chapter 11 Zombies, Selves, and the Possibility of Afterlife

Johan Modée

1 Introduction

The history of human beings is crowded with all kinds of strange, imagined beings, such as gods, ghosts, souls, witches, fairies, trolls, zombies, gnomes and so forth. As the archaeological evidence indicates, the consciousness of human beings achieved the cognitive capability to conceive such beings at least 30,000 years ago.1 After that, the human beings have frequently imagined that their cognitive imaginations are cases of existent beings. In fact, it has been assumed that the existence of such beings is more certain than anything. Another important historic or even prehistoric conception, still prevalent in many religions, is the idea of afterlife. The basic idea is here that the identity of an individual is preserved after death. In other words: it is claimed that it is logically possible for the self to exist post mortem. Prima facie, we can all, as human beings, conceive that there is a spiritual substance that can take different forms as soul or divine being. From our cul- tures, we have historical conceptions of divine beings and human souls. Thus is may appear to most of us that we actually can grasp the existence of such beings and things, as representations in our minds. From this, some or even most of us conclude that they (possibly) also (can) exist. Thus, in this cogni- tive-historical sense, selves, logic and ontology are strongly connected in the context of religion. It is natural for human beings to conceive supernatural things. Now there is no obvious empirical evidence for the existence of any afterlife, divine being, or spiritual substance whatsoever. The importance of this fact cannot be overrated.2 By contrast, the empirical evidence for the existence of a physical world is overwhelming. But in the face of this evidence and lack of evidence, at the same time, the absolute majority of people believe that there are spiritual substances and afterlife. It is a natural, cultural position to see the

1 Steven Mithen, The Prehistory of Mind: A Search for the Origin of Art, Religion and Science (London: Thames & Hudson 1996). 2 See the discussion in John Searle, Mind, Language and Society: Philosophy in the Real World (London: Phoenix 1999), 33–37.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004270183_�13 208 Modée world as partly spiritual, in the sense that there is a spiritual substance, and that human beings are partly spiritual. This is indeed a strange situation. The Enlightenment and modern science came out very hard on religious ideas. The many times iterated point was and still is of course that there is no empirical evidence of spiritual substances—at least not the kind of evidence that the scientific view requires. The contemporary prevalence of religion is, however, contradicting this. Religion still has its strongholds, despite the Enlightenment critique. But I cannot go into any details here, as that would go beyond the scope of this paper. Another consideration is my real concern, and that is the status of our cul- tural discourses. Since the dawn of human history, philosophers and theolo- gians have tried to demonstrate the possible or even necessary existence of some divine being, soul or spiritual substance by the use of logical tools. A related attempt has been to clarify these concepts, showing that they do not entail any contradiction. The absence of logical contradictions is then taken as a platform for ontological assumptions. It is unclear whether or not this discourse has contributed to a situation where religion has made a comeback or in the contemporary world. One aspect of that discourse is nonetheless the focus of the present chapter.

2 Zombies and the Philosophical Zombie Argument

One way to classify all these philosophical-theological attempts to demon- strate the existence of a non-physical reality is to see them as conceivability arguments, similar to zombie arguments in the philosophical literature. What are zombies? Zombies are historical-cultural creatures of imagina- tion, which have their natural place in a religious context. Zombies are corpses that become alive. Such creatures appear in a prophecy by Ezekiel in the Old Testament (cf. Ezekiel 37: 1–10). Another context in which they emerge as con- ceptions is Haiti voodoo religion. In modern times, zombies have been made world-famous by various zom- bie movies. The ghouls in George Romero’s’ classic 1968 film The Night of the Living Dead initiated a movie genre that recently got its latest contribu- tion in Marc Foster’s blockbuster World War Z (2013), starring Brad Pitt. The zombie creature in these movies, typically, is a corps that is still alive, in some mysterious way. In Romero’s 1968 movie corpses became zombies due some unknown natural or non-natural cause and they move around very slowly in large crowds, looking for fresh bodies and brains to consume. Contemporary