Disembodied Souls Are People Too

Here, I summarize my views about souls.* You are an immaterial soul. You have lived infinitely many lives in the past and will live infinitely many more in the future. While alive, you are embodied; in between lives, you exist as a disembodied soul.

[ *Based on: “Disembodied Souls Are People Too,” pp. 138-153 in Extreme Philosophy, ed. Stephen Hetherington (Routledge, 2024). ]

1. People Have Souls

1.1. Minds are non-physical

These are controversial views, and I can’t fully discuss any of these debates here; here, I will just very briefly summarize my views. I think the mind has three features that are hard to explain in physical terms:

• a. Qualia (the particular way experiences feel from the inside).

• b. Intrinsic intentionality (the feature of representing things or being “about” things).

• c. Free will (the ability to control which of a set of genuinely open alternatives is realized).

These make it seem that the mind must be something over and above the physical phenomena of the body and the brain.

1.2. Properties or substances?

Is there a non-physical entity, “the mind”, wherein the above properties reside, or is it merely that a certain physical entity (the brain) has certain non-physical properties?

I favor the former view (“substance dualism”) because I think it best accommodates very strong and widespread intuitions about personal identity. Roughly, I think there are objective, intrinsic facts about personal identity (e.g., whether a particular future person is you or is instead someone else); also, personal identity is a one-one relation (it is metaphysically impossible for more than one person existing at a given time to both “be you”).

I think the soul theory of personal identity (you are wherever your soul is) accommodates these intuitions, and I think no theory that relies only on physical entities, even supplemented with non-physical qualities, can accommodate these intuitions.

Ex.: spatiotemporal and psychological continuity don’t account for identity because of “fission” cases (hypothetical cases in which a person divides into two qualitatively indistinguishable persons). The continuity theory would violate the principle that identity is one-one.

You can rule out such cases by stipulating that identity requires continuity plus no branching, but then you have to give up the principle that personal identity is intrinsic (the identity of a person should not be dependent on the existence or qualities of other beings).

The “soul”, then, is understood as the immaterial thing that has mental qualities and determines the identity of persons.

2. People Are Repeatable

2.1. A probabilistic proof of reincarnation

I assume that the past & future are both infinite. Given this, if persons could only live once in all of time, then the probability that you would be alive now would be zero. If your being born is a nonzero-probability event, it should have occurred earlier, given the infinite past, which would have prevented you from being here now.

But you are alive now. So persons can live more than once. Bayesian calculation:

Let H = the hypothesis that persons can live more than once.

E = the evidence that you are here now.

From Bayes’ Theorem:

P(H|E) = P(H)*P(E|H) / [P(H)*P(E|H) + P(~H)*P(E|~H)]

As discussed above, P(E|~H) = 0. So:

P(H|E) = P(H)*P(E|H) / [P(H)*P(E|H) + P(~H)*0]

= P(H)*P(E|H) / [P(H)*P(E|H)]

= 1,

provided P(H) and P(E|H) are nonzero.

So the probability of reincarnation is 100%. For more, see my earlier post on this.

2.2. How does reincarnation work?

I don’t know how similar your different incarnations are to each other—e.g., whether they are all almost identical to your current self, or whether some of them are completely different. I don’t know whether you can come back as a non-intelligent animal. I don’t know how long it takes to get reincarnated after you die. It might be instantaneous (this is plausible if there is an infinite multiverse), or it might take a ridiculous length of time like a googleplex years (if it requires us to wait for the universe to go through another entire cycle).

You don’t (I assume) remember any of your previous lives, because your memories are stored in your brain, which decomposes after death. Therefore, you won’t remember this lifetime either. Upon death, you lose everything other than your soul.

2.3. Tables vs. persons

Can you give a parallel argument that ordinary material objects must be reincarnated? If time is infinite, and tables can only exist once, then the probability that this table would be here now is zero. Etc. So tables can exist many times.

It’s not clear that this would be a problem; maybe tables do recur infinitely. However, tables also differ importantly from persons in two ways: (a) I think the identity conditions for tables are a matter of convention, unlike persons, for whom there are objective, intrinsic facts about identity; (b) I think a statement of your basic evidence (what you are most immediately aware of) must include a direct reference to you as an individual, but it would not include a direct reference to a specific table. You are only aware of the qualities of tables, not their individual identity.

