Life After Death: The Evidence by Dinesh D'Souza

Author:Dinesh D'Souza [D'Souza, Dinesh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2009-11-01T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

THE IMMATERIAL SELF

How Consciousness Can Survive Death

Brains are automatic, rule-governed, determined devices, while people are personally responsible agents, free to make their own decisions.1

—Michael Gazzaniga, The Ethical Brain

Now it is time to ask whether life after death is not merely possible but actually reasonable. We will first reconsider dualism and see how it has made a remarkable scientific comeback. We still won’t be able to fully understand how minds interact with bodies, but we do have the beginning of an answer to what seemed like an impossible problem. Dualism, as we have seen, enables life after death, but it doesn’t confirm it. That’s because minds may still depend on earthly bodies for their instantiation, in the same way that software programs require certain types of hardware in order to run. Therefore, we need to explore whether there are parts of our mental lives that are completely independent of bodies, indeed independent of the laws of nature that govern material bodies. If this is so, then minds can be expected to live on past death either by themselves, as Socrates believed, or in union with some greater mind, as the Hindus and Buddhists hold, or in different kinds of bodies, as the Abrahamic religions affirm. By examining two crucial features of mental life—consciousness and free will—I will show aspects of our minds that are irreducible to material bodies or to the laws that describe them. The argument, if sound, will provide my first proof of life after death.

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