Making sense of the self

Julian Baggini

A note on the article

The purpose of this article is to help identify some key issues in the philosophy of personal identity and to show how one can bring a philosophical approach to them. The hope is that this will make the reader more able to identify such questions for herself and to consider them with some of the discipline and clarity which philosophy demands. I claim no particular originality for the arguments presented here. In a sense, their value is that they are not original. Nor are the arguments in any way conclusive. For every argument presented there are countless counter-arguments, refinements and disputes. It would be tedious to qualify every argument with a note as to how disputed or accepted it is, so I hope this general acknowledgement suffices and should be born in mind as one reads the article.

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Having recently lost her mother, Martha would very much like to believe in life after death, and at heart, she does. She is not, however, all that clear about what life after death will be like. Sometimes she feels her mother lives on as some pure spirit, liberated from her body. Other times, she can't really think of her mother living on except as being in her body in some way, with her voice and her face. And on yet other occasions she perhaps thinks her mother has gone on to be reincarnated in some other body, living life all over again and learning new lessons. Because she finds it hard to imagine any of these views with any clarity, however, she usually just comforts herself with the thought that somewhere, somehow her mother is living on. And, most importantly, she hopes she lives on as her old self, before senile dementia cruelly took away so much of her memories and character.

The doctor peered gravely over her spectacles and took Mr Edwards to one side. Edwards shuddered: ever since his son had come off his motorbike and had fallen into the coma he had lived suspended between the hope that he would make a recovery and the dread that his son's condition was terminal. The doctor spoke to Edwards calmly and with care. "We believe that your son will regain consciousness. However, I am afraid that scans show he has suffered very serious brain damage. He will almost certainly suffer widespread and irreversible amnesia. Mentally, we suspect that he will be severely impaired, with a mental age of ten or less. You must be prepared for the fact that he may not recognise you and that, in a sense, you may not recognise him." Edwards looked over at the body of his son and could feel only one thing: bereavement.

For most of us, loss of a loved one is the hardest thing to bear, yet loss is something we almost all, without exception, experience during our lives. Loss comes not only through death but on any occasion when a loved one is removed from us or leaves us. There are also occasions when a person is so transformed that it feels identical to a loss, such as when someone joins a religious cult and totally changes their personality, or suffers a trauma or head injury and starts behaving in vastly different ways. Thinking about such all-too frequent situations raises questions about what makes us the particular person we are and what it means to carry on being the same person. And yet these big questions are so fundamental to our self-image and life projects that it is amazing we don't think about them more often. Wouldn't it make a difference to how you live your life if you believed in life after death or that death was the end? Yet to think clearly about what life after death means, we have to have some idea about what kind of beings we are, and whether such beings could live forever. This chapter is all about thinking about these big questions. It is about making sense of what we are and how that may affect the way we think about our past and our future.

Martha thought about her mother living after death and considered various possibilities. One of these was the popular view is that there is reincarnation - that after death we go on to live in a new body. Another idea is that of resurrection - that God will, soon after death or on judgement day, bring us back to life, body and all. A third possibility is that, at death, the spirit leaves the body and goes on to live independently. These have been the three main traditional beliefs about how we may live after death. We can add to this list two other alternatives which rely upon human technology rather than God or our spiritual essences to sustain us beyond the grave. One of these is cryogenics - the freezing of dead humans until such times as medical technology has worked out a way of reviving and healing us. The second is the possibility of becoming a cyborg - using robot parts to replace clapped-out human fleshy bits, enabling us to carry on living as an amalgam of man and machine. The first question I want to consider is whether any of these make coherent sense as real possibilities, and if so, what the implications of accepting them would be.

