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Dead-Survivors, the Living Dead, and Concepts of Death

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. An abridged list of some of the works addressing this question: Astuti and Harris (2008); Bek and Lock (2011); Bering (2002); Bering et al. (2005); Harris and Giménez (2005); Lane et al. (2016); Misailidi and Kornilaki (2015); Pereira et al. (2012). Additionally, this finding was replicated by Gray, Knickman, and Wegner (2011) who also produced our second curious finding.

  2. The phrase “dead-survivor” comes from observations of Antony Flew (1956, 1998) and his thought experiment regarding an investigator of an airplane crash. To Flew, belief in an afterlife is analogous to that investigator accounting for the passengers by placing them into one of three columns: survivor, dead and dead-survivor.

  3. Afterlife beliefs, of course, are not the same as concepts of death. Afterlife beliefs are representations of what “afterliving” is like for our dead-survivors, whereas concepts of death provide representations of what it means to die, and can address explicitly or implicitly whether it is possible to survive death as we shall see.

  4. It is vital for the reader to understand that I am not challenging the empirical evidence gathered from these experiments; instead, I am challenging the current, widely held explanations for these findings.

  5. For the purpose of this article, I distinguish between concepts and conceptions in the following manner: concepts have clear intensions, whereas conceptions are interpretations of concepts or notions, which lack clear intensional content.

  6. This methodology was originally used by Bering (2002) to probe folk intuitions about those in the afterlife, but has been adopted by most researchers that followed. In addition to probing participants intuitions about the dead and those in PVS, the methodology was also adapted to probe intuitions about biological and psychological capabilities of person before conception, before birth, and as a baby (Emmons and Kelemen 2014). Additionally, the mind-body interpretation of those states was initially Bering’s (2002) as well.

  7. In Hodge (2012), I argue that a possible confound arises from an asymmetry between physical state/process questions and mental state/process questions, specifically that the later tended to include social relationships. The question structure took the form, “Now that subject S is dead, can S still do activity A with person P? The importance of this inclusion of a social element will become clear later in this article.

  8. See n. 1 above for an abridge list of experiments investigating how the folk conceive of the dead.

  9. Perceptual abilities appeared to be by type and context sensitive. Olfactory, gustatory and tactile perceptions were claimed to be less likely to continue for the dead, whereas visual and auditory perception continued, especially if perceiving something socially relevant (Bek and Lock 2011; Hodge 2012, 2016; Misailidi and Kornilaki 2015; Zhu et al. 2017). Another intriguing finding, which I shall note later, is that while young children did not intuit that the dead needed to eat, they nonetheless intuited that the dead could be hungry (Bering and Bjorklund 2004).

  10. It is important not to underestimate the widespread acceptance of this claim across the psychology and cognitive science of religion (see, Hodge 2008; Hodge and Sousa 2018; Nikkel 2015). Additionally, Hodge and Sousa (2018) point out that the inferential moves from “the dead have mental states” to “the dead are disembodied minds” is a non-sequitur.

  11. Evans (2001) and Sperber (1996) forcefully argue that children would not be able to avail themselves of public, cultural representations if such representations did not already possess an analogous intuitive belief system.

  12. Of course, those described in the “alive condition” were attributed (as capable of) all mental states and processes.

  13. Participants were not provided with the medical definition and description of a PVS which lays out the minimal areas of the brain that must continue to function (e.g., Blumenfeld 2009, Figure 2.1; Laith Farid Gulli 2002; Working Party of the Royal College of Physicians. 2003). The affected brain areas were left out of Grey and colleagues working definition of PVS as well, which only stated visible symptoms. Yet, the participants were not provided that limited information either. They were simply informed that the patients “entire brain was destroyed, save for the one small part that keeps him breathing” and although the patient’s body was “still technically alive, he will never wake up again (Gray et al. 2011a, b, p.2).” This mischaracterization of PVS led Gomez and colleagues (Gomes and Parrott 2015; Gomes et al. 2016) to argue and empirically demonstrate that when PVS was correctly characterized with more working parts in the brain along with wakefulness and basic responsiveness that the results reported by Grey and colleagues were significantly muted.

