Cognitive aspects of afterlife beliefs

Current events in science imply that a new scientific revolution in physics is unfolding. This new revolution will be as much about mind and consciousness as it is about matter and physics. It will bring a new theory of physical reality that includes the consciousness that senses, interprets and interacts with physical reality. The new theory of consciousness will lead to explanatory models of the paranormal as well as explain how consciousness survives death. This prediction is not an optimistic 'pipe dream', but our present and future. A theory of this type has already been developed. It is based on a five-dimensional Einstein-Kaluza model of the space-time continuum. ‘Single field theory' or SOFT can easily account for paranormal phenomena and the survival of consciousness. Whatever theory finally succeeds in bridging the gap between mind and matter, indications are that it will have many of the characteristics of SOFT if it is not SOFT. Whatever the case may be, a valid theory that combines physical reality and consciousness is truly a theory to die for!

The author argues that, contrary to received wisdom, neurotypical humans (a.k.a., the folk) do not conceive of death as the annihilation of the individual. If that received wisdom were true, then afterlife beliefs, which have proven to be intuitive to the folk and ubiquitous across the vast time and space of human religious cultures, are a straightforward, blatant contradiction in the minds of the folk. To alleviate and ameliorate that contradiction, those who accept the received wisdom have argued for one of two theories regarding how and why the folk create, accept, and enforce their cultural afterlife beliefs: through cognitive dissonance or explanatory coexistence. The author argues, however, that these cognitive explanations fail to explain the intuitive and ubiquitous nature of afterlife beliefs. Contrariwise, the author argues that the folk has three different concepts of death—the folk biological concept of death, the existential concept of death, and the concept of social death—which apply to different experiential domains: the fate of the body, the fate of the individual, and the social fate of the individual, respectively. Finally, the author argues that these integrated concepts allow afterlife beliefs to be held coherently and consistently in the folk's mind and accounts for their intuitiveness and ubiquity.

Abstract: The cognitive science of religion has contributed greatly to our understanding the cognitive processes involved in religious beliefs and practices. The author warns, however, that current research trends and theories in the cognitive science of religion threatens the relevancy of this project. By misapplying the psychological and philosophical theories of mind and mind-body dualism to supernatural agents, these cognitive theories are positing supernatural agents that are not representative of anthropologically documented instances. The author traces the historical patterns and logical errors that have contributed to this trend, and then demonstrates how these patterns and logical errors are present in the literature. Finally, the author suggests why cognitive scientists of religion have fallen prey to these errors and ways to rectify them.

Nous avons préparé pour les incrédules/ des chaînes, des carcans et un brasier./Les hommes purs boiront à une coupe dont le mélange sera de camphre » (Coran, 76, 4 sq.) 1 . Que disent les hommes de la falsafa -la philosophie arabe héritière des grecs -de cette description, cruciale en Islam, de la vie future ? Face à l'un des dogmes de la foi musulmane, que lisent les « gens de la démonstration » dans ces versets qui détaillent les délices du Jardin pour les bienheureux comme, pour les damnés, les supplices du feu ? Ils les interprètent, sans doute. Mais quelle doctrine de l'interprétation (ta'wīl) les y autorise, et que livrent-ils comme exégèse ? On veut l'examiner ici avec deux exemples : ceux d'Ibn Rušd (Averroès, m. 1198) et d'Ibn Sīnā (Avicenne, m. 1037), qu'on interrogera sous des angles différents.

Science investigates phenomena in nature that are either experienced or observed by people. However, one special class of phenomena is generally considered unscientific, i.e. unworthy of scientific investigation, by the majority of scientists. Science generally ignores any phenomenon associated with the possibility of an afterlife, which amounts to a scientific bias against this possibility. This shortcoming of science is actually a historical artifact that our present science inherited from the earlier break between science and religion and the separation of human thought into the two realms of MIND and MATTER. The bias is so
strong that science, as it now defines itself, will never accept the reality of the afterlife and associated phenomena no matter how strong or persuasive the evidence is to the contrary. But new research does point directly to a conclusion that the afterlife is real or at least that consciousness in some form survives death; so science must change in order accept this new reality and progress.

