phenomena such as ESP, which cannot be accounted for as
a brain effect. It is only in recent decades that we have had reports
of near-death experiences, in which many observers have reported
floating out of their bodies, often verifying details of their
medical resuscitation attempts that they should have been unable to observe while they were unconscious. Such observations are quite
compatible with the idea of a soul that survives death, and may force
such a conclusion on us.
Shermer seems rather to be
thinking of the idea of the soul as something kind of like a USB flash drive to back up
the brain. But those who have postulated a soul have more often
supposed it as a crucial component of human mental functioning, not
some optional accessory. Under the concept of a soul that accounts
for a large fraction or most of human mental functioning, there is no
requirement for any sudden copying from the brain to occur for
someone to survive death; and there is also continuity, as death
merely means discarding what you don't need to survive beyond death.
As none of Shermer's three arguments damages such a concept, Shermer
has not succeeded in closing the door to an afterlife.
We know not what lies at the end of the misty bridge
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