Surviving Death (5)

I'm close to the finish line of Surviving Death, and won't try to summarize or systematically wrap up--it's all too complicated for that.  But maybe you'd like to know the punchline.  It's that even without supernaturalism, we can reasonably believe that death is not as bad for the good.  Basically, for two reasons:

(1) The good know that other people's cares and feelings are objectively as important as their own. So they know that when they're gone, what remains will really matter and still (often) be very good.   They can content themselves with the thought that life will go on, and undiminished. In contrast, the bad think their own pleasures are all that count, and those pleasures are undoubtedly extinguished by bodily death.  So death for them is especially appalling.

(2)  More strikingly, Johnston argues that the good can reasonably think they won't really be wholly absent from the world, after their bodies expire.  They will survive "in the onward rush of humanity."  All of the book's explorations of personal identity are preparation for chapter 5, which offers "a new refutation of death."

It's not fair to criticize without first explaining, and time/space doesn't allow.  So take these comments with a grain of salt, and read the book if you want to really understand Johnston's theory. But here goes--

Johnston bends over backward to eschew any kind of supernaturalism in this book--there are to be no supernatural deities or souls in this "rational reconstruction"of religious beliefs about goodness and death.  My feeling is that he trades in supernaturalism for a different sort of superstition.

The Hibernators are a critical warm up for the refutation of death in chapter 5.  They don't believe in any science-resistant entities, but their view of the world is still profoundly irrational (in my view, not Johnston's).  They think new people rise out of their beds after three months of hibernation, despite all of the physical and mental continuities that connect the "old" and the "new." Thinking this way doesn't make it so!  That's what I'm inclined to think about the dispositions of the ultra-good that grant them a kind of survival after death--as Johnston explains in chapter 5 (and this does get tricky--so there's no substitute for reading it).

The (allegedly) death-defying attitude involves attaching exactly the same weight to everyone else's interests as to my own.   The contrast with supernatural Christianity couldn't be more stark.  Today's "Christians on the street" think they can fairly egocentrically enjoy this life and still have more joy to come.  What a deal!  On Johnston's view, that's incoherent.  You only get to survive in the onward rush of humanity if you "decenter" throughout life--make yourself no more than one in 6 (7, 8, 9.....) billion.  I'm a little skeptical that Johnston has contemplated what that would really mean.  The sacrifices would be enormous, and the survival thin (at best).

So...survival?  Not convinced. I do think there's some truth in (1), though, and that it may even be palliative--a comfort to the dying.

Surviving Death (4): Is Survival Real?

There are different ways a person/group could think about personal identity and this is crucial to Mark Johnston's argument in Surviving Death.   Take the Hibernators (see yesterday's post).  They think they don't survive hibernation. The person who falls asleep dies, they think, and a new person wakes up three months later.  By contrast, in Star Trek the crew thinks they do survive teletransportation.  The Hibernators have a much more demanding notion of what it means for a person to be the same over time than the Star Trek crew.  We (Johnston assumes--and I'm really not sure why) have a third notion--we would not want to get into the transporter, because we think it would kill us while generating a copy of us at our destination.

Johnston says the Hibernators, the Teletransporters, and us Human Beings differ in their dispositions.  The Hibernators presumably feel bad about dying when they get ready to hibernate, instead of planning the next stage of their own lives, as we would.  The Star Trek crew isn't concerned about stepping into the Teletransporter, as we might be.  So...which of the tribes is right about personal identity?

Johnston says they're all really right in a fashion--the dispositions make for three forms of personal identity.  Basically, there's no disposition-independent fact of the matter about whether any person survives hibernation or teletransportation.   Should we go along with this? 

A bit of medical anthropology might be useful here.  A child from an exotic community has a bad stomach ache.  The doctors say he must have an operation.  The boy has heard talk in his community about how operations put an end to persons and replace them with new persons, but he never really understood this.  So he wonders what will happen.  When he wakes up, he remembers his question, and feels he got his answer. "I survived!" 

Now imagine he had been well trained in the theory, so he was terrified before the surgery, and willingly participated in a christening when he woke up.  He begins calling himself by his new name and buys into all the strange theories the group has about why he feels so much like the boy who went into surgery,

Since the boy really has no dispositions in the first scenario (he just wonders what will happen) are we really to say he neither survives nor doesn't survive?  In the second scenario, do we really want to say that the boy doesn't survive, because of his dispositions? 

Come on.  The boy survives, and he knows it in the first scenario. In the second, he's been brainwashed into having unnecessary fears.  Though at the edges, personal identity is murky and there are very hard cases, there are also clear cases of survival and non-survival.  Johnston's dispositional view of personal identity doesn't have room for this.

Sadly, I think I'm getting close to jumping off this boat before it reaches it's destination--a story about how I can survive the death of my body, if I just develop a certain set of dispositions.

Surviving Death (3): The Hibernators

Now here's something really fun from Mark Johnston's book Surviving Death: the Hibernators (chapter 4). This is a tribe of humans with an unusual brain chemistry. They stay awake for 9 months out of the year and sleep for the winter months, preparing for "the great awakening" by leaving themselves all sorts of provisions and instructions. They also have an unusual understanding of personal identity.