  14. This finding of context sensitivity is not, theoretically at least, surprising. Similar context sensitivity was demonstrated between secular and religious narratives of death (Astuti and Harris 2008; Harris and Giménez 2005). Most readings of Harris and colleagues’ experiment seem to support a cultural role for the ontogenesis of afterlife beliefs, but see Hodge (2012) for a discussion, and a theoretical cognitive approach to those findings.

  15. In fact, when given the opportunity to address both of these findings, Gomes and colleagues (Gomes and Parrott 2015; Gomes et al. 2016) side-stepped the issue, which placed their interpretations of Gray et al. (2011a) in jeopardy, particularly their Epicurean explanation which “holds that subjects intuitively believe that people go out of existence at death explanation (Gomes and Parrott 2015, p. 1009).” See also n. 29 below.

  16. My use of the phrase “secular conception of death” follows the usage initiated by Harris and Giménez (2005) in which it refers to death as the ultimate termination of life (i.e., annihilation of the person). According to them, the secular conception of death is entertained by the folk when death is discussed in a secular context. It is not meant to be mistaken for biomedical conception of death discussed in n. 17, which makes no claims regarding the ultimate existential fate of the deceased individual.

  17. I wish to caution the reader not to confuse the folk biological concept of death with the biomedical conception of death. This latter conception—or perhaps better, operational definition—is employed by healthcare professionals and legal experts to determine when an individual under their care is dead (Fallon and Fleming 2002; Gillon 1990; Kastenbaum 2003). It allows the professionals to determine between the states of being dead and being unconscious, as well as determining when it is no longer possible or feasible to revive the patient (Gilmore 2013; Shewmon 2001). This is accompanied by very specific definitions and empirical delimiters for medical, ethical and legal reasons (Brock 1993; Fallon and Fleming 2002). Also, in contradistinction to the folk biological concept, this conception is continually updated and revised based on new knowledge and technological advances (Kastenbaum 2003). This conception of death is learned by rote and reason; it is not intuitive.

    Regarding belief in an afterlife, the biomedical conception of death remains silent (Gillon 1990; although, see D. Hershenov and Taylor 2016; D. B. Hershenov 2006). Its only concern is the physical state of the physical body and makes no overt claims about the existence of the person, even though early biomedical definitions once endorsed a dualistic vision of the person and described death as the point at which the immaterial soul left the physical body (Kastenbaum 2003). Thus, there is no reason why an individual cannot accept the biomedical definition of death of the body while at the same time believing that the person continues afterliving.

  18. This does not mean that the folk only accepts natural, physical causes of death, or that we are always, or even often, right about those causes.

  19. Both “persons” and “personal identity” are used here in the loosest possible sense inasmuch as folk dualism may extend to entities that are neither generally conceived as human nor persons (e.g., supernatural agents or animals: Barlev et al. 2016; Boyer 2001; Testoni et al. 2017; Tremlin 2010; White and Fessler 2013).

  20. To be clear, there is no canonical view of folk dualism across the cognitive sciences. There are different claims by researchers about the properties and functions of the soul, and the cognitive mechanisms by which folk dualism is generated and functions (Hodge 2008; Hodge and Sousa 2018; Hodge et al. manuscript in production; Horst 2016).

    Those appealing to folk dualism are also less than clear as to what exactly the concept applies: whether that be humans, agents, persons, individuals or more (such as pets). Although this may seem a trivial complaint, it can have huge inferential implications in application, particularly in the cognitive science and psychology of religion.

  21. The line of reasoning exhibited by Gray, Knickman et al.—that is, because an entity has mental states and processes, it has a mind, and it is that mind—is based on an overinterpretation of theory of mind (Hodge and Sousa 2018).

  22. Harris, personal communication.

  23. Watson-Jones et al. (2016) found some cultural variation among the Vanuatu in Madagascar, where the participants provided more continuity responses for the biological processes after death of a fictional individual, but overall the researchers concluded that the results still fell largely within the folk dualist pattern as in other experiments.

