Perspective Awareness and Postmortem Survival
Stephen Braude, 2009
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Abstract
Critics of survival research often claim that the survival hypothesis is conceptually problematic at best, and literally incoherent at worst. The guiding intuition behind their skepticism is that there’s an essential link between the concept of a person (or personality or experience) and physical embodiment. Thus (they argue), since by hypothesis postmortem individuals such as ostensible mediumistic communicators have no physical body, there’s something wrong with the very idea of a postmortem person, personality or experience. However, critics can’t simply beg the question and assert that physical embodiment is essential to personhood, personality, or experience, because the evidence suggesting survival is a prima facie challenge to the contrary. On the other hand, defenders of ostensible mediumistic communication need to explain how post-mortem awareness and knowledge of the current physical world can occur without a physical body that experiences the world and represents it accurately enough to ground veridical postmortem reports. This paper will first consider why survivalists face potentially serious problems in trying to make sense of apparent postmortem perception. Then it will consider a plausible—and arguably the only—way to deal with the issues. However, that solution turns out to be a double-edged sword. Ironically, the best way to deal with the problem of perspectival postmortem awareness may render the survival hypothesis gratuitous.
Introduction
Critics of survival research often claim that the survival hypothesis is conceptually problematic at best, and literally incoherent at worst. The guiding intuition behind their skepticism is that there’s an essential link between the concept of a person (or personality or experience) and physical embodiment. Thus (they argue), since by hypothesis postmortem individuals such as ostensible mediumistic communicators have no physical body, there’s something wrong with the very idea of a postmortem person, personality or experience. Consider, for example, the following representative passage from A. R. Miller.
I find the very notion of disembodied personality logically inconceivable. A “person” is, essentially, a being which, among other things, perceives, acts, and thinks. Normally, perception requires sense organs, action requires limbs, and thinking (in the broadest, Cartesian sense) requires a brain; I cannot see and read the billboard unless my eyes are open, I cannot kick the football without a leg, I cannot imagine Santa Claus without a cerebral cortex, and so on. In the total absence of such physical accoutrements, I cannot see how any of the sorts of activities constitutive of personhood are or could be possible. (Miller, 1998)
Although this line of thought is hardly outlandish, some versions of it are admittedly disappointingly glib. For example, Antony Flew’s variant turns on the methodologically naive assumption that something is logically impossible if we can’t form a mental image of it (see Flew, 1976, 1987, and the discussion in Braude, 1993, 2003; also, see Almeder, 1992). However, other accounts are more serious and raise genuine puzzles about postmortem existence—specifically, concerning the possibility and apparently perspectival nature of postmortem awareness of the physical world. In fact (and to his credit), Miller is one of those who recognizes that both advocates and critics of survival must address some interesting and complex issues here. Critics can’t simply beg the question and assert that physical embodiment is essential to personhood, personality, or experience, because the evidence suggesting survival is a prima facie challenge to the contrary. On the other hand, proponents of survival (hereafter, survivalists) need to grapple with puzzles arising especially from cases of apparent mediumship. That’s because mediumistic communicators often respond appropriately to and describe correctly—and, in fact, claim to experience—what’s currently going on in the physical world. Of course, survivalists must endorse at least some of these occurrences in order to legitimate mediumistic communication as a source of evidence for their position. So they need to explain how postmortem awareness and knowledge of the current physical world can occur without a physical body that experiences the world and represents it accurately enough to ground veridical postmortem reports.
It may be surprising, then, that proponents of survival often have little to say about the relevance of physical embodiment to the manifestations of personhood and experience, apart from their efforts to deflect the more superficial and question-begging versions of the anti-survivalist critique. For example, readers will look in vain for a discussion or even acknowledgment of the issues in Fontana’s recent book, widely (but incorrectly) regarded as a respectable defense of the survival hypothesis (Fontana, 2005; see Kelly, 2005, for a critical review). And in another—and much more conceptually sophisticated—work (Almeder, 1992), the instructive problems about perspective discussed below are missed entirely, although Almeder correctly targets some related issues (including the superficiality of Flew’s position).
In this paper, I want first to consider carefully why survivalists face potentially serious, vexing, and largely unheralded problems in trying to make sense of apparent postmortem perception. Next, I want to consider a plausible—and, arguably, the only—way to deal with the issues. And finally, I want to show why that explanatory strategy is a double-edged sword. Ironically, the best way to deal with the problem of perspectival postmortem awareness may render the survival hypothesis gratuitous.
The Perplexing Problem of Perspectival Postmortem Perception1
Generally speaking, the substantive problem at issue here is the following (see Penelhum, 1970, and Sorabji, 2006, for presentations of the relevant arguments). Our everyday visual and auditory sense perceptions are perspectival—that is, they present themselves to us relative to and from the specific perspective of our location in space. That’s why our experiences of seeing and hearing are always from a point of view. We see and hear things to the right, left, or straight ahead, and at a certain distance. Of course, we explain the perspectival nature of these experiences with reference to the fact that our sensory receptors occupy specific positions in space.
Now suppose it’s true, as survivalists maintain, that after death we may con-tinue having such perspectival experiences in the absence of a body. And suppose further that some of those experiences are veridical—that is, that they provide accurate information about states of the physical world. How are survivalists supposed to make sense of that? Since in disembodied survival nothing is literally at (i.e., extended at) any relevant location in space, there is apparently no basis for the alleged reports (transmitted through mediums) of a postmortem individual’s perspectival awareness of what the living are doing or saying (i.e., things that normally can only be observed or experienced from certain points of view in space). Presumably, when a person’s body has decomposed (or at least ceased all organic functioning), nothing in space can anchor and provide the spatial orientation of a sensory experience.