You see, they believe that the persons who wake up are not the same as the persons who fell asleep. They think sleep is akin to death, and waking up is birth. So in retrospect, the Sally who wakes up thinks of herself as Sally2, an entirely different person from Sally1, who fell asleep. Johnston argues that "there are no independent justifiers that settle the appropriate lineaments of personal identity" (p. 267) so it's impossible to say the Hibernators are mistaken.

Are the Hibernators mistaken? That's the $64,000 question, and I suspect they are, but a preliminary question occurs to me. How could a society sustain this odd view of personal identity--what else would they have to believe? I think we need the help of Hollywood here. So imagine: coming soon, to a theater near you, THE HIBERNATORS (with Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz).

The Hibernators are going to have to have many thoughts that we lack, because they are going to notice connections between Sally1 and Sally2 (both played by Diaz), and Don1 and Don2 (both played by Cruise), etc, that are missing between other pairs of people. After all, Sally2 is going to remember the experiences of Sally1, but not other people's experiences. Sally1 is going to know that she has power over Sally2's future that she doesn't have over other people's futures. If Sally1 learns to ride a motorcycle, Sally2 will wake up knowing how to ride a motorcycle. To account for this, they'll inevitably have to have a concept of relatedness that we lack. The Hibernators will think of Sally1 and Sally2 (and all the other Sallies down the line) as (shall we say?) zisters, and Don1 and Don2 (etc) as zothers.  Ziblings are very, very unlike other pairs of different people--like you and me, for example.

The exciting question of the movie is whether the Hibernators will go on like this forever. After much sleuthing around and of course a painstaking reading of the personal identity literature (cinematically exciting, to be sure--and this is where the good looks of our stars will come in handy), will Cameron (perhaps) say "Oh my God, that was me!" about her earlier zisters, and throw the concepts of zisterhood and zotherhood into the flames?

I suspect that the Hibernators' view of personal identity is not sustainable, and that this is (somehow or other) revealing.

Surviving Death (2)

I'm waiting to get more excited about this book--and trying to be patient. The problem is that a lot of it is written "ad hominem"--in the technical sense. In other words, Johnston spends a lot time talking to a reader whose assumptions are not his own, and not mine either. For example, the very long first chapter is addressed to a reader who believes in a supernatural god who resurrects the dead--and the question is whether there's any way to conceive of how this might work.  I could be interested in that question for some number of pages, but not for 125.

Towards the end of the second chapter, things start to get somewhat more interesting. There are still lots and lots of  detours through not-important-for-me terrain but there's starting to be a glimmer of hope that we will come to the book's central question.  As he puts it--"Our purpose here is to see whether there is a naturalistic account of how it is that death does not threaten the importance of goodness." (p. 130)

Earlier on, he argued that death does seem to threaten the importance of goodness.  If good people can expect exactly the same fate as bad people after death, it detracts from the sense that it's really, really important to be good.  I don't think he means to say there's no incentive to be good, it's just not quite so super-important. 

And now a confession.  From time to time I find myself having to go through some sort of adversity in order to do the right thing.  As I persevere under pressure, it never dawns on me to think: no matter what I do (the right thing or the wrong thing), I'll be dead anyway in 50 years.  I never (literally, never) experience my mortality as a threat to the importance of morality.

This isn't good, because I do want to finish the book, but I don't find myself with the distress that Johnston is trying to remedy.  Can anybody help me worry more about how mortality threatens morality?

Surviving Death (1)

I spent all of last week visiting a hospital, and the beginning of last week visiting an intensive care unit.  When I got back home, my reading priorities seemed a bit different.  Mark Johnston's new book Surviving Death had risen to the top of the stack. I'm not going to blog about it systematically, but just make an occasional comment as I read.

This is the basic question of the book is: "Is it possible to ransom any genuinely salvific ideas found in the major religions from their supernaturalist captivity, and what price do we have to pay for the ransom?" (p. 16)

Why do we need "salvific" ideas? What's there to be saved from?  I've always felt I was a terrible candidate for Christian conversion, because I completely lack the sense of being a sinner. I've never felt any need for salvation.

But Johnston isn't talking about anything as simple as sinfulness.  He's looking for a "fix" for

certain large-scale structural defects in human life that no amount of ordinary psychological adjustment and no degree of the resultant natural virtues of prudence, courage, moderation, just dealing, and so on, can adequately address or overcome.  These large-scale structural defects include arbitrary and meaningless suffering, the decay of aging, untimely death, our profound ignorance of our condition, the destructiveness produced by our tendency to demand premium treatment for ourselves, and the vulnerability of everything we cherish to chance and to the massed power of states and other institutions.  A truly religious or redeemed life is one in which these large-scale defects are somehow finally healed or addressed or overcome or rendered irrelevant. (p. 17)

So--he's looking for a "fix" for all that, and it's going to be religious in a very broad sense, but free of supernaturalism.   Stay tuned.