I’ve always liked an epitaph supposedly used by Epicureans in ancient Greece: “I was not; I was; I am not; I do not mind.” It expresses a benign resignation toward the inevitability of death as part of the natural cycle. And although it’s written in the form of a statement by a dead person, the dead cannot really express themselves thus, even if that’s how they felt about it when they were alive.
This article from Scientific American Mind proposes that the human tendency to believe in an afterlife is based on a particular cognitive illusion. Even if you believe that death is truly the end of the road, it’s impossible to imagine ourselves not being here and so to experience even in imagination what death will be like. In other words, we have to be here to think about not being here, which can be a major source of confusion for a brain trying to understand its own death. Obviously it’s possible to hold what the article describes as extinctivist beliefs about death truly being the end, but even extinctivists can have a hard time conceptualizing what that means for themselves.
From this viewpoint, it’s probably not existential terror that first led humans to think that there was an afterlife, but an innate trick of consciousness. The article describes various studies that have examined people’s statements about the feelings, thoughts, and intentions of the dead. In particular, some scientists have looked at what children have to say on the subject, and have found that younger children are more likely than older children to assume some kind of psychological continuity in the dead. Even when they’re aware that death will eliminate the need for food or sleep, they talk as if the dead will still be able to feel or think.
The fact that this tendency is weaker in older children indicates that it’s not (or at least not entirely) imposed by culture. Interestingly, however, language and religious training can influence the degree to which older children ascribe mental states to the dead: clinical or scientific language and secular schooling both seem to counteract the mental habit of assuming ongoing mental activity after death.
The article also mentions the concept of person permanence, which means the recognition that just because someone is out of sight doesn’t mean he or she has stopped existing. We learn this when we’re very young and, as the author of the article suggests, perhaps we can’t easily unlearn it when we’re thinking about people we know who have died, as opposed to people we know who are alive but absent. This may be another factor contributing to the intuitive feeling that maybe the dead aren’t really gone.
And in some sense, they do live on, in our memories and imaginations, and in that sense, they’re always here. Not in the way you’d like them to be, but still, for people you were close to, parts of them live on in you. Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop explores this idea in detail. One of my favorite Ashleigh Brilliant cartoons has the caption “Officially, we begin at birth, and end at death, but it’s really much more complicated than that.” I don’t know exactly how Brilliant meant it, but even an extinctivist like me can find some truth in that.
I remember when the kids first asked me about death, when they were six or so. I told them, “Do you worry about the time before you were born? Was that time bad? It wasn’t there at all, was it? Death is the same way. It’s nothing to worry about because it’s nothing. Just like before you were born. And that wasn’t bad, was it?”
Worked for me, worked for them.
Keith