On Imagining the Afterlife more

Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 brill.nl/jocc On Imagining the Afterlife K. Mitch Hodge* Department of Humanities, Amarillo College, P.O. Box 447, Amarillo, TX 79178, USA *Tel.: (1-806) 371-5354; Fax: (1-806) 345-5572; e-mail: Kmitch.hodge@gmail.com Abstract The author argues for three interconnected theses which provide a cognitive account for why humans intuitively believe that others survive death. The first thesis, from which the second and third theses follow, is that the acceptance of afterlife beliefs is predisposed by a specific, and already well-documented, imaginative process – the offline social reasoning process. The second thesis is that afterlife beliefs are social in nature. The third thesis is that the living imagine the deceased as socially embodied in such a way as to continue to fulfill on-going social obligations with others. The author further suggests six reasons why the fantasy/reality distinction breaks down for the imaginer such that the continued existence of the decedent in the afterlife is believed to be real. Finally, the author suggests avenues for further research which would support this cognitive account. Keywords Afterlife beliefs, offline social reasoning, imagination, metaphors, alief, social embodiment One need not be a chamber to be haunted, One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing Material place. Emily Dickenson The human mind is predisposed to accept afterlife beliefs. Children, as young as 4 years-old, claim that certain states, particularly psychological states (Bering, 2006),1 continue after death. This trend continues through adulthood 1 This finding has been replicated many times, not only by Bering and colleagues (Bering, 2002; Bering and Bjorklund, 2004; Bering et al., 2005), but also by Harris and Gimenez (2005), Astuti (2007b) and Astuti and Harris (2008). These latter replications, however, show the context sensitivity of these beliefs and suggest that it is not the belief in the afterlife itself which is innate, but at the least the predisposition to accept such beliefs is present at the earliest ages. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156853711X591305 368 K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 and regardless of religious affiliation. In fact, even some who claim to be extinctivists (i.e., believing that all mental and physical states cease at death) inadvertently claim that some mental states (e.g., the decedent knowing that he is dead) continue after death. These findings suggest that the human mind is well suited to accept intuitively input of content concerning a life beyond the grave. Moreover, it would seem to follow from these findings that trying to quell affirmative assertions about life after death require considerable cognitive effort.2 The point is, simply, that the human mind is predisposed to believe that humans survive death. How we imagine this afterlife to be is subject to both cognitive constraints on our imagination as well as external input – specifically the culture in which we are raised. Much of how we believe we survive death is left open to the imagination (our own or some else’s).3 This imaginative enterprise is subject to cognitive constraints that limit how we might imagine a life that succeeds our present one. Here, I wish to put forward three interconnected theses concerning the genesis of afterlife beliefs among humans. The first thesis is that the acceptance of afterlife beliefs is predisposed by a specific, and already well-documented, imaginative process – the offline social reasoning process.4 Thus, unlike other theories (e.g., the simulation constraint theory by Bering, 2006; and the imaginative obstacle theory by Nichols, 2007) which attempt to explain the cognitive underpinnings of humans’ predisposition to accept afterlife beliefs, my theory will not require the positing of a new cognitive mechanism to explain why humans intuitively believe in an afterlife. The second thesis, supported by the first, is that afterlife beliefs are social in nature. Contrary to other theories, I suggest that afterlife beliefs are not selfcentered, but other-centered. As Bering’s experiments show, we intuitively 2 I argue below that because of our offline social reasoning processes, statements by extinctivists that affirm continued existence after death are the result of an alief rather than a belief (implicit or explicit). See Gendler (2008a) for an overview of alief. 3 I wish to make it clear that my discussion of beliefs about death and the afterlife are meant to reflect “folk” beliefs rather than scientifically, philosophically and theologically educated beliefs. Even more specifically, I am centering my discussion on those folk beliefs concerning death and the afterlife which humans are predisposed to accept intuitively given their evolved cognitive architecture. 