Consciousness Before Birth and After Death

What is the difference, to consciousness, between being dead and being not yet born, or more exactly, being not yet even conceived? Are they equivalent states of consciousness?

After you die, your individual consciousness ceases to exist. Religion generally denies this, but that is wishful thinking. The main purpose of religion, after all, is to deny death. For believers, who are alive, not dead, this is a comforting, though delusional idea that has no basis in evidence or logic.

So let us agree, for purpose of this essay, that individual consciousness ceases to exist when, or sometime very soon after, all the systems of the physical body cease to function.

Now, how is that different in principle, to an individual’s state of consciousness prior to being conceived? In that condition (or non-condition), there is no physical body to define the boundary of an individual, and with no body, no individual consciousness. Functionally then, being unborn (unconceived) is equivalent to being dead. In both cases there is no individual consciousness because the functioning, individual embodiment to support it does not exist. Individual consciousness depends on individual embodiment – which is not to say that consciousness is caused by embodiment; there is no evidence for that. There is simply a dependency, of an unknown kind, between embodiment and consciousness.

It is only during a brief segment of less than 100 years, while we have a functioning body, that we have a functioning individual consciousness. Prior to the beginning of my tiny moment of individualism, the world extended backward in time beyond history and took place entirely without my presence (difficult though that is to imagine). And after my flicker of time is over, the world will continue on, in some form or other, without me (difficult though that is to imagine). Beyond the boundaries of my particular individual life, my consciousness simply does not exist in the universe. Why then, do we so carefully distinguish between being dead, and being not yet born?

An easy, and wrong, answer, is that the unborn are full of “potential” while the dead are not. This is a linguistic confusion, for “the unborn” do not exist. What the expression means is that some hypothetical individual who might be conceived and born at a future date, would have the potential to have experience, and to cause things to happen in the world. But that is a fact about someone who hypothetically will be alive, not an entity actually unconceived and unborn at this time. That entity does not literally exist yet. Something that does not exist has no potential for anything.

A person might take a God’s-eye view of human life and declare from that omniscient mountaintop that new individuals will be born, and when they are, will have “potential” for life whereas the dead never will again (assuming that dead is forever). But there is no God’s-eye view. We are humans, not gods, and we only have a human point of view, which is not omniscient. To take a God’s eye view is either imagination or self-delusion. If you’re going to pretend you have a God’s eye view of life and death, you might as well imagine reincarnation, or zombies and vampires if you like, because it is unconstrained fabrication anyway.

From actual human, not presumptive divine, knowledge, we can again only conclude that there is no functional difference between the state of (non-) consciousness prior to conception and after death. That conclusion is an inference based on evidence available to living humans.

However, there is a psychological difference that matters to living humans. I have memory of personal experience that seems to extend backward in time before my birth. This is possible through the magic of history. By contrast, except for religious stories, I do not imagine any personal experience beyond my death, since, unlike for history, there is no human evidence that any experience continues beyond death.

Of the uncountable billions and billions of people who have died on this planet, and among the millions who die every day, not a single person has ever “come back” to the living and reported any experience beyond death, or even communicated with us “from the other side” about what postmortem experience is like. In this assertion, I rule out fictional stories, religious fabrications, fraudulent reports, and tales from the mentally abnormal. By comparison, with history, we have written records, fossils, geology, astronomy, genetics and so forth, which give us verifiable, scientific evidence of what happened or probably happened before my individual experience began.

World War II ended before I was born, which seems odd to me, because I feel like I remember it, but that’s because of having studied history. My father fought in WWII and he actually remembers it (or would, if he were not dead). But what would he remember? He would remember his naval experience, his buddies, the situations he was in. He would not remember the entire war, though, because nobody could, because nobody experienced the entire war. People can only literally remember their own experience, not somebody else’s. And yet, after a lifetime of reading about the war, and watching uncountable movies and newsreels covering all aspects of it, I feel I have a personal memory of it, although that is not literally possible because I wasn’t yet born when the war ended. Still, that quasi-memory, a function of internalized history, extends my memory of collective human experience back in time beyond the moment of my conception.

