Intuitive Conceptions of Dead Agents' Minds: The Natural Foundations of Afterlife Beliefs as Phenomenological Boundary

Abstract

Little is known about how the minds of dead agents are represented. In the current experiment, individuals with different types of explicit afterlife beliefs were asked in an implicit interview task whether various mental state types, as well as pure biological imperatives, continue after death. The results suggest that, regardless of one's explicit reports about personal consciousness after death, those who believe in some form of life after death (and, to a certain extent, even those who do not) implicitly represent dead agents' minds in the same way: psychobiological and perceptual states cease while emotional, desire, and epistemic states continue. The ndings are interpreted according to simulation constraints -because it is epistemologically impossible to know what it is like to be dead, individuals will be most likely to attribute to dead agents those types of mental states that they cannot imagine being without. Such a model argues that it is natural to believe in life after death and social transmission serves principally to conceptually enrich (or degrade) intuitive conceptions of the afterlife.

The supernatural guilt trip does not take us far enough

“…Nevertheless, there is evidence that simulation constraints (i.e., the inability to know what it is "like" to be dead) may comprise an important set of factors. Like reasoning about one's past mental states during dreamless sleep or while in other somnambulistic states, consciously representing a final state of unconsciousness poses formidable, if not impassable, cognitive constraints (Barrett 2004;Bering 2002a;Bering & Bjorklund 2004;Bering et al 2005;Clark 1994; Gilbert 2001;Nichols, in press). By relying on simulation strategies to derive information about the minds of dead agents, one would be compelled to put themselves "into the shoes" of such organisms, which is an impossible feat.…”

“…Attempts to simulate dead agents' minds may even result in Type I errors made by adults who profess not to believe in the afterlife. Bering (2002a) found that when undergraduate students were asked to reason about the psychological abilities of a protagonist who had just abruptly died in an automobile accident, even some participants who later classified themselves as "extinctivists" (i.e., those who endorsed the statement "what we think of as the 'soul,' or conscious personality of a person, ceases permanently when the body dies"; after Thalbourne 1996), nevertheless stated that the dead person knew that he was dead.…”

“…These aspects of consciousness are not obviously related to the body's survival, nor are they linked to external bodily accoutrements (i.e., sense organs) that become "broken" by death. In the absence of scientific theory concerning the isomorphic relationship between the brain and the mind, individuals may defer to a simulation strategy in reasoning about dead others, a strategy that inevitably leads to Type I errors for these particular mental capacities (Bering 2002a;Clark 1994;Gilbert 2001;Nichols, in press). Firsthand experiences with the phenomenal negation of mental functions such as desires, emotions, and thought can never be had because these states are constantly "turned on" during conscious periods (e.g., it is epistemologically impossible to know what it is like not to think), making people inclined to impute these capacities to dead agents.…”

“…Firsthand experiences with the phenomenal negation of mental functions such as desires, emotions, and thought can never be had because these states are constantly "turned on" during conscious periods (e.g., it is epistemologically impossible to know what it is like not to think), making people inclined to impute these capacities to dead agents. Indeed, in looking at participants' response latencies to state that a dead protagonist lacked the capacity for various mental states, Bering (2002a) reported that it took people longer to answer that this was the case for "difficult-to-imagine-theabsence-of" states (e.g., desire: "Now that he's dead, does he want to be alive?") than for "easy-to-imaginethe-absence-of" states (e.g., psychobiological: "Now that he's dead, is he still sleepy?").…”

“…As will soon be discussed, investigators such as Boyer (2001) and Atran (2002) have shown that the "selection" of explicit religious ideas occurs at the cultural level, with the "survival" of such ideas being a feature of their ability to become ensconced in the evolved architecture of exposed human minds (Sperber & Hirschfeld 2004). Instead, it is to argue that the subtle contours of a uniquely human adapted design may stand out when closely examining the folk psychology of souls, an intuitive pattern of reasoning that does not appear to hinge on the presence of explicit religious concepts per se (Bering 2002a). But how might a representational bias for envisioning personal immortality have impacted the net genetic fitness of individual humans in ancestral environments?…”