Many have been persuaded that reincarnation is the means by which we live after death. One way to think more clearly about reincarnation is to start by assuming that it is actually what happens, and drawing out the implications. If we are, indeed, reincarnations, then normally we do not remember our past lives. Some people claim you can come to remember these lives through a process of regression. Indeed, I have often had it put to me that people actually have remembered past lives through this process. I think it safe to say that all we can be sure of is that people seem to remember past lives in so-called "regression". Their reports of previous lives are not obviously good evidence that they did in fact lead these lives. The more sceptical among us will not be very impressed by what people often report in regression, which tends to be either that the person was some well-known historical figure (how many were there in the court of Camelot?), or that they are some very stereotypical stock-historical figure (Viking warrior, medieval knight, Egyptian slave and so on).

I do not wish to get into a debate about the reliability of past-life regressions, because my key point is not that no-one remembers their past lives, but rather that if reincarnation is true, normally one does not remember past lives and that remembering requires some special process. So memory of past lives is not a necessary part of having had a past life and is, indeed, the exception rather than the rule.

Having accepted that, we now need to ask what it means to be the reincarnation of someone who lived before you. It is obvious that we don’t have the same body as that person, as our bodies grow from the unique fusion of sperm and egg, two physical organisms that are produced by the human reproductive system, not that mysteriously appear in the womb from another time and place. So, presumably, reincarnation is of some spiritual or mental entity which resides in the body during life and leaves it after death. This is what reincarnation requires at the very least. At most, it may involve a little more. Perhaps this spiritual part has at least some influence on my character. And perhaps it also enables certain skills and talents to be passed on from one life to another. So the reason why Joe took to playing the piano like a duck to water is that he learned how to play in a previous life. And the reason why Mary is such a morally good person is that she has learned how to be moral in past lives. Let us, for the sake of argument, assume all this is true.

Now, what if I were to reveal to you that you are the reincarnation of a fourteenth-century cobbler called Harold? The same spirit that gave life to him gives life to you. Your character was formed at least partly by his experiences. If you have any special talents, chances are he learned them. What follows from this? That you are Harold? I must confess it doesn't feel this way to me. Harold still seems to me like a totally different person. So I may have got some abilities and some of my character from him, that doesn't make me him. After all, we often believe we get some our talents and character from our parents - it doesn't mean we are our parents. No, Harold to me seems like a totally different person from whom I have "inherited" a soul and all that goes with it.

Looking forward to after my death, I don't see life for me either. Perhaps there will be a twenty-second century advertising sales executive (yes, they'll still be around) called Keanu who will inherit my soul, my ability to sing badly and my irritating mannerisms. Well, bully for Keanu! It still doesn't seem to me that I will live on in him.

My point is therefore not that reincarnation doesn't make sense, but rather, if there is such a thing, then it does not seem to be a means by which individual persons can have life after death. If there is reincarnation, it doesn't seem to mean that I, Julian Baggini, will live on after death. The reason is that who I am seems to require an awareness that I am who I am as well as a sense of my past and future. Neither Harold nor Keanu has any sense of being me, nor of my life as his past or future. Therefore, they just don't seem to be me! So at the very least, I would need to be given very good reasons to be persuaded that such a person would really be me, and the continued existence of my soul does not seem to be a sufficiently good one.

This doesn't mean that reincarnation is meaningless. Perhaps it is some comfort to think of one's soul going on and living in someone else, just as there is some comfort in thinking of one's vital organs helping someone else to live after your death. But it is not at all clear that reincarnation, if true, is a means by which we can survive as individuals beyond death.

I should just deal with one possible objection, which is that perhaps we do remember all our lives at some stage when the cycle of reincarnation ends and we reach the end of our spiritual development. Once again this apparently straightforward belief makes much less sense when you examine it more closely. To see why, consider this analogy: Imagine that we could trade memories, so that, for example, I could have some of your memories. That would be very strange indeed. It would be like, suddenly, I could "remember" certain experiences from your viewpoint. But gaining some of your memories in this way would not make me you. It seems to me that remembering all our past lives at some point in the future must be something like this. I would suddenly have a whole lot of memory experiences from the viewpoints of various odd characters, such as Harold, and I would remember them as if I were there. But I don't think it's obvious that means I was Harold.