There is a complementary, if not parallel, kind of quasi-experience after death. After a person dies, their memory continues in the collective experience of those who knew that person. In cultures that emphasize ancestor worship, this mnemonic persistence can last quite a long time. Eventually, and inevitably, it fades from the collective memory. Even if a family has an extensive, documented genealogy, we can be confident there is little, if any, collective memory of individuals who lived thousands of years ago, or who lived before history. Some individuals who are deemed noteworthy by a cultural tradition may be remembered less intimately for much longer than average. We collectively remember Albert Einstein, Thomas Aquinas, Jesus Christ, Socrates, and a collection of Egyptian Pharaohs. As more time elapses since a person’s death, the less detailed is the historical record of them and the dimmer the collective memory.

Nevertheless, there is a sense in which an individual’s experience persists beyond death in the collective consciousness of the community in which that individual lived. The dead individual has no personal consciousness or memory, but as long as the community persists, there is yet a persistent psychological trace of that individual’s experience.

To the extent that an individual, while living, defines himself or herself as a member of that community, psychologically constituted of it, then the individual can anticipate being remembered in the collective consciousness after death. That is, in a sense, another form of quasi-memory, an imagined future memory in the minds of the community. That is why some people are so extremely motivated to “leave a mark,” “make a difference,” “leave a legacy,” or otherwise make a noteworthy impression on their community so that their imagined, future, collective memory will persist longer than average.

The quasi-memory after death is actually an imagination of the community’s future rememberance, not a literal individual postmortem memory, but it can be conceived as a hybrid form of postmortem consciousness. In comparison, the quasi-memory of experience before birth feels like an individual form of consciousness, but it is derived from the collective experience of historians, scientists, and the like, and so is also a hybrid of personal and collective consciousness. The two kinds of hybrid quasi-experience have different qualitative feels.

Thus, there is, after all, a difference in consciousness between being dead and not yet having been conceived. While there are hybrid forms of quasi-personal consciousness before birth and after death, they are strangely different, and complementary rather than parallel or equivalent.

Crazy-ass Bombers

In September, a 24-year old Afghan immigrant, was arrested for planning to blow up a New York Building. A week before, a 29-year old fry cook who likes to be called Talib Islam, was charged with attempting to blow up a federal courthouse in Springfield, Illinois. A day later, a 19 year old Jordanian national was arrested for attempting to detonate a car bomb in Dallas. According to the Heritage Foundation, 23 known terrorist plots have been foiled in the last eight years (www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandSecurity/bg2294.cfm).

What is up with these people? I’m wondering if my wife is right, a tax on all males between 15 and 50 would finance most law enforcement and national security. Assuming these nutcases are not actually psychotic, what motivates them (other than 72 heavenly raisins)? The Islamists are attacking the infidel, they believe, a righteous battle in the name of God. But why do they believe that, and what do they hope to accomplish?

The proximal issue is education. The terrorists uniformly are not well educated, by Western standards. They know only the Koran. They know nothing of secular history, science, philosophy, or the principles of critical thinking. I’m sure that is a point of pride for most of them, but an extremely narrow world view does not leave much room for getting along with other people.

Presumably, Islamists get along fine with their own people, and that’s all that matters to them. They want the esteem of their imagined peers, not of the infidel. If they broadened their sense of community beyond the cult, they would quickly realize that they would take a serious hit on the esteem front from pluralism. So there is a built-in defense against consideration for outsiders.

“Islam” means peace, submission, obedience. Submission to what or whom? Not modern law, not community standards, not philosophical principles. It means only submission to God as defined in the Koran and often interpreted by extremist nuts. But in the beginning the term referred to the principle of submitting your personal ego to the good of the tribe. That was a huge innovation in early Arab tribalism. If each individual was utterly subservient to the tribe, you had a fighting machine with replaceable parts as good as any modern army. The “sword of Islam” would have been demonstrably superior in warfare.

