10.19.08
Sciam on soul beliefs
And yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won’t feel like anything—and therein lies the problem.
Here’s a quote from the SciAm article referred in the previous post. The assumptions of cognitive psychologists, where do they come from? They aren’t any sounder than the endemic beliefs of human societies everywhere. People’s beliefs in ‘soul’ show the spontaneous propensity to undecidable metaphysics, yet at the same time suggest that human beliefs overwhelmingly reflect an unknown reality that scientists can no longer reckon with.
The Tibetan book of the Dead shows the way that folklore level can become something to reckon with indeed.