Lecture on Immortality

immortality.tex

\documentclass[letterpaper,12pt]{article}
\usepackage[logic]{mymacros_goerz}
\usepackage{fullpage}
\usepackage[numbers]{natbib}
\usepackage{url}


\title{Lecture Outline: Immortality}
\author{Michael Goerz (\url{[email protected]})}
\date{Hofstra University, March 5th, 2007}


\begin{document}

\maketitle

The lecture is based on \\Lucretius: \emph{The Mind and the Spirit Will Die}, \\D.~Hume: \emph{Of Personal Identity} and \emph{Of the Immortality of the Soul}, and \\C.D.~Broad: \emph{On Survival without a Body}, \\as well as other material, all appearing in \citep{edwards1997}:

\section{Different Ideas of Immortality}
\begin{itemize}
 \item Survival or immortality
 \item Reincarnation
 \item Resurrection
 \item Astral bodies
 \item Disembodied minds
 \item Survival in the universal mind
\end{itemize}

\section{Types of Arguments for Immortality}
\begin{itemize}
 \item Metaphysical: arguments derived from the nature of the immaterial soul
 \item Moral: arguments from divine justice
 \item Empirical: examples from parapsychology
 \item Physical: the argument \emph{against} immortality from the physical point of view
 \item God, Religion, and immortality
\end{itemize}

\section{Some Relevant Theories of the Mind}
\begin{itemize}
 \item Dualism and materialism
 \item The problem of causation: interactionism
 \item The bundle theory of the mind
 \item The problem of identity
 \item Thinking matter and computation
\end{itemize}


\section{Lucretius}
Background: 94--51 BC. In the Epicurean tradition: atomism, freedom from religious fear (\emph{religare} -- to bind down). From Epicurus: \emph{God holds no fears, Death no worries, Good is easily attainable, Evil easily endurable.} The early Christians denounced him as atheist.

Arguments (simplified):
\begin{enumerate}
 \item Mind and spirit are both composed of matter, because they move the body, which can only occur through direct exchange of motion by touch between particles of matter.
 \item The mind is composed of extremely fine particles, because nothing happens faster than the mind can follow, which requires the atoms of the mind to be smaller and more movable than any other atoms.
 \item The mind dies with the body, because it follows the body's development with age in all other respects.
 \item The mind is destructible, because it is easily affected by all other diseases of the body, and death is the ultimate disease.
 \item The mind cannot exist outside of the body because it is too sensitive to be without the body's protection.
 \item The mind is not immortal, because if it was, it would need five senses, and no sense organs can be attached to an unembodied mind.
 \item The mind has been annihilated before birth, because we have no prenatal recollection.
 \item The mind was not slipped into the body at birth, because if it was, it could not be as interwoven with the body as we observe it to be.
 \item If the mind/spirit was slipped into the body at birth, it would still die with it, because it would be completely dissolved in the body.
 \item Survival of the mind in the sense that the mind-atoms are indestructible and may form my soul again is not meaningful, because there would be no continuity or recollection of identity.
\end{enumerate}

\section{David Hume}
Background: 1711--1776. Hume was, together with Locke and Berkeley, one of the three great British empiricists. Because of his ``atheism'', he had frequent and violent clashes with the church, some of his work had to be published posthumously.

Hume's empiricism: We can only form ideas from simple, original impressions (sensation or reflection) or from direct combination of ideas. There is no a-priori-reasoning. If a term claims to be meaningful, we have to be able to dissect it into its original impressions. Causation, for example, is \emph{not} a meaningful idea, it is merely a ``custom'' or ``habit''.

\subsection{Hume's Views on Identity}
Hume argues for a bundle theory of identity: The mind is not a substance which hosts thoughts and emotions, but instead is the collection of these thoughts and emotions. They form an identity through their causal relationship, we obtain our sense of identity through memory.

The argument is this: In introspection, we have multiple impressions of our succeeding mental states. Mental states are mutually exclusive; there is no continuous impression to be found in introspection. Therefore, according to Hume's empiricism, we cannot form a meaningful idea of the self as an entity.


\subsection{Arguments against the Immortality of the Soul}

The arguments are meant to show that immortality of the soul does not follow even from a substance theory of the mind. They are, however, fundamentally based on Hume's empiricism.

\noindent The metaphysical argument:
\begin{itemize}
 \item We have no empirical basis for the belief that matter cannot produce thought.
 \item From our knowledge that material substance disintegrates, we can only infer (by a\/na\/lo\/gy) that the immaterial substance of the soul also disintegrates.
\end{itemize}

\noindent The moral argument (God is just):
\begin{itemize}
 \item It would be unjust if God had given us no concern or insight for an eternal afterlife, which would be infinitely more important than our present life.
 \item Given that humans are morally frail, no crime in this temporary life could be so severe as to justify eternal damnation.
\end{itemize}

\noindent The physical argument:
\begin{itemize}
 \item Body and mind are closely connected; we can observe that whatever happens to the body is also reflected in the mind (aging, sleep, disease, etc.) From this, we can infer that the mind is also destroyed by the body's death.
\end{itemize}


\section{C.D.~Broad}
Background: Britain, 1887--1971. In response to the mind-body problem, he believed the mind consisted of a nervous system, and an unobservable metaphysical ``psychogenic factor'', which might survive after death.

In his epistemological views he suggested that some statements are neither analytic nor synthetic, but that simply no other alternative is humanly imaginable, e.g. ``The cause of any change contains a change as an essential factor''.\citep[``C.D.~Broad'']{edwards1967}

The presented argument is such an appeal to what can possibly be imagined and what not. It refutes the meaningfulness of the unembodied soul. Broad illustrates that an unembodied soul would have no sense organs, and would have to interact with clairvoyance and telekinesis. Such an existence may be possible in theory, but is not conceivable in practice.

\nocite{stanford}
\bibliographystyle{plainnat}
\bibliography{bibliography_goerz}

\vspace{1em}

In addition to the presented texts, \cite{edwards1997} contains much more worthwhile material. Much of the lecture's topics are discussed in some detail in the book's introduction. In addition, \citep{stanford} contains excellent and concise information on the various issues of philosophy of mind, dualism, the individual philosophers, etc.



\end{document}

immortality_handout.pdf

REAME.markdown

This is the handout of a lecture on immortality that I gave at Hofstra University on March 5th, 2007