In the decade since Bering (2002) revealed that humans intuitively believe in an afterlife, a growing body of research has contributed to understanding the nature of that belief. What has received little-to-no attention is why the afterlife, cross-culturally, is imagined to be a just place. In this article, the author offers experimental and theoretical evidence which supports a cognitive explanation for this phenomenon. The author argues that the conjunction of the just-world hypothesis (that people get what they morally deserve) with afterlife beliefs is over determined by a number psychological and cognitive mechanisms.

While the psychical sciences and parapsychology have languished over the decades and failed to produce a viable theoretical basis for their observations, great strides have been made in the neurosciences especially in the areas of neurophysiology and neurophysics. The object of these researches goes beyond just discovering how the brain functions, but to actually discover the neural correlates of mind and consciousness. Understanding how brain and consciousness relate to one another has opened a new door to understanding psi and how consciousness survives death. The new physical model of consciousness presented below goes a long way toward explaining the paradoxical nature of mind and consciousness that psi and survival present.

Among the greatest questions ever asked, perhaps the greatest is whether some part of us survives death of the body. Whole religions, individual philosophers, scholars of all types, scientists and ordinary people have all tried to answer this question, so far without any verifiable success. Yet most people continue to believe that some form of a soul survives, but not much more than that is known. This book describes in general terms a new fundamental theory of physics based on a five-dimensional space-time continuum that includes new scientific definitions of life, mind and consciousness, Given these, the book explains a scientific model of the survival of consciousness and mind when the physical body dies. Other cultural beliefs about death are described and their essential points are compared to this new physical model of the afterlife.

The author introduces and critically analyzes two recent, curious findings and their accompanying explanations regarding how the folk intuits the capabilities of the dead and those in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). The dead are intuited to survive death, whereas PVS patients are intuited as more dead than the dead. Current explanations of these curious findings rely on how the folk is said to conceive of death and the dead: either as the annihilation of the person (via the secular conception of death), or that person's continuation as a disembodied being (via folk dualism). The author argues that these two conceptions are incompatible and inconsistent with each other and the evidence. Contrariwise, the author argues that the folk intuition about dead-survivors and the living dead are more easily explained by appealing to cross-culturally established concepts: the folk biological concept of death, the existential (metaphorical) concept of death, and the concept of social death. KEYWORDS: Afterlife beliefs, persistent vegetative state; folk biological concept of death; religious conception of death; secular conception of death; folk dualism; existential (metaphorical) concept of death; social death.

It is fairly common to refer to our use of the paranormal aspects of consciousness as a sixth sense, but the idea of a sixth sense comes much closer to the truth of our physical situation in the universe-at-large than we might imagine. The universe in which we exist is commonly thought to be a four-dimensional space-time continuum. All five of our normal senses evolved within this common four-dimensional environment. Each individual consciousness interacts with the four-dimensional world via our five normal senses. However, our universe is actually five-dimensional so it would be safe to assume that human evolution has also taken the fifth dimension of the space-time continuum into account and given humans a sixth sense. According to all indications in modern science, this assumption would prove true. Our sixth sense actually represents the manner by which we gather information about the universe in which we exist via the fifth dimension, just as our normal five senses allow us to gather information about our physical environment within the four normal dimensions of space-time. Even when our four-dimensional material bodies die, we still continue to exist, communicate and gather information via this five-dimensional connection with the rest of the universe, and sometimes show ourselves and communicate with the living.

Both philosophers and scientists have long assumed that the impetus to develop and hold afterlife beliefs was primarily provided by one’s fear of one’s own death (an egocentric view).  Recent empirical studies, however, present compelling evidence against this assumption: it has been observed that participants intuitively believe that others survive death (an allocentric view).  Despite this, most theories offered to explain this finding rely on egocentric mechanisms and claim that the deceased are represented as disembodied minds.  Here, the author offers an allocentric explanation for intuitive afterlife beliefs based on the intentional stance and offline social reasoning which also suggests that the deceased should be represented as socially embodied.  The author then argues that this socially embodied representation is more in line with both the findings and folk descriptions of those in the afterlife.  Finally, the author discusses the impact on both the scientific and philosophical investigations into afterlife beliefs.

