Dinesh D'Souza
is the author of "Life After Death: The Evidence"
One of the oldest arguments for life after death was made by the philosopher Socrates, who argued that human beings are made up of two kinds of stuff. Material stuff includes the organs of the body, including the physical brain, and those perish. Immaterial stuff includes thoughts and ideas, the ingredients of the mind, and those are imperishable. When we die, Socrates said, our bodies deteriorate, but our minds live on, emancipated from their material frames.
Socrates' stance on the twofold nature of reality is called dualism. Most of us are instinctive dualists because dualism seems to capture the world as we experience it. And dualism makes life after death plausible because the attributes of material things are not shared by immaterial things. Even so, dualism has fallen out of favor with many philosophers and sciences, not to mention atheists, who reject the idea of life after death.
These critics deny Socrates' argument by challenging its premise. Typical is philosopher Daniel Dennett, who contends that human beings are ultimately made up of one kind of stuff: material stuff. This position is called materialism, and it is the main alternative to dualism. Minds and souls, materialists insist, are simply terms for the operations of the neurons in our brains.
Why, then, do we experience choices and thoughts and emotions as nonphysical? Materialists like Dennett say that mental states can be apprehended by their functional purposes. A mousetrap, for instance, is defined by what it does; it is any kind of device that catches mice. By the same token, mental states can be best understood in terms of their behavioral results. "Being in love," for example, refers to the actions the love produces, such as writing romantic poems and sending flowers. The basic project of materialism is to reduce the mental to its physical consequences. If materialism is true, then there is no life after death, because when the body dies, there is nothing left to live on.
Despite its ingenuity, materialism of this sort clearly falls short in explaining mental states. The feeling of being in love is hardly explained by love's behavior, because even if we subtract the behavior, the feeling remains, and it seems churlish at best to say, "Well, you are obviously not in love because you aren't writing poems and you haven't sent flowers." We all know that there is something that it feels like to be in love, just as there is something it feels like to watch a sunset by the ocean, or to smell fresh-brewed coffee. Philosophers call such sensations "qualia," a term that refers to the inner quality of an experience on the part of the one who is having it.
It seems that no amount of scientific or objective analysis can capture this inner quality, this "what it is like" to have a particular sensation. To demonstrate this point, philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay in 1974 with the provocative title "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" This may seem a damning indictment of how philosophers spend their time, but Nagel wasn't sitting around thinking, "What would it be like for me, Thomas Nagel, to be a bat? I wonder how I'd feel if I could hang upside down, had wings, and could navigate by echolocation." Rather, he was asking what it was like for a bat to do those things, what it was like for a bat to be a bat.
Nagel's point was that there is something that it is like to be human, or male, or a dog; by the same token, there must also be something that it is like to be a bat. But however much we learn about bat physiology, bat brains, and echolocation, Nagel says we can never fully understand what it is like to be a bat. The clear implication is that an objective physical understanding is necessarily incomplete, apparently because there is something to living organisms that transcends the physical.
In 1986, philosopher Frank Jackson broadened Nagel's argument into a refutation of all materialist attempts to explain mental states in purely physical terms. In what has come to be called the "Mary problem," Jackson envisioned a brilliant scientist named Mary who is locked in a black-and-white room from which she investigates the world by way of a black-and-white television monitor. As a specialist in the neurophysiology of vision, Mary knows everything there is to know about color. She understands how different wavelengths of light stimulate the retina, and how those are channeled to the visual areas in the brain, resulting in such statements as "The sky is blue" and "Tomatoes are red."
Now here's Jackson's question: Suppose Mary finally gets a color TV monitor or is released from her black-and-white room into the outside world. Will Mary learn something that she didn't know before? Jackson says she obviously would. She would for the first time know what it's like to see the blue sky or red tomatoes. These experiences would teach her something about color that all her previous knowledge could not.
Alarmed at where this is going, the atheist Dennett disputes Jackson's interpretation, insisting that if Mary really knew everything about color, including, as Dennett puts it, "10 billion word treatises" on the subject, then she actually would know what it was like to see the blue sky and red tomatoes. Dennett admits this is counterintuitive, but he contends that intuitions are not always our best guide.
I agree with him on that, but on balance I have to go with Jackson here. It defies not only intuition but also reason to say that Mary, on being liberated from her black-and-white world, wouldn't discover something new. Her extrinsic knowledge of color would now be supplemented by intrinsic knowledge. If this is so, then it is hard to resist Jackson's conclusion that all attempts to reduce mental states to physical states must be false, because Mary had all the physical information, and yet her prior knowledge was incomplete.
My conclusion is that the best attempts of materialists have failed to reduce the mental realm to the physical realm. The startling implication is that Socrates' dualism retains its plausibility. The old Greek philosopher was right: We do inhabit two distinct, although interdependent, realms, and the termination of our physical bodies at death does not foreclose the possibility that our minds and our souls might continue to exist.