The Coceivability of a Disembodied Personal Life Beyond Death Based on David Lund’s Views

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 Ph.D. Student in Philosophy of Religion, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

2 Associate Professor, Department of Islamic Philosophy and Theology, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

3 Associate Professor, Department of philosophy of religion, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

As science focuses exclusively on the physical, it seems to assume that the brain has a key role in the origin if not also the constitution of our consciousness; and thus the destruction of the brain, the nervous system, and the body makes it pointless or even absurd to think of any personal consciousness after death. But one need not be convinced by this. However, any effort to investigate a possible post-mortem life depends on forming a coherent conception of what such a life could be. Can we speak, without incoherence or contradiction, of a person continuing to exist after death in a disembodied state? Our concern in this study lies here. Based on Lund's view, we will present and defend an argument that one can conceive of a self who is fully embedded in the natural world and deeply embodied in a physical organism, and yet could have a rich variety of experiences in an afterworld encountered after death. In this theory, the close association of the mental and the physical is due to a causal connection - a connection that fails to establish that the physical brings the mental into existence and is compatible with theories that the source of consciousness is not in the brain (e.g., the transceiver or filter theory).

Keywords


Alexander, E., & Newell, K. (2017). Living in a Mindful Universe. Rodale.
Braude, S. E. (2003). Immortal Remains: The Evidence for Life After Death. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, INC.
Flew, A. (1972). The Presumption of Atheism. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2(1), 29-46.
Hasker, W., & Taliaferro, C. (2019). Afterlife. (E. N. Zalta, Ed.) Retrieved from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: <https://plato.stanford.ed/archives/spr2019/entries/afterlife/>.
James, W. (1898). Human Immortality: Two Supposed Objections to the Doctrine. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company.
Kelly, E. F. (2010). Irreducible Mind; Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
Lund, D. H. (1985). Death and Consciousness. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
Lund, D. H. (1990). Disembodied Existence, Personal Identity, and the First Person Perspective. Idealistic Studies, 20(3), 187-202.
Lund, D. H. (1994). Perception, Mind and Personal Identity: A Critique of Materialism. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
Lund, D. H. (2000). Materialism and the Subject of Consciouness. Idealistic Studies, 30(11), 7-23.
Lund, D. H. (2003). Making Sense of It All. Upper Saddle River,NJ: Pearson Education.
Lund, D. H. (2005). The Conscious Self: The Immaterial Center of Subjective States. New York: Humanity Books.
Lund, D. H. (2009). Persons, Souls, and Death. North Carolina: McFarland.
Lund, D. H. (2014). Materialism, Dualism, and the Conscious Self. In A. Lavazza, & H. Robinson (Eds.), Contemporary dualism: A Defense (pp. 56-78). Routledge.
Lycan, W. G. (2009). Giving Dualism its Due. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 87(4), 551-563.
McTaggert, J. (1906). Some Dogmas of Religion. (E. Arnold, Ed.) London: Edward Arnold.
Moreland, J. (2008). Consciousness and the Existence of God; A Theistic Argument. New York: Routledge.
Penfield, W. (1975). The Mystery of The Mind; A Critical Study of Consciousness and The Human Brain. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Price, H. H. (1964). Personal Survival and the Idea of Another World. In J. Hick (Ed.), Classical and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Religion (3rd ed., pp. 364-386). Prentice-Hall, INC.
Price, H. H. (1995). What Kind of a "Next World". In H. H. Price, & D. B. Frank (Eds.), Philosophical Interactions with Parapsychology: The MajorWwritings of H. H. Price on Parapsychology and Survival (pp. 263-269). MacMillan press.
Taliaferro, C. (2018). Substance Dualism: A Defense. In J. J. Loose, A. J. Menuge, & J. Moreland (Eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Substance Dualism (pp. 43-60). NJ: Wiley Blackwell.
Taliaferro, C., & Knuths, E. (2017). Thought Experiments in Philosophy of Religion: The Virtue of Phenomenological Realism and Values. Analytic Perspectives on Method and Authority in Theology, 167-173.
CAPTCHA Image