  24. In personal communication, Harris acknowledges that the thesis presented by himself and colleagues leaves open the possibility of an innate cognitive mechanism, by which afterlife beliefs are developmentally intuitive, albeit that it would still support their “religious conception of death.” Also, see n. 11 above.

  25. It is important to keep in mind that the religious conception of death, as proposed by Harris and colleagues is only that the individual survives death as a spiritual entity (Astuti and Bloch 2013; Astuti and Harris 2008; Harris 2011a, b; Harris and Giménez 2005; Sebestény and Emmons 2017). Any additional cultural elements are not part of this conception.

  26. Harris and colleagues “teased apart” these two conceptions by manipulating the narrative by which an individual was informed of the death of another. For instance, Harris and Giménez (2005) manipulate the narrative presented to participants in which a fictional child is informed of the death of a grandparent. In the secular condition, the participants were told that the fictional child was informed of the death by a physician, and, in the religious condition, the child was informed by a priest. I have offered a detailed criticism of this methodology elsewhere (Hodge 2012).

  27. This also eliminates TMT as having a viable explanatory role for afterlife beliefs inasmuch as the theory demands that humans conceive of death as annihilation of the person as Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski (1991, p. 96 n. 4, emphasis original) clearly state, “Whenever we refer to the terror of death, we do not mean the immense fear of death per se, but rather of death as an absolute annihilation.” I have argued this in more detail in Hodge( 2016). This is also why TMT cannot be compatible with afterlife anxiety as proposed by Van Tongeren et al. (2017): conceiving of death qua absolute annihilation leaves no conceptual room to be anxious about what else might happen after death.

  28. To be clear, it is not that they cannot ascribe to the secular conception of death, but merely that there is a lack of evidence that they do.

  29. This is likewise the findings from Gomes et al. (2016) who both replicated and manipulated Gray et al. (2011a) experiments. In fact, their findings of “mind continuity” for dead and PVS patients forced them to abandon their previous hypothesis (Gomes and Parrott 2015) that people are implicit Epicureans, naturally conceiving of death as annihilation of the person.

  30. This potentiality would seem to beg for a reflective explanation rather than an intuitive one. Moreover, Qirko (2016) argues that a more likely evolutionary solution is “unconscious personal death unawareness.”

    This also reinforces the idea that TMT is an egocentric theory of death which falls outside of the experimental evidence we are considering on how the folk intuitively reasons about the death of others (i.e., an allocentric view discussed in Hodge 2011b, 2016; and Hodge et al. manuscript in production).

  31. Moreover, is it really a religious concept of death, or a religious concept of the afterlife? It is not clear that religions peddle concepts of death. What happens after death, however, is a domain addressed ubiquitously across human religions.

  32. Experimental evidence on how the folk view the possibility of an afterlife for animals is mixed. For instance, Bering (2006) found that both children and adults easily represented a deceased anthropomorphized mouse as continuing (at least, mentally) to exist. Yet, Astuti and Harris (2008) found that the older one was, the less likely they were to represent an animal (in this case a generic bird) as continuing to exist beyond physical death. Pets, with which the bereaved individual had a social relationship, are treated much the same as deceased humans in  whom she was emotionally invested (Testoni et al. 2017; White and Fessler 2013).

  33. In Gray and colleague’s (Gray et al. 2011a, b) appeal to intuitive folk dualism, they strangely take the position that we may view other humans qua a body or qua a mind. This suggestion runs counter to the claim of intuitive folk dualism (even broadly construed) that personal identity is held and secured by the immaterial mind, and the mind alone. This interpretation seems to be ad hoc to make sense of their findings regarding context. No matter how much one “focuses” on the body, it should not displace identity from the immaterial mind in intuitive folk dualism. The physical body plays only an accidental role to identity in intuitive folk dualism (Bloom 2004; Wellman and Johnson 2007).

  34. An ancillary argument against a folk dualist explanation of Gray et al. (2011a ) findings regarding PVS patients is that the folk do not appear to apply mind-body dualism at all. Folk dualism relies on numerical identity of the mind and the soul such that the mind is the soul (Hodge 2008). Experiments by Richert and Harris (2008) found that 80.1% of participants said that PVS patients had a soul compared to only 32.9% who said they had a mind. Therefore, the folk do not view the soul as numerically identical to the mind in PVS cases as a folk dualism explanation requires.