Why would an individual want to submit his individual will, either to the will of the tribe or later, to the will of Allah? What’s to gain from loss of self? Immortality. Or, at least the fantasy illusion of immortality. If you are not an individual, you cannot die, because the tribe lives on. We know that for a fact because as members of the tribe we see individuals die all the time, but the tribe continues. So if you abrogate individual intentionality and responsibility to the will of the tribe, you too will continue indefinitely. The core motivation for adherence to Islam is fear of death.

Many Islamists deny that and boast of their love of death. However, that is a reaction formation, a defense against death anxiety. What they long for is immortality, not personal annihilation. That’s why suicide car bombers have their hands taped to the wheel, and why they are only ready to serve after intensive indoctrination. If Islamists really loved death so much, suicide would suffice. For example, public self-immolation can make a powerful political or religious statement, and still accomplish death, if that were the goal. Instead the goal of killing a flock of infidels reveals a more pedestrian motivation to achieve the esteem of peers (“martyrdom”) through distinction in tribal warfare.

All the religions have fairy stories to alleviate death anxiety. That is the main service provided by religion. In Christianity, good works (or arbitrary grace) will get you to heaven, where you will sit at the right hand of God forever, which is presumably a good thing. That promise is supposed to reduce your death anxiety. Coming out of a tradition of tribal warfare, Islam emphasized instead that the key to immortality is to support your tribe in fighting other tribes, or at least, for moderates, to abjure completely the ways and ideas of tribal outsiders. The Islamic promise of immortality is no less fantastic than those of other religions.

Dealing with death anxiety is not easy for anyone. The idea that you will cease to exist while everything goes on without you, is almost unthinkable. We deeply need an alternate story, and religion supplies it. But religions come in all flavors, and unfortunately for us, Islam is one whose solution to the problem was interpreted as xenophobic warfare. The only thing that is ever going to change that is a modified system of Islamic education.

Are Corpses Really Dead?

Recently I attended a show in Seattle called Bodies: The Exhibition. Complete, human, adult bodies have been skinned and imbued with silicone or polymeric plastic, in a process similar to fossilization. The chemicals replace bodily fluids down to the cellular level, preserving all details of the body. The plasticised corpses are clean, odor-free, completely detailed, and have cutaways so you can see the interior of muscles and organs. The bodies are on display for examination.

It was an impressive and educational show. It forces you to adjust your mental ideas of what body parts are like. I was surprised, for example, at how thick the skin and fat layer is on a body. The belly button sticks out a good inch from the abdomen without that layer. I was surprised at how big the bladder is, how small the brain really is, how small the lungs are, the enormous number and complexity of blood vessels, how extremely long some neurons are, and so on. Plus, the displays are physically attractive. Artists would love them.

The show has appeared in Amsterdam, Miami, Las Vegas, and New York. There are other, similar exhibits traveling internationally, such as “Body Worlds.” The web site for the exhibit I saw is http://www.bodiestheexhibition.com/bodies.html

The controversy about the show is about where the bodies came from. Apparently there are no documents proving that the owners of the bodies had consented that their bodies could be used for medical purposes after they died.

Below: Nationalgeographic.com (Runner)

“The bodies belonged to people from China who died unidentified or unclaimed by family members, said Dr. Roy Glover, a retired University of Michigan anatomy and cell biology professor and spokesman,” according to Graham and Duryea (2005). The Chinese government owns all unclaimed bodies, and often donates them to medical schools. The Dalian Medical University of Plastination Laboratories in the People's Republic of China is
the source of the bodies in this exhibit. The owners of the Exhibit, a for-profit corporation based in Atlanta, leased the bodies from the university.

The spokesperson for the exhibit points out that lack of written consent is not necessarily illegal or unethical.

“In some states, if a person dies and can't be identified by a medical examiner or family member, local university medical schools have an opportunity to receive the remains for study.”

“Glover said he assumed a similar process was used in China for acquisition of specimens” (Graham and Durya, 2005)

Below: Times photo: Melissa Lyttle (Blood vessels in the hand)

Those are all accurate facts, as near as I can determine. So what is the basis of the controversy over the exhibit? Many objections have been raised but only two, it seems to me, are legitimate, and both of them are weak.

