discuss has to do with the possibility of my surviving my

death. Is there life after death?

Is there a possibility that I might still exist or survive

after my death? Now at first glance--and in

fact, I think, at second glance it's going to

turn out to be true--you might think that the answer to this

question would depend on two basic issues.

Do I survive my death? Do we survive our deaths?

You think, the first thing we have to get clear on is well

what am I? What kind of a thing am I?

Or generalizing, what kind of thing is a person?

What are we made of? What are our parts?

It seems plausible to think that before we could answer the

question, "Do I survive?" we need to know how I'm built.

And so the first thing we're going to spend a fair bit of

time on is trying to get clear on what's a person?

What are the fundamental building blocks of a person?

The second question that you might think we'd want to get

clear on is, "What's the idea, or what's the concept,

of surviving?" Before we ask, "Do I survive?"

we need to get clear on "What am I?"

and "What is it to survive?" What is it for something that

exists in the future to be me? Now this question can be

discussed philosophically in quite general terms.

What's the nature of persistence of identity over

time? But since we're especially

interested in beings like us, people, this topic,

this sub-specialized version of the question of identity,

gets discussed under the rubric of the topic,

personal identity. What's the key or the nature or

the basis of personal identity? As we might put it:

What is it for somebody who's here next week to be the same

person as me? What's the nature of personal

identity? So, as I say,

at first glance you might think to get clear on the answer,

"Do I or might I or could I survive my death?"

we need to know, what am I? What's a person?

What's the metaphysical composition of people,

on the one hand? And we need to get clear on the

nature of identity or persistence or,

more specifically, personal identity.

Now as I say, I believe that when push comes

to shove, we do need to get clear about both of those

questions and so that's going to take the first several weeks of

the class. We're going to spend a couple

of weeks talking about, "What's a person?"

And then we're going to spend several weeks,

or at least a week or so, talking about the nature of

personal identity. But before we can even get

started, there's a question, really an objection to the

whole enterprise. So we're about to spend a lot

of time asking the philosophical question: Is there life after

death? Could there be life after death?

Might I survive my death? But there's a philosophical

objection to the entire question.

And the objection is fairly simple.

It says the whole question is misconceived.

It's based on a confusion. Once we see the confusion,

we can see what the answer to our question is.

Could I survive my death? The answer has got to be--this

is what the objection says--the answer has got to be,

obviously not. All right, so here's the

objection. I should mention that the very

first reading that you're going to be doing is a couple of pages

from Jay Rosenberg, a contemporary philosopher.

He gives us a version of this objection.

So I'll give you one version. You'll have another version in

your readings. The objection basically says:

What does it mean to say that somebody's died?

We're asking, "Is there life after death?"

What does it mean to say that somebody has died?

Well a natural definition of death might be something like

the end of life. So then, if that's right,

then to ask, "Is there life after death?"

is just asking, "Is there life after the end of

life?" The answer to that ought to be

pretty obvious. Well, obviously,

the answer to that is no. After all, if we're saying once

you've run out of life, is there any more life?

Well, duh! That's like asking,

when I've eaten up all the food on my plate, is there any food

left on my plate? Or what happens in the movie

after the movie ends? These are stupid questions,

because once you understand what they're asking,

the answer is just built in. It follows trivially.

So although it has seemed to people over the ages that the

question, "Is there life after death?"

is one of the great mysteries, one of the great philosophical

things to ponder, the objection says that's a

kind of illusion. In fact, once you think about

it, and not all that long, you can see the answer's got to

be no. There couldn't possibly be life

after death. There couldn't possibly be life

after the end of life. Or suppose we ask the question

in a slightly different way. Might I survive my death?

Well what does the word "survive" mean?

Well, survive is something like we say that somebody's a

survivor if something's happened and they haven't died.

They're still alive. When there's a car accident,

you ask, so-and-so died, so-and-so survived.

This person survived. To say that they survived is

just saying that they're still alive.

So, "Might I survive my death?" is like asking,

"Might I still be alive after"--well what's death?

Death is the end of life. So-- "might I still be alive

after I've stopped living? Might I be one of the people

who didn't die when I died?" Gosh, the answer to that is,

again, duh! No.

You couldn't possibly survive your death, given the very

definition. It should remind us of--at

least it reminds me of this joke that you probably told.

It seemed hysterical when you were seven.

The plane crashes exactly on the border of Canada and the

United States. Exactly on the border.