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Everyone seems to have some innate idea that there is an afterlife. Developing a mental picture of the afterlife seems quite natural to us and seems be as old as humankind, more than likely predating even the earliest development of religions. However, religions have taken the initiative in dictating our most commonly held views of the afterlife over the past few thousand years even though there is no hard and fast rule stating that only religions have the right to develop views of the afterlife to the exclusion of all other forms of human knowledge. In fact, a concept of the afterlife is more fundamental to religions as a whole than belief in a Supreme Being, God or gods. Some of religion’s grasp on concepts of the afterlife have recently slipped as moviemakers have taken the initiative in representing how we picture the afterlife. On the other hand, science has been conspicuously absent from this whole process even though science has developed more and more complex paradigms about life, mind and consciousness, just those concepts which would seem important with regard to any possible afterlife. The very silence of science on this issue is simply deafening. However, the present lack of scientific worldviews that include some form of an afterlife will soon change as science takes a greater interest in the concept of consciousness and develops working theories to explain consciousness. Only then will science begin to consider the possibility that consciousness, at the very least, could survive death of the body and brain and only then will science consider the possibility that the afterlife is another part of our physical reality requiring explanation.

This paper combines the chaîne opératoire and microhistory methodologies to investigate decision-making and intentionality in construction design choices within the internal walls of the Neolithic Orcadian passage grave Maeshowe. Focusing specifically on side-chambers and their opposing sidewalls, this study documents that masonry quality is superior on the left-hand side—against the grain of highlighting the right, that novel left-dominant architectural features are notable for their association with rare incising, and that fluvial sedimentary stones are purposefully inverted. These features of re-orientation, watery inversion and of left for right, engender an interpretation that side-chambers exist within the space of an inverted netherworld, and that their apertures gesture a physical opening into the Land of the Dead. Thus conjoined, these methodologies generate a
a comprehensive new hypothesis.

We evaluate the role of physical embodiment in ordinary mental state ascriptions to disembodied spirits. Presented are five experiments suggesting that embodiment is not a central principle of folk psychology guiding ascriptions of phenomenal consciousness. Results continue to support the important role of functional considerations in theory of mind judgments.

This study tried to investigate if intuitive ideas about the continuation of the Self after death determine the way people represent the state of being dead, and, in this way, investigate possible psychological origins of afterlife beliefs, which constitute a recurrent cultural phenomenon. A semi-structured interview and a self-report questionnaire were used to obtain information on the experience of imagining oneself as dead and the representation of the dead-I of young adults. The results suggest that (1) there is a tendency to imagine the state of being dead as a continuation of the I, even in the absence of explicit afterlife beliefs; (2) perceptual, emotional, epistemic and desire experiences are associated to the dead-I; (3) the representation of the dead-I seems to be determined by an interaction between cognitive processes related to self-awareness and theory of mind, and the cultural afterlife beliefs explicitly learned. A previous alternative hypothesis, suggesting that simulation constraints were responsible for the emergence of non-reflective afterlife concepts is not completely supported by our results. The data presented here suggest that immortality of the soul might be an intuitive religious concept, connected to the experience of the Self and to the implicit theorization that the experienced Self is independent from the body. Future studies should focus on the collection of cross-cultural and developmental data.

Science investigates phenomena in nature that are either experienced or observed by people. However, one special class of phenomena is generally considered unscientific, i.e., unworthy of scientific investigation, by the majority of scientists. Science generally ignores any phenomenon associated with the possibility of an afterlife, which amounts to a scientific bias against this possibility. This shortcoming of science is actually a historical artifact that our present science inherited from the earlier break between science and religion and the separation of human thought into the two realms of MIND and MATTER. The bias is so strong that science, as it now defines itself, will never accept the reality of the afterlife and associated phenomena no matter how strong or persuasive the evidence is to the contrary. But new research does point directly to a conclusion that the afterlife is real or at least that consciousness in some form survives death; so science must change in order accept this new reality and progress.