4 Bering (2006) is the first to discuss offline social reasoning in connection with afterlife beliefs, although he does not think this process is the genesis of afterlife beliefs. For Bering, offline social reasoning is a secondary process that provides content for afterlife beliefs, but is not causally responsible for them. He asserts that the genesis of afterlife beliefs is his simulation constraint (i.e., one cannot imagine what it is like not to have psychological states). I criticize the simulation constraint in detail in Hodge (2011). Another distinction between Bering’s account and my own is that Bering (Culotta, 2009) still holds to a dualist, disembodied account of afterlife beliefs which I criticize in Hodge (2008). K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 369 believe that others survive death, rather than first believing that we, ourselves, survive death and then project this belief onto others. Not only is this thesis more compatible with the evidence gathered, but it also follows from the first thesis. Offline social reasoning processes exist so that we can think about, and plan interactions with, absent third parties. Beliefs in the afterlife are not personal attempts to attain immortality, but rather a place in which one imagines her deceased loved ones continuing to exist. Furthermore, because of the very nature of offline social reasoning, I suggest, two further aspects of afterlife beliefs are illuminated. First, built into the offline social reasoning is the presumption that the person being thought about is somewhere doing something. The afterlife is conceived of as a socially active place. Second, because offline social reasoning evolved to allow us to think about absent third parties, this brings to light why death is understood metaphorically by humans as an absence and not as an annihilation of the individual. The third thesis is that those in the afterlife are imagined as being embodied. I (Hodge, 2008) have argued elsewhere (and will do so briefly below) that humans’ imaginative representations of the afterlife (e.g., mythology, art, theology and philosophy) do not easily accommodate Cartesian substance dualist interpretations of afterlife beliefs. Here, however, I wish to give further arguments, based on imaginative processes supported by offline social reasoning, why humans should imagine their deceased loved ones as embodied – in particular, socially embodied in such as way as to continue to fulfill their social obligations with the living. The evidence supporting this theory was accumulated from various cognitive disciplines in different contexts which are gathered here to present a coherent theory of how and why humans are predisposed to accept afterlife beliefs. These pieces have come together from cognitive psychology, linguistics, cognitive anthropology, and philosophy. It is the assessment of the evidence from these fields which gives this theory not only its firm support but also its novelty in comparison to presently accepted theories. Offline Social Reasoning Humans have the uncanny ability to think about and be affected by conspecifics who are not within their immediate perceptual fields – that is, we can have thoughts about other individuals in their absence. Moreover, it is not necessary that we have ever been physically present with that individual (e.g., Julius Caesar) nor even that the individual in question actually exists (e.g., Sherlock Holmes). We think about how they might act in a certain circumstance, what they are doing, how they are feeling, etc. Our ability to think about absent 370 K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 parties affects us physically through our emotions and behaviors (Currie, 1995, 1997; Gendler, 2006). Most importantly, when we imagine the activities of absent third parties we imagine them embodied. We do not envision them as disembodied minds because we do not and cannot interact with such beings – nor can those beings interact with us (Kim, 2001). We imagine a physical Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon. We imagine a physical Sherlock Holmes solving the case. We imagine our deceased loved ones physically active in the afterlife. The case of ghosts and spirits might be thought as counter-indicative of the deceased being imagined as embodied in the afterlife. These beings, however, are imagined to be governed by the same physical principles as embodied individuals in the manner by which they interact with the world (Cornwell et al., 2004). They are imagined to act on the world as bodily-shaped apparitions or invisible embodied beings rather than disembodied beings about whom it is difficult, if not inconceivable, to imagine acting on the world at all. I wish to stress here that a disembodied being is not the same as an invisible being. In arguing that there are conditions in which we can imagine a disembodied being and also interact with it, Gillett (1986), for example, confuses imagining a disembodied being with imagining an invisible being who has a physical location with a particular point of view that perceives and acts according to an approximation of the same bodily constraints to which the human body adheres.5 It is also worth noting the distinction made by Tye (1983) that imagining having disembodied experiences (e.g., floating above your dead physical body) is not the same as imagining oneself disembodied (i.e., the imagined person – you – floating above your