As always, I don't expect my comments to be conclusive. My main point is simply that when we think harder about what reincarnation means, it does not obviously entail that we as individuals live on after death at all. There would clearly be some relationship between people whose lives were linked through reincarnation, but whether that relationship is best described as survival of one individual is certainly disputable.

Would resurrection offer a better means of survival? It seems it would for the simple reason that with resurrection, you are literally restored to exactly how you were before death. If I have the same body, brain, personality and memories - in short, the same everything after resurrection, how could I not be the same person? Resurrection, therefore, as a means of personal survival after death, seems much more promising than reincarnation.

However is resurrection really plausible? The problem with resurrection is that it implies life going on in just the same way as it does here on earth - with us as fully embodied biological organisms. This would mean wherever the afterlife is it would have to be somewhere physical, with oxygen, water and food. It would be true that there is more to life than this earthly existence, namely, more of the same somewhere else!

There are further strange features of this vision. It would take a being of extraordinary power to actually resurrect us. After all, our bodies rot or are burned and thus the matter of which we are made of is scattered to the four corners of the world. Because at least some of the molecules of the dead are now part of the living, it is actually impossible we could all be resurrected exactly as we are now. It also seems extraordinary that this powerful being would have us live for eternity in human bodies which seem of their nature designed for a relatively short period of usage on earth. These oddities do not make resurrection impossible, but they do make it sound far less plausible.

The situation gets odder when you realise that there would have to be at least some changes made to us in order for this afterlife to last any time at all anyway. To avoid swiftly dying again in this new land, the ageing process would presumably have to be stopped. And for there to be a good quality of life, surely it would have to be reversed in many, many cases. Disease and fatal accidents would have to be prevented. So falling off tall buildings wouldn't kill you. Presumably, we wouldn't procreate. If babies were born straight into this heaven, why weren't the rest of us? Add all these things up and, all of a sudden, it seems our image of this afterlife is not what it first seemed. As we first described it, this was just a full resurrection of the body. But now it seems these bodies are very different to the fragile, ageing, mortal ones we had on earth. This is not so much a resurrected me as a totally new model! We find ourselves impaled on the horns of a two-pronged dilemma. Either we have resurrection, which implies a mere continuation of our earthly life and the ageing, vulnerability and mortality that involves, or we have a kind of pseudo-resurrection, where we live on in bodies that may look like our human ones, but are, in fact, rather different. The first option defeats the object of resurrection in the first place, which is to offer us the chance of life, if not eternal, then a good deal longer than it would have been. The second option is not resurrection at all, but something quite different. This dovetails into the third way in which we think life after death may be possible, that at death, the spirit leaves the body and goes on to live independently.

The second option I described above is perhaps best described, not as me going on to live in my body or a body like mine but better. Rather it seems to be that it is me living on in human form. "Body" implies so much that is physical that the kind of disease free, immortal "body" imagined above can't really count as a body at all. Prick a body and it bleeds. If it bleeds enough it will die. Such cannot be the case in the afterlife unless we are to be condemned to an endless cycle of life, death, and restoration to the physical state we were in before that death. Again, given that the very idea of resurrection in human form seems to require a deity to bring it about, it seems most odd that such an infinitely powerful and wise being would set things up in this way. Having died a few times and realised there's life after death, I think I for one would ask why God just hadn't fitted us out with immortal "bodies" to start with! (Of course, if you don't remember you've died before we're back to reincarnation, which I discussed earlier).

So it seems most likely that if we are to live on in human form, this will not be in truly human bodies. That would mean that we are essentially beings distinct from our physical bodies, but that we would always exist in some kind of human form. As that makes us essentially non-physical in nature, it is not too fanciful to describe ourselves as non-physical "souls".