2.4. Space vs. time

Can you give a parallel argument that people must exist in infinitely many spatial locations at any given time, just as (I claim) they must exist at infinitely many times?

No, there are two differences between space and time. (a) If I existed in different places right now, then I should be directly, introspectively aware of the experiences I am having in those places. However, if I will exist or did exist at different times, I should not thereby be directly, introspectively aware of those other lives.

(b) A statement of one’s basic evidence must include a reference to the present time (e.g., you might have as evidence the fact that you are in some mental state now), but it would not include a reference to any spatial location. In fact, one cannot perceive spatial locations.

3. Dead People Exist

Some reasons to think that you exist after death, albeit in a non-conscious, disembodied state:

1. Suppose you are asleep and not dreaming. Do you exist at this time? Intuitively, yes. This shows that you can exist while having no experiences.

2. Suppose you die then are reanimated an hour later by some amazing new medical technology. Did you exist during the hour you were clinically dead? If you agreed about case (1), then it seems plausible that the answer to this one is also “yes”.

3. Suppose you get amnesia, forgetting all your memories related to who you are and your life experiences. Over the next few weeks, the memories gradually return. Do you still exist as the same person during the amnesiac period? Again, yes.

4. Same as case 3, but suppose the memories never return. Do you still exist as the same person after you get the amnesia? Yes, because you are in the same state as you were in in case 3. Your identity can’t depend on something that’s going to happen in the future.

These cases show that you can continue to exist while non-conscious and after losing all of your memories. That’s what death is: loss of consciousness and permanent loss of memories.

4. Normative Puzzles

4.1. The harm of death

Epicurus claimed that death is not a harm because a person does not exist after dying, and it’s impossible for a non-existent entity to be harmed.

Epicurus is wrong because people do exist while dead. They are merely disembodied and non-conscious.

4.2. Posthumous harm

Some philosophers have wondered whether you can harm someone posthumously. E.g., could we harm Hegel by destroying his reputation? Some intuitions suggest that the answer is “yes”. Yet there is a puzzle because it seems that there is no subject of the harm: after a person is dead, they no longer exist, and it is impossible for a non-existent entity to be harmed.

Solution: again, people do exist while dead.

4.3. The repugnant conclusion

The Repugnant Conclusion (RC) is the thesis that, for any world full of happy people, one can imagine a better world populated entirely by people whose lives are just barely worth living, provided that the latter world contains enough people. In earlier work, I have proved the RC to be correct.

The current thesis about disembodied souls gives us a new way of defending the RC. The “smaller population” world and the “larger population” world really contain the same number of people. It’s just that in the former, there is a large number of people who exist as unconscious, disembodied souls, with a welfare level of 0, whereas those people have a (slightly) positive welfare level in the “larger population” world.

4.4. Pro- and anti-natalism

Some philosophers think that it’s wrong to create new people. David Benetar says that this is true because the harms that the new people will suffer count as reasons against creating them, while the benefits that they will enjoy do not count as reasons in favor of creating them. Crucial to his argument is the idea that it’s bad to cause a harm to exist, but it isn’t bad to refrain from creating a person to enjoy a benefit. This is allegedly because if you don’t create the person, then there will be no one to have missed out on the benefit.

On my view, however, you never fundamentally create persons; you only cause a pre-existing soul to become embodied. If you refrain from reproducing, then, there will be souls who continue to be unconscious and disembodied, whom you could have rescued from that condition. Your reason for reproducing is about the same as the reason you have for rescuing a currently-alive person who is about to die.

5. Conclusion

Time stretches infinitely into the past and infinitely into the future. In the infinite expanse of time, each of us lives infinitely many lives. In between lives, we exist as unconscious, disembodied souls.

The main resistance to this idea stems from physicalism. But the physicalists can’t explain qualia, intentionality, or free will. Neither physicalists nor property dualists can satisfactorily explain the conditions for personal identity.

This view has interesting normative implications. Since it is better to be conscious than unconscious, we have reason both to fear death and to “rescue” souls from the condition of being dead by reproducing.