physical body). As Tye argues, arguments for the imaginability or conceivability of disembodiment show that the former is imaginable, but they fail to show the latter. Furthermore, why should we expect humans to go through the cognitive difficulty of trying to imagine their deceased loved one as disembodied – particularly since even imagining our own disembodiment is so difficult (Blose, 1981; Sorabji, 2006) – when the deceased can be so easily supplied one by our imagination? As Boyer (2001) points out, those who populate the afterlife are those individuals that matter to ourselves and our society. We imagine their continued existence in the afterlife in a way which permits a continued social exchange. As Bering (2006, p. 2) suggests, “intuitive reasoning about dead agent’s minds seems to leave open the possibility for continued social relationships with the 5 Another interpretation of what Gillett (1986) argues is specifically in line with my arguments here – namely, that our ability to understand a disembodied person (if there were such a being) as a person is constrained by our experiences of embodied persons and we think of them as such. K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 371 dead.” We interact with them in the concrete sense of “doing things to them, experiencing them doing things, giving and receiving, paying, promising, threatening, protecting, placating and so on (Boyer, 2001, p. 138).” Since we understand death as an absence, we think about our deceased loved ones in same way we would about a living but absent individual. Bering (2006, p. 4, emphasis original) discusses this phenomenon at some length: When it comes to death, human cognition apparently is not well equipped to update the list of players in our complex social rosters by accommodating the recent nonexistence of any one of them. This is especially the case, of course, for individuals who have played primary roles in our social lives, who did so for a long time, and who were never presumed to be continuously stationary when they were out of our sight. Because our minds are designed for offline as well as online social processing, we expect the periodic physical absence of social partners. Casual observation reveals that individuals will often, for example, pick up the phone with the intention of calling the decedent or fleetingly imagine how the decedent will react when told about some good news, only to remember that the person is not where they usually are – they have “passed on” to someplace else. Although these automatic cognitions are probably the residue of habitual social behaviors, they also reveal something about the challenges faced by the human cognitive system when it attempts to process information concerning the truth about dead agents’ physical whereabouts. A person who has recently died and whose body has already been disposed of may continue to be processed by an offline social system for an undetermined period of time. We continue to think about deceased individuals and, in turn, they continue to affect our thoughts, emotions and behaviors. We do not readily update our social registry, and their absence leaves a social void (Palgi and Abramovitch, 1984) to which our offline social reasoning processes respond, and provide an imagined world for them to inhabit. I wish to stress again that absent third parties in this cognitive system are not imagined as disembodied minds. I (Hodge, 2008) have argued against the Cartesian substance dualism interpretation of afterlife beliefs elsewhere, but here I wish to stress that we imagine, ceteris paribus, absent third parties as embodied physical beings who perform socially relevant tasks. There is no reason to think, given the normal functioning of offline social reasoning processes, that humans who suffer the loss of a loved one begin imagining the continued existence of the decedent as disembodied. They might not have a physical body in reality, but they can continue to have an imagined physical body. The role that imagination plays in preserving the physical presence of the deceased individual is often overlooked in how humans can both understand the physical death of an individual and their continued existence in the afterlife. In trying to make sense of this, it is often assumed by researchers that 372 K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 once the bereaved realize that the physical body is dead that the only way which they can sensibly understand the continued existence of their loved one is disembodied. These accounts, however, overlook the power the imagination has in supplying the decedent with a new body. For humans under those circumstances, ceteris paribus, the possibility of the continued existence of their loved one is not a philosophical issue – they likely will not wonder how it is possible for their loved one to be re-embodied; they will simply provide one with their imagination in the same manner we provide Sherlock Holmes with his (Dennett, 1990; Weisberg and Goodstein, 2009) – and do we really stop to puzzle how a fictional character becomes embodied in our imagination when we are in the throes of his adventure? It is unlikely, unless one