What of the possibility that these souls exist in a non-human form? That raises the question of how much any being not in a human form could really be me. It does not seem to be just an incidental feature of my existence that I use language, read, hear and interact with people. Unless my soul lived on in something like this way, I'm not sure it could me living on in that soul. It will be little comfort to Martha if her mother lives on after death unless she does so in a way which is recognisably "human" in form. Just think about the whole idea of being reunited with our loved ones in the after-life. At the very least that would require human communication. So when we talk about the possibility of the soul going on to live independently of the body, I take it that this form of life is in very important respects like human life. For this reason, I think that if souls are our means of survival, it is necessary that they take on a human-like form.

So maybe this is the version of the afterlife that makes sense - a human-like existence in a non-human body, with full mental continuity from our earthly life. I’ll calls this view "soul liberation" because it is the view that, in this life, our souls are entrapped in our bodies, but that after this life, they become freed from this constraint.

But hang on. I argued that the continued existence of the soul doesn't give us an after life in reincarnation. So why would it provide us with one in the case of soul liberation? The crucial difference is that soul liberation allows for mental continuity, whereas reincarnation does not. With the soul liberation, we remember our past, we feel we are the same person and we have the same characters. This doesn't happen in reincarnation.

But if this is the reason why soul liberation allows personal survival after death, then surely the crucial factor is mental continuity, not survival of the soul. After all, survival of the soul alone doesn’t seem to allow for personal survival, as considerations of reincarnation showed. So the reason why soul liberation seems like the best option for the afterlife is because it allows for full mental continuity liberated from the mortality of our bodies. It actually has nothing to do with "soul" at all. If you agree with me that my soul being reincarnated doesn't give me life after death, then you agree that you are not your soul. So in the case of soul liberation, what enables you to live on is that your mental life lives on, not that your soul does. Soul is just the means by which your mental life does live on. The soul wouldn't be you, it would just be the substance which enabled you to go on living. In the same way, a computer disc is not the computer file, merely the physical mechanism in which the file can be stored.

My final concern about this is that, if this is true, we face a rather difficult question. It's all very well talking about soul liberation, but just what is this "soul" anyway? My thoughts suggest that when we talk about soul we are really talking about our mental lives: our thoughts, feelings, memories and character. Do these really add up to a "thing" which could live on after death? Is our "sense of self" a being which can float away from the body at death and live without it? The evidence is rather to the contrary. Our mental lives seem to depend entirely on our being embodied humans with brains. Knock our part of the brain and you knock out language. If your brain doesn't produce enough serotonin, you will be miserable. Stimulate a certain area of the brain and everything seems funny. Considering these various possible ways in which we could live on after death makes me convinced that the only way I could live on is if this mental life I have could continue. But this mental life seems, alas, to depend entirely on my having a brain in an all-too mortal human body.

This is an important point which is worth stressing. Many things are not understood about the brain and consciousness. For example, philosophers have shown that the claim that mental states just are brain states is hugely problematic. But these major difficulties should not be used as a means of avoiding what few philosophers or scientists seriously deny - that mental processes such as thought and feeling owe their existence to a functioning, organic brain. The relationship between brains and minds is not properly understood, but the dependence of minds on brains is rarely disputed.

So perhaps the best bet for, if not immortality, than at least an extra few laps around life is actually through human technology after all. Cryogenics - the freezing of dead humans for resuscitation later - seems unlikely to help, as the brain, starved of oxygen, will almost certainly suffer terrible damage before it could be revived. Extending life through robot parts may help us to live longer, but given the primitiveness of this technology, I wouldn't rely on it. However, in the future, much seems possible. Science-fiction writers have explored the possibilities in great depth. Maybe one day humans will find some way of keeping themselves - or at the very least, good copies of themselves - alive indefinitely. Whether this is a desirable state of affairs or not is another matter.