One argument is about money. Some big bucks are involved here. The organizer of the Bodies exhibit paid $25 million to rent the corpses and they expect to make all that back and more. We don’t know if Dalian Medical University paid the Chinese government for the bodies, but on the assumptions that nothing happens without money, especially in China, and that human beings will do anything for money, and knowing that the Chinese government does not have a strong record on human rights … assuming the worst, a reasonable person might worry that these bodies were “harvested” from among the living, by the government, as a cash crop. If so, an ethical person would not want to endorse such behavior nor further it, by paying the hefty admission fee ($27.50 per person in Seattle).

This is a legitimate, but weak objection because it is based on a whole set of presumptions about how the bodies were acquired. We simply do not know the facts. Furthermore the bodies did not appear to be traumatized (e.g., no gunshot wounds to the head or broken bones). It is a little odd that they are so young (I would guess 25 to 50) and apparently were in rude health, suggesting they did not die of a wasting disease or violence. But again, we just don’t know how they died and we have nothing to back up the mere suspicion of foul play. I admit it would have been better to have signed medical donation consent forms on public view.

Remaining Photos: Karen Ducey/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The second objection is cultural. In some cultures traditional people believe that a person’s soul is disturbed if the bodily remains are disturbed. I don’t know if that is true of traditional Chinese culture, but let’s assume it is. In that case, it could be considered culturally insensitive to display Chinese bodies in this manner (even though the bodies came from the Chinese government itself).

That is a valid objection, but a weak one, because this exhibit is displayed for a Western, modern, scientifically oriented audience that does not hold similar cultural beliefs about the soul. The organizers of the display are pretty clear what it is all about, and it would seem obvious that if a person felt they would be offended that they should not go to see it. The argument that nobody should see it because somebody might be offended, is weak.

Other objections voiced by protestors are less cogent.

“We don't know their names, or if they mind our stares.”

Not knowing the names of the prior owners of these corpses is not an ethical or legal issue. They obviously represent “the human body,” not named personalities.

We can be sure that the corpses do not mind our stares, because these are dead bodies, not people.

“These people would not have approved of how science is using their bodies.”

We don’t know that. In any case, it doesn’t matter to them now because these are dead bodies, not people.

“The displays desecrate the human body for profit.”

You can desecrate a temple or a holy image. Desecration is the violation of the sacred nature of something. But in modern medical science, the human body is not holy or sacred. It is a biological machine, especially after it is dead. So for a modern, scientifically minded person, this exhibit desecrates nothing.

The fact that the exhibit is a for-profit enterprise is not relevant to anything.

“This treatment of a body condemns the soul to wander the netherworld with no chance to rest.”

That is a particular cultural belief, but not one embraced by the organizers or viewers of this medically oriented exhibit. A person who has such concerns about other people’s souls should not see the exhibit.

"I know I wouldn’t want to be somebody's Saturday entertainment."

There’s nothing to worry about there, because the ‘I’ referred to in that objection would no longer exist, because these are dead bodies, not people. No serious person could believe that socially-aware consciousness would continue to inhabit their dead, plasticized body.

"The display is not honoring the dead and not treating them with dignity.”

It makes sense to honor the memory of the dead, but to a scientifically educated person, it does not make sense to honor a dead body.

As to whether the bodies are treated with dignity, I believe they are. The exhibit is a completely serious educational presentation. There are no profane, vulgar, obscene, or undignified displays in it.

My feeling is that most objections to this exhibit stem from an unacknowledged denial of death. They seem to be based on the idea that somehow, the dead are not really dead, but still alive in some unexplained sense, and even still inhabit their dead, plasticized bodies. That is not a well thought-out basis for objection.

My unanswered question is, how can a modern, educated, rational person deny death in this way? It is utterly perplexing.

References:

Benedetti, W. (2006). Education or freak show? 'Bodies The Exhibition' cashes in on our own curiosity. Seattle P-I, 28 September 2006. (Online at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/lifestyle/286689_bodies28.html )

Graham, K., and Duryea, B. (2005). Who is running man? St. Petersburg Times Tampa Bay, 28 July 2005. (Online at http://www.sptimes.com/2005/07/28/Tampabay/Who_is_running_man.shtml)