All-Too-Mortal Bodies
The recent death of President Hugo Chavez in Venezuela occasioned a proposal that a mausoleum be built to house his body for public viewing for decades to come. Presumably, this was to be modeled on the mausoleums for Vladimir Lenin in Moscow, for Mao Zedong in Beijing, and for Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang. Just as those facilities have permitted subsequent generations of Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans to view the bodies and honor the memories of these founders of communist regimes, the Chavez mausoleum would have provided future Venezuelans with similar opportunities to venerate Chavez. It appears, however, that the rapid deterioration of Chavez’s body has prevented carrying out this plan. Finally, neither the contrivances of modern mortuary practices nor even the resources of national governments can cheat death’s claim.
Immortal Souls
Our all-too-mortal bodies are, apparently, quite different from our souls. No one feels any need to make any special efforts to preserve the souls of the deceased. That is either because they are skeptical to begin with that humans have souls that are separate from their bodies (the minority view) or (the majority view) because they take the separateness of humans’ souls from their bodies and the immortality of those souls for granted. A wide range of evidence suggests that the second of those rationales comes more easily to human minds.
Consider, for example, what looks to be the universality of ghost concepts across cultures. Typically, ghosts are reputed to be the souls of human beings persisting after they have died and unconnected with their bodies. Ghosts, for one reason or another, are often unable to leave some particular place – many of which, apparently, are small towns across America, where nighttime “ghost tours” have become a thriving enterprise. (This is an odd state of affairs, given that standard conceptions of minds/souls hold that they are not spatial, but that must remain a problem for another day.) If not rooted in some haunted house or dark lane, ghosts are, at the very least, somehow stuck here on the planet Earth. They cannot join other souls in the places or conditions immortal souls are taken to reside in, which the world’s various religions describe.
The key idea, though, is precisely that our minds/souls are immortal and survive the death of our bodies. Humans have little problem understanding that bodies die and disintegrate, but most people have an extremely difficult time imagining the demise of humans’ minds.
Natural Born Dualists
Some developmental psychologists, including Paul Bloom and Jesse Bering, have argued that these proclivities are in place early on. They argue, in effect, that young children seem to be natural born dualists. Bloom’s book, Descartes’ Baby, reviews a wide range of considerations indicating that young children readily distinguish between material things and minds. From their initial distinction between animate and inanimate objects, infants quickly graduate to differentiating material objects and mentality and reasoning about them differently.
Bering has carried out a variety of studies that suggest that younger children are significantly more liberal than older children and adults are about the capabilities of minds after death. When queried about the thoughts and feelings of a mouse, which had been eaten by a grumpy alligator (this was all done with puppets), preschoolers thought that the mouse could still feel hungry and thirsty, even though they were clear about the cessation of the mouse’s biological functions, including the fact that the mouse would not need to eat or drink any more. Bering’s research showed that older children and adults were far more likely to restrict the mental states of the dead to matters of emotion (the mouse still loved its mother), desire (the mouse would still like to go home), and cognition (the mouse can still think about the alligator). Bering maintains, contrary to most assumptions about the influence of culture, that this pattern shows that cultural learning, if anything, tends to curtail humans’ assumptions about the capabilities of minds and their independence from bodies.