There's dead people everywhere. Where do they bury the

survivors? The answer is:

You don't bury the survivors. So when you're seven you think,

"I don't know. Do they bury them in Canada?

Do they bury them in America?" The answer is:

You don't bury the survivors, because survivors are people

that haven't yet died. So, "Can I survive my death?"

is like asking, "Could I not have yet died

after…?" The answer is,

of course, you have to have died if you died and you haven't

survived if you've died. So the question can't even get

off the ground. That, at least,

is how the objection goes. Now I don't mean to be utterly

dismissive of the objection. That's why I spent a couple of

minutes trying to spell it out. But I think there's a way to

respond to it. We just have to get clearer

about what precisely the question is that we're trying to

ask. This is something that

Rosenberg tries to get clear on as well.

So here's my attempt to make the question both a bit more

precise, and a question that's an open question.

A question we can legitimately raise.

Well, now as you will hear on several occasions over the

course of the semester, I'm a philosopher.

What that means is I don't really know a whole lot of

facts. So I'm about to tell you a

story where I wish I knew the facts.

I don't know the facts. If I could really do it right,

I'd now open the door and bring in our guest physiologist,

who would then provide the facts that I'm--what I'm about

to go is "blah, blah, blah."

But we have the physiologist come in and he'd actually tell

us these things. I don't know them.

I don't have that person. But take a look at what happens

when a body dies. Now, no doubt,

you can kill people in a lot of different ways.

You can poison them, you can strangle them,

you can shoot them in the heart.

The causal paths that result in death may start different,

but I presume that they converge and you end up having a

set of events take place. Now what are those events?

This is exactly where I don't really know the details,

but I take it it's something like: because of whatever the

original input was, eventually the blood's no

longer circulating and oxygen isn't making its way around the

body. So the brain becomes

oxygen-starved. Because of the lack of oxygen

getting to the cells, the cells are no longer able to

carry on their various metabolic processes.

Because of this, they can't repair the various

kinds of damage they need, or create the amino acids and

proteins they need. So as decay begins to set in

and the cell structures begin to break down, they don't get

repaired as they would normally do,

and so eventually have breakdown of the crucial cell

structure and boom, the body's dead.

Now as I say, I don't really know whether

that's accurate, the little rough story I just

told, but some story like that is probably right.

And in typical philosophical fashion, I've drawn that story

for you up here on the board. So the events that I don't

really know the details of, we can just call B_1,

B_2, B_3,

up through B_n. Before B_1 begins,

you've got the body working, functioning,

in its bodily way--respirating, reproducing the cells,

and so forth and so on. And at the end of the process,

by B_n, the body's dead.

B for bodily. B_1 through

B_n; that's what death is.

At least, that's what death of the body is.

As I say, it's the sort of thing that somebody from the

medical school or a biologist or a physiologist or something

could describe for us. So here's the question then.

Suppose we call that process "death of the body."

Call what has occurred by the end of that sequence of events,

"bodily death." Now here's a question that we

can still ask, at least it looks as though we

can still ask it. Might I, or do I,

still exist after the death of my body?

Might I still exist after bodily death?

I don't mean to suggest in any way that we yet know the answer

to that question, but at least that's a question

that it seems as though we can coherently raise.

There's no obvious contradiction in asking:

Might I still exist after the death of my body?

The answer could turn out to be no.

But at least it's not obviously no.

If the answer turns out to be no, it's going to take some

sustained argument to settle it one way or the other.

The answer could turn out to be yes, for all we know at this

point. This just brings us back to the

thought that whether or not I could still exist after the

death of my body looks like it should depend on what I am.

So in a minute, that's the question that I'm

going to turn to. But it's a bit cumbersome to

constantly be asking: Might I still exist after the

death of my body? So no harm is done,

once we've clarified the question that we're trying to

ask, if we summarize that question in a bit of a jargon or

slogan. We say, instead of asking:

Might I survive? Or: Might I continue to exist

after the death of my body? --you might put it this way.

You might say for short: Will I survive the death of my

body? No harm done.

Or: Will I survive my death? Because what we were just

stipulating we mean when we talk about my death in the context of

this question is the death of my body.

No harm done. We can just say for short:

Will I survive my death or might I survive my death?

For that matter, no serious harm done if we ask:

Is there life after death? As long as we understand that

what we're not asking about there is life of my body.