TLS on Death

on Death

My future me

by THOMAS NAGEL

a review of Mark Johnston's SURVIVING DEATH
416pp. Princeton University Press. £24.95 (US $35). 978 0 691 13012 5

If your existence depends on the life of a particular human being, you will vanish when that creature dies: the centre of consciousness that is now reading the TLS will be annihilated, and the universe will close over you. In Surviving Death, an ambitious and quixotic book, Mark Johnston shows a deep understanding of the natural fear of death and rejects a number of traditional religious and philosophical accounts of how we might survive it. He then offers his own explanation of how, even if one assumes a naturalistic world-view, surviving our own biological death might be theoretically possible. But the hope of survival he offers, apart from its philosophical implausibility, is one which neither the author nor his readers have a significant chance of achieving. So the book offers little comfort; but it is stimulating, written with skill and charm, and packed with illuminating philosophical reflection on the question of what we are, and what it is for us to persist over time - on the relations among selves, persons, human beings, bodies and souls.
What is it you care about, if you don't want to die? Not the survival of a particular organism, as such. The survival of that human animal concerns you because it is a condition of your continuing existence; if you could survive its death, then even though you might miss the old jalopy, the worst would be averted. But can we give sense, and perhaps even credence, to this possibility? Most of us can easily imagine waking up on the Day of Judgment, or being reincarnated as someone else, but perhaps that is just a trick of the imagination, a projection of the self that corresponds to no real possibility.
read more Johnston is moved in this inquiry not only by the pure wish to survive, but by another wish that seems to require survival for its fulfilment: the wish that goodness should be rewarded. Those who are good are not good for the sake of reward, but if great sacrifice in the name of the good is not rewarded, Johnston believes, the importance and even the rationality of goodness are threatened. He concludes, like Kant, that faith in the importance of goodness requires hope of reward in an afterlife. I have no sympathy for this view, because I believe that the reasons to be good are self-sufficient, even if they require sacrifice. But Johnston's conviction leads him to seek a demonstration that death is better for the good than for the bad, and that will be the key to his analysis of survival.
First, however, he has to dispose of the considerable array of alternative theories. These fall into three types: immortality of the soul, resurrection of the body, and psychological continuity. Johnston rejects each of them as a way we might survive death, for different reasons, and his arguments constitute an excellent tour of the territory of theological and philosophical theories of personal identity. He says that there is no evidence against the naturalistic view that nothing but a properly functioning brain is necessary for conscious mental life; in particular, psychical research has turned up no credible evidence for a detachable soul. He argues on subtle metaphysical grounds that even a body just like yours, reassembled by God at the Day of Judgment out of the same atoms that constituted your body shortly before your death, would not be the same body. And he maintains that, though we care about the continuation of our memories and personalities, such psychological continuity alone is not enough to guarantee that a future psychological replica will be you.
Though the issues are far from settled, Johnston makes a good case for the view that none of these three forms of survival is available. His weakest argument is that even if you had an immaterial soul, that would not justify your special concern for its future, since everyone else would also have such a soul - to which the reply is that your soul's future experiences are the only ones that would be yours. Suppose, however, that we concur with Johnston in setting aside these three types of account; what is the alternative?
To decide whether surviving death is possible, we need to know what would make a future experience mine. One of Johnston's important and plausible claims is that we cannot discover this by a priori reflection on what to say about various possible cases, because our concept of personal identity does not work that way. Instead, it operates by "offloading" the conditions of identity on to the real nature of certain actual persisting things - human animals, in our own case - which we reidentify only by their manifest properties. As he puts it: "The idea of offloading can be expressed by means of a motto, 'I don't know what the (non-trivial) sufficient conditions for identity over time are, but I do know a persisting object when I see one'". This phenomenon of offloading is familiar from the case of "natural kinds" like water or gold, whose real essences can't be discovered by a priori reflection on our concepts, but require empirical investigation.
We can offload the criteria for identity over time by referring to what metaphysicians call a substance, that is, "something whose present manifestation determines what it would be to have that very same thing again". Living things are the clearest examples of substances, in virtue of their active disposition to maintain themselves over time. To determine personal identity - identity of the self - we offload on to persisting human beings, a class of living things that we regard as possessing embodied minds. And now that we have learnt about the dependence of mental life more specifically on the operation of the brain, we add that if a brain could be kept alive without its body, it would continue to embody the same mind. This seems to imply that the true conditions of personal identity are determined by how mental life is generated in the brain, and it seems to rule out decisively any possibility that we might survive biological death. I think that is the correct conclusion. Johnston, however, believes he can escape it.