  35. One might suggest that the secular conception of death too has long historical roots in human culture . While it is true that some ancient and classical philosophical schools, most notably the Epicureans, endorsed a secular conception of death, they took it to be an educated and scholarly perspective achieved through reason, and never to be the default position of the folk.

  36. Bering (2006) also came to this conclusion, albeit for different reasons.

  37. Bering (2006) was the first to suggest a role for offline social reasoning in why afterlife beliefs were cognitively intuitive. Bering, however, assigned it a supplementary, non-causal role rather than as playing a primary causal role as I do.

  38. This is not to say that the bereaved do not suffer real emotional pain because of the extrication of the decedent from their lives. This emotional pain is due to missing the individual because they are absent, however, rather than believing (or intuiting) that they are annihilated.

  39. Bond (1992) gives an interesting account as to how the deceased remain socially relevant through ancestor cults in Africa.

  40. There is a dual aspect regarding who suffers because of a social death. On the one hand, as mentioned, the fear of a loved one being forgotten is prominent in the minds of the bereaved, and episodes of forgetting the deceased (such as on a birthday or anniversary) can create real suffering for the bereaved. On the other hand, it is likely that the social death matters little to the deceased. But, as we shall see, those who are still alive can also suffer a social death.

  41. Králová (2015) performs some much needed conceptual hygiene on academic discussions and applications of the social death concept.

  42. Case and Williams (2004) describe ostracism as how we would imagine life if we did not, or ceased to, exist, where not existing means annihilation. But, there is no reason to assume or think that if we ceased to exist that we would be annihilated from the minds of those we love. Also problematic is the underlying assumption that there is “something it is like” to be annihilated, such as “how one would feel if he was annihilated.” Of course, there could be no such qualia.

  43. Some have insisted that since these states can also be categorized as mental states this means the afterliving deceased are intuitively represented as purely mental entities—that is, as disembodied minds (Bering 2006; Bloom 2004, 2007). This claim, however, rests on both a misinterpretation and overinterpretation of the evidence (Hodge 2008; Hodge & Sousa, 2018, respectively).

  44. To be clear, this is in line with what I have called social embodiment, meaning that the afterliving deceased is represented with the body parts necessary to carry out scenarios imagined by the living in which the afterliving deceased engage socially with the living and their fellow afterliving deceased (Hodge 2011a, b, 2016).

  45. This also explains why (from n. 9, above) the dead-survivors were represented as being hungry even though they did not eat. Being hungry is an intentional state, even though it is not considered a (pure) mental state (Griffin and Baron-Cohen 2002; Hodge 2011a, 2012, 2016).

  46. As one relative of a PVS patient put it, “It’s almost like living with a dead person. Some people say, ‘you’ve still got her’. No I haven’t (Kitzinger and Kitzinger 2014, p. 239).”

  47. One could suggest (as one reviewer did) that relatives who continue to visit a PVS patient might be more likely to view the patient as still alive and socially accessible inasmuch as they might misinterpret autonomic movements and responses as intentional, and thus believe that their loved one might ‘come back.’ There are two problems with this suggestion in regard to my argument: (1) the participants in the studies were told of fictional patients with whom they were not related; and (2) the clinical evidence does not appear to bear out this potential, although plausible, scenario (see, Edgar et al. 2015; Holland et al. 2014; Kitzinger and Kitzinger 2014 for a discussion of the clinical evidence from relatives of patients in vegetative states.). On the contrary, relatives do seem to perceive their loved one in a PVS as in a liminal, limbo state, being socially dead yet physically alive, in line with my argument.

  48. I have not included the religious conception of death here because I think my arguments have eliminated it as a viable conception.

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Claire J. White, Paulo Sousa, two anonymous reviewers, and Associate Editor of this journal Christophe Heintz for discussions and comments about the arguments in this paper and earlier versions of it.

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    K. Mitch Hodge

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Hodge, K. Dead-Survivors, the Living Dead, and Concepts of Death. Rev.Phil.Psych. 9, 539–565 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-017-0377-9

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