Before moving on, however, I should make clear that I have been discussing, essentially, not whether there is a life after death, but in what senses life after death is possible or likely. It is possible to view life after death as something which is essentially transformative. On this view, the move from our present mode of being to another changes you in such a very profound way so that, in a real sense, you are no longer the "same" person, but that this is the very purpose of the change. I have argued that if reincarnation or soul liberation into a non-human form really happens, then in an important sense, it would make the resulting person not you at all. Perhaps that can be accepted phlegmatically. Perhaps to you it makes sense to think of this life as a stage in the life of something rather greater and that it doesn't really matter that the next stage will be so different from this one that it won't really be you at all. Such thoughts provide, for me, neither hope nor comfort. But others may feel differently. I am not sure what reasons we might have for believing that such a continuation occurs, but if you feel we have such reasons then I have not argued against you here. My goal has been more modest - to try and make sense of what life after death could be like and to examine the consequences. This entire section falls under a very large if.

So perhaps Martha's vague ideas about life after death were appropriate for the occasion. They provided comfort because of their vagueness. But what of Mr Edwards? His son is not dead, and yet the questions he has to deal with have a lot in common with the ones Martha mused on. Martha thought about what was necessary for us to continue to live on after death. Mr Edwards is faced with the question of what is necessary for his son to live on before death. This may seem a paradoxical question: if his son is not dead, he lives on. But to say his son is not dead is to beg the question. The question is, though the body lives on, is Edwards' son living in it?

I think our answer to this question should correspond to our reactions to the life after death cases we have already looked at. When you add up the different scenarios considered, there are various options for life after death: (1) The soul lives on without mental continuity; (2) the soul lives on with mental continuity (which perhaps simply means there is mental continuity, and the concept of "soul" is redundant"); (3) the body is resurrected with mental continuity; and (4) the body is resurrected without mental continuity. I have suggested that any of the options that do not involve a significant amount of mental continuity cannot really add up to survival of me. They may add up to survival of something, but that something is my body or my soul, not me. If you agree with me, then you will agree that mental continuity is necessary for personal survival. For the sake of concision, let's refer to this view by the acronym COMINS - Continuity Of Mental Is Necessary for Survival. The alternative views would have to suggest something other than mental continuity is necessary for survival. This could be the soul (Continued Existence of Souls Is Necessary for Survival - CESINS) or the body (Continued Existence of Body Is Necessary for Survival - CEBINS). These three views really exhaust all the possibilities, save for the possibility that a combination of two or more is required for survival. So one could believe that both COMINS and CEBINS together form the correct view - that mental continuity in the same body is necessary for personal survival.

Armed with these distinctions we can simply ask: on what views has Edward's son survived his terrible ordeal? If we believe COMINS, then if the worst prognosis is correct, his son cannot have survived, as his amnesia and reversion to the mental age of a seven-year old makes mental continuity impossible. Many will resist this view, even if when considering after-life they favoured COMINS. Why is this?

One reason is that they may reply that although mental continuity is severely restricted, it is not true to say that there is no mental continuity. They will point to cases where a person after such an accident displays some signs of their "old self" as evidence of this. Allied to this may be some fears. One is that, if we accept COMINS, we will not show respect for such people as Edwards' son and will treat them as "living corpses". Another fear is that we will presume comatose humans to be dead, when really we cannot know whether inside they are really very much alive and thinking. How may we respond to these worries?

Firstly, I think it is a necessary part of accepting COMINS that one accepts that mental continuity is not an all-or-nothing thing. One may have the normal amount of mental continuity, increasingly less and then none at all. Clearly, if I suffer selective amnesia, forgetting, say, five years of my life, I do not cease to be me. But it does not follow that I could lose all mental continuity with my past and still be me. We are dealing here with the problem of "fuzzy borderlines" which I discussed in Chapter Two. The question anyone committed to COMINS must ask is "How much mental continuity is required for survival?" whilst at the same accepting that no hard-and-fast answer can be given. This is perhaps one issue where common-sense judgement is required. Whether or not Edwards' son post-coma is sufficiently mentally continuous with his son pre-coma for him to be the same person is perhaps best judged by Edwards, his son and those close to him.

