The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [76]
In 1907, a Massachusetts physician named Duncan MacDougall tried to find out by weighing six dying patients before and after their death. He reported in the medical journal American Medicine that there was a twenty-one-gram difference. Even though his measurements were crude and the weights varied, and no one has been able to replicate his findings, “twenty-one grams” has nonetheless grown to urban legendary status as the weight of the soul, spawning articles, books, and even a feature film of that title.
Death, and the possibility of life continuing beyond it, has spawned countless serious treatises and not a few comedic commentaries. The perpetually anxious Woody Allen has this workaround: “It’s not that I’m afraid to die. I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”1 Steven Wright thinks he’s figured out a solution: “I intend to live forever—so far, so good.”2 Humor aside, since I am a scientist and claims are made that there is scientific evidence for life after death, let us analyze, first, a scientific explanation for why people believe in an afterlife, and, second, what the evidence is for that doubtful future date, and consider what its possibility means for our present state.
Natural-Born Immortalists: Afterlife as Agenticity
In the 2009 Harris Poll of religious beliefs among Americans, respondents were asked to indicate whether they believed in the following:3
Why do so many people believe in the afterlife? The question can be treated like any other belief question, and science can help illuminate the darkness. I suggest there are at least six solid reasons that lead people to believe there is life after death, based on the causal explanations I proposed for the sensed-presence experience, agenticity, dualism, and especially out-of-body experiences, all of which factor into afterlife accounts.
1. Belief in the afterlife is a form of agenticity. In our tendency to infuse the patterns we find in life with meaning, agency, and intention, the concept of life after death is an extension of ourselves as intentional agents continuing indefinitely into the future.
2. Belief in the afterlife is a type of dualism. Because we are natural-born dualists who intuitively believe that our minds are separate from our brains and bodies, the afterlife is the logical step in projecting our own mind-agency into the future without our bodies. It may even be a type of sensed-presence effect or third-man factor, with ourselves as that presence continuing on into an imagined ethereal empyrean.
3. Belief in the afterlife is a derivative of our theory of mind. We have the ability to understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions (we “read their minds”) by projecting ourselves into the minds of others and imagining how we would feel. This ToM projection is another form of agenticity and dualism by which we can imagine the intentional minds of both ourselves and others as continuing indefinitely into the future. Since there is good evidence that ToM occurs in the anterior paracingulate cortex just behind the forehead, we might even conjecture that this neural network is integral for belief in the afterlife.4
4. Belief in the afterlife is an extension of our body schema. Our brains construct a body image out of the myriad inputs from every nook and cranny of our bodies. When this single individual self is coupled with our capacity for agenticity, dualism, and theory of mind, we can project that essence into the future, even without a body.
5. Belief in the afterlife is probably mediated by our left-hemisphere interpreter. A second neural network that is likely integral for afterlife beliefs is the left-hemisphere interpreter, which integrates