The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [77]
6. Belief in the afterlife is an extension of our normal ability to imagine ourselves somewhere else both in space and time, including time immemorial. Close your eyes and imagine yourself on the warm sands of a tropical beach on a beautiful sunny day. Where are you in this picture? Are you inside your skin looking out from your eyes at the crashing waves in the distance and children playing in the sand? Or are you above yourself looking down on your entire body as if there were a second you hovering overhead? For most people this thought experiment results in the second observational platform. This is called decentering, or imagining ourselves somewhere else from an Archimedean point beyond our body. In this same manner we envision ourselves in the afterlife as a decentered image removed from this time and space into an empyreal realm, the literal (and literary) dwelling place of God, the ultimate immortal and eternal agent.
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In sum, because we so readily impart agency and intention to inanimate objects such as rocks and trees and clouds, and to animate objects such as predators, prey, and our fellow human beings; because we are natural-born dualists who believe in mind beyond body; because we are aware of our own minds and the minds of others; because we are aware of our own bodies as separate from all other bodies; because our brains are naturally inclined to weave all sensory inputs and cognitive thoughts into a meaningful story with ourselves as the central character; and, finally, because we are able to decenter ourselves from our time and space into another time and space, it is natural for us to believe that we have a timeless and eternal essence. We are natural-born immortalists.
The Disembodied Mind and the Eternal Soul
Believers in the afterlife, of course, will either reject these lines of evidence that belief in life after death is a product of the brain, or they will argue that their religion is simply reflecting an ontological reality about the universe. They believe in life after death because there really is an afterlife, they will say, and they will offer evidence in support of this claim. But as I have been arguing throughout this book, such rationalization of belief is precisely backward. Belief in the afterlife comes first; rational reasons for the belief come second. Nevertheless, the case for the existence of the afterlife is built around four lines of evidence that may be summarized as follows (from weakest to strongest in evidentiary strength).5
1. Information fields and the universal life force. According to the theory of morphic resonance, nature preserves data in the form of information fields that exist separately from individual organisms, as evidenced by people who can sense when someone is staring at their backs, by dogs that know when their owners are coming home, and that it is easier to complete the Sunday crossword puzzle later in the day because others have already solved it. These, and many other mysterious psychic phenomena, can be explained by “morphic resonance fields” that connect all living organisms to one another. Information cannot be created or destroyed, only recombined into new patterns, so our personal patterns—our “souls” by my definition—are packages of information that precede birth and survive death.
2. ESP and evidence of mind. Experimental research on psi (psychic power) and telepathy, in which subjects under controlled conditions can apparently receive images from senders without the use of the five senses, if true would stand as evidence for a disembodied mind that functions independently of the brain and yet can interact with normal matter.
3. Quantum consciousness. The study of the actions of