After writing the essay, On Getting Older, the following is more of an intellectual speculation. It’s an activity I enjoy, so I’m going to indulge myself in it yet again. I’m sure it’s also a way to defend myself against the darkness. It seems to work, fairly well.
At the beginning of On Getting Older, I wrote:
Each of us inhabits a physical body.
Sooner or later, that physical body will deteriorate and die.
From a religious perspective, some people accept the truth of this assumption, but argue that the immortal “soul” does not die, and preserves individual identity forever.
From a materialist perspective, some people argue that individual identity (including mind and soul) cease to exist when (and if) the body dies.
The scientific method is a powerful method for accumulating reliable beliefs over time. It relies on generating potential explanations for experience, and then testing them against actual experiences. Success is gratifying, but only failure is definitive, because it refutes a failed explanation.
Therefore, the scientific method relies on comparing two competing explanations, and defining an experience (a “controlled experiment”) that is expected to refute at least one of them. Explanations that survive many such comparisons gain our confidence, but they may eventually be refuted in comparison with even better explanations.
Over the centuries, the scientific method has helped humanity identify a large number of reliable explanations, some of them supporting valuable practical applications.
Science helps us (provisionally) identify certain kinds of truths. The scientific method is a demanding discipline. Only certain types of questions lend themselves to scientific investigation. Others do not, but we care about their truth anyway. For example, “Does your mother love you?” This question does not lend itself to a controlled experiment, and the terms involved are not defined precisely anyway. Similarly, the question “What happens to the self when the body dies?” does not (currently) lend itself to scientific investigation.
“Scientism” is a name for the belief that the only truths are scientific truths. This is essentially a faith-based, superstitious belief. It is often used to heap scorn on, and discourage, investigations of other types of truth.
From the materialist perspective, personal identity (including mind and soul) cease to exist when the body dies, because we don’t know how the mind and soul can survive the death of the body.
There are at least two materialist approaches to avoiding this fate.
One is: “Don’t die.” That is, search to understand the biological basis for aging and death. and try to intervene in those natural processes. Humans live for quite a few decades, generally repairing most biological faults. Perhaps we can discover how to extend these natural repair mechanisms of the body to counteract all of the natural aging processes.
Another is: “Freeze the body at death.” That is, once death has become inevitable, cryogenically preserve the body, or at least the head, in the hopes that a future society will be able to cure what ails you, and will be willing to do that for you. [To me, this relies on an unrealistic level of trust in the charity of future generations.]
By far the most common approach is acceptance. This can’t hurt, and you might be surprised.
From some (not all) religious perspectives, personal identity (including mind and soul) survives the death of the physical body and persists, perhaps forever. How can this be? Presumably, there is a God who makes it happen, either by intervening after each individual death, or by arranging the laws of the universe so that this transition is part of the natural progression. But is this even possible?
After seeing the ghost of Hamlet’s father, Horatio is astonished, but Hamlet says [Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5]:
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The field of artificial intelligence builds on an analogy between the active mind and a running computation, where the human mind runs (in ways we don’t yet fully understand) on the physical substrate of the brain, while a computation runs (in ways we do understand) on the physical substrate of a digital computer.
Can a computation survive the destruction of its physical digital computer? Certainly! Suppose I create a spreadsheet to project our savings for retirement. Then I email that spreadsheet to my wife, close out of the spreadsheet program, and shut down my computer. (In principle, I could destroy my computer; but I don't.) Some time later, she reads the email and opens that spreadsheet. Now “the same” computation is running on her own, quite different, computer.
The analogy from mind-and-body to computation-and-computer is certainly incomplete, but it is also productive. A running computation is an immaterial pattern of dynamic activations in a physical device. That pattern can be abstracted from the physical substrate, stored, transmitted, and translated into a similar pattern of dynamic activations in a different physical device. Since we have built the physical computers and studied the mathematical patterns of the computations, we can understand and explain in detail what is happening in this scenario. (Carefully defining what “similar” means is critical here.)
It is at least conceivable that something like this could happen with the mind-and-body. The argument here does not demonstrate that this explanation is true. But it does suggest (pending some future refutation) that this explanation is not impossible.
This particular religious perspective relies on faith that some agency (“God”?) has built and maintains a process for preserving individual identity after the death of the body. There are certainly many other religious perspectives that concern themselves with other aspects of religious experience.
But I do believe that the perspective expressed here suggests an answer to the question of what might happen when the body dies.