Secondly, even if we judge that Edwards' son has not survived the coma, that does not mean we immediately lose all respect for the life of the poor man still living in Edwards' body. We are as much governed by sentiment in these cases as we are by reason. Sentiment can cloud our judgement but it is also essential to our humanity. Without human sentiment there would be nothing to motivate us to reason. In order to do anything at all, physical or mental, we must first have desires and wants. Hume famously said that "reason is the slave of the passions". I can only imagine what my reactions would be in Edwards' situation. To even begin to imagine it is an emotionally overwhelming experience. I am sure that no matter how rationally convinced I was that my loved one had effectively ceased to exist, my emotional attachment to them would leave me determined to make sure the body that survived them was treated with respect and was taken care of. I say this as someone who is perhaps more influenced by intellectual concerns than average and is not particularly sentimental. If this is how I would react, I think we need not fear how humanity as whole would.

The third worry is about how we can judge whether a person really is thinking in the same way "inside". We have the horror, for example, of turning off the life-support machine of someone who appears to be brain dead, but is really aware of all we are saying, and is internally crying out not to be killed. Two points here. Firstly, the question of how we can tell mental continuity has ceased is quite distinct from the general question of whether mental continuity is necessary for survival. We may believe that COMINS is the correct view, but also believe that no person is in a position to judge of another person whether there is mental continuity or not. In other words, no action follows on inevitably from accepting COMINS is true. The second point is that, horror stories not withstanding, there are at least some cases where we can know beyond all reasonable doubt that a person is brain dead. It is a horrible thought, but there are no cases of someone recovering consciousness after having either their brain stem totally destroyed or their brains effectively turning to liquid. We should not use a few examples of incredible recoveries from comas as evidence that there is no such thing as irreversible brain death.

So, if COMINS is the correct view, then Edwards' feeling of bereavement is entirely justified. His son has not survived his ordeal. Even if we believe there is some mental continuity between the pre-coma and post-coma man, at best we can call this partial survival.

On either of the other two views, Edwards' son may have survived. According to CEBINS - Continued Existence of Body Is Necessary for Survival - he may have survived as his body lives on. The big question is whether survival of the body is sufficient for survival of the self. Why would we feel that the survival of the body alone is enough for personal survival? In science fiction stories such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, for example, we have no trouble in accepting that, though the bodies live on, once taken over by the aliens, they are no longer the bodies of their original owners. Of course, it is only science fiction, but the story-writer seems to be plugging into a deep-seated belief that continued existence of our bodies is not enough to guarantee survival of our selves.

The problems for CESINS - Continued Existence of Souls Is Necessary for Survival - are rather different. As the discussion of reincarnation showed, it is far from obvious that soul-survival has anything to do with personal survival. But perhaps the biggest difficulty is making sense of just what "soul" is. Definitions such as "the non-physical essence of self" just seem to rephrase the mystery. As far as we can understand what "essence of self" is, I think we understand it as to do with the mental - our characters, dispositions and so on. But all this is covered in the COMINS view. What is left that is distinctive for CESINS?

We are left with various ways of interpreting the status of the person who recovers from the coma. Though we may feel ill-qualified to pronounce definite judgement, just thinking about the situation clarifies our thoughts about who each of us is as an individual. We are forced to consider how important continuity of the mental, the physical or the "soul" is for our continued existence as individuals. And in doing that we make judgements about who we are. That judgement may affect how we view our pasts, our futures and indeed our whole lives. It will affect how we see others, even if it doesn't affect how we treat them.

The same is true for the result of thinking about the afterlife. Making sense of the afterlife is part of making sense of this life: if the afterlife looks improbable or incoherent to you, then how you live this life takes on a new urgency. If afterlife does seem probable or possible to you, what form you think it might take may also influence how you live now.

The reflections we have made whilst considering the two cases we have looked at should help us to build up a clearer picture of what we are and whether we could live on after death. I think it is possible to think of persons as bodies, souls, a stream of consciousness or some combination of the three. But depending on which way we actually do think about persons, we will end up having very different ideas about who and what we are.

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This article is adapted and extracted from Making Sense: Philosophy in the Real World by Julian Baggini.