To do so, however, he must dismantle the ordinary idea of the persisting self, an idea he evokes vividly as follows: "The most immediate way in which I am given to myself is as the one at the center of this arena of presence and action". This is the subjective sense of "I", and it is this subjective I for whose interests he has an immediate, absorbing concern, and whose death he finds terrifying. "My sheer desire to survive may feed a desire that Johnston survive, but it is not itself a desire that Johnston survive. It is the desire that there will continue to be someone with the property of being me." The crux of Johnston's argument is that there is no such property - or none that could justify the special future-directed self-concern to which it is supposed to give guidance. The way the world is, independent of our attitudes, does not determine what it would be for this same arena of presence and action to exist at a later time.
Johnston denies (unconvincingly, I believe) that this subjective sameness can be secured by offloading on to the persistence conditions of the particular human being who occupies this arena of presence and action at the present moment. Instead, he claims that the self is a merely intentional object, whose identity is not an objective matter, but depends on what the subject takes it to be. Like the dagger that Macbeth imagines, its re-identification at different times is wholly determined by how the subject sees it. Johnston's relativism about personal identity is a radical inversion of the traditional dependence of your future-directed concerns on your belief about who will be you. He contends that personal identity is "responsedependent": it is the disposition of your future-directed concerns that determines who will be you, instead of the other way around.
To introduce this idea, Johnston imagines three tribes of human animals, whom he calls Hibernators, Teletransporters and Humans. The Hibernators fall into a deep sleep during the winter months, and they do not regard the person who will wake up in the spring in their body, with their memories and personality, as being numerically the same person as they are; they do not believe they survive dreamless sleep. The Teletransporters, on the other hand, are accustomed to superfast travel of the kind familiar from science fiction. They step into a machine that takes a complete reading of the microconstitution of their body, destroys the body and sends the information at the speed of light to a target machine at the destination, where a body physically and mentally indistinguishable from the original is produced from local materials. The Teletransporters believe they survive these trips, and unproblematically regard the person who will step out of the target machine as themselves. Finally, the Humans believe that they survive dreamless sleep and don't believe they would survive teleportation: they wouldn't get into one of those machines for a million pounds. In each case, the conviction is immediate and shows itself in unreflective patterns of special future-directed concern.
Johnston says that the Hibernators, Teletransporters and Humans are all right, each on their own terms. There is no objective fact that could make one belief right and the others wrong. Identity is response-dependent, and it is the disposition to identify with some future person deeply and consistently - to care about what happens to him or her in the first-person way - that constitutes the identity-determining disposition.
And here is the punchline: You can survive the biological death of the human being who is now at the centre of your arena of presence and action, if you develop a disposition of future-directed concern for all of the human beings who will exist after he is gone - if, in other words, you become someone who literally loves your posterity as yourself. But once the independent reality of the self is recognized as an illusion, this becomes the rational attitude to take: "If there is no persisting self worth caring about, the premium or excess that special self-concern expects and rejoices in cannot represent a reasonable demand or expectation . . . . One's own interests are not worth considering because they are one's own but simply because they are interests, and interests, wherever they arise and are legitimate, are equally worthy of consideration".
Therefore agape, the universal love that is the Christian ideal of goodness, brings with it its own reward, for those who can attain it. Persons are protean: a single person may be constituted by one human being, or by a series of human beings, or even by a huge crowd of human beings, "the onward rush of humanity", depending on which interests he is immediately disposed to incorporate into his practical outlook. Johnston's theory vindicates the importance of goodness by making absolute goodness the condition of continued life.
This form of survival through extreme selflessness would require a transformation that is out of the reach of almost everyone, and in any case not subject to the will. Johnston adds, though, that even if we cannot attain this perfect goodness, it is important to transcend natural selfishness and nepotism in a more familiar way, by recognizing that everyone's interests have the same importance as our own. Even if we cannot be truly good, we can become "good enough", not to survive death but to "face death down, to see through it to a pleasing future in which individual personalities flourish . . . . For the utterly selfish, however, the obliteration of their individual personalities is the obliteration of everything of real importance to them". But this is a familiar point, and does not cancel the absoluteness of one's own death.
To accept Johnston's theory that identity is relative, that persons are protean, and that we could survive death by coming to identify with future human beings, would require at least as large a dose of wishful thinking as belief in the immortality of the soul or the resurrection of the body. It seems far more likely that the world, in particular the facts about how the brain sustains the mind, determines what we are, even though those facts are still largely unknown. Johnston's scepticism about a purely mental substance as the carrier of personal identity is reasonable, but the familiar, and alas perishable human animal is harder to dislodge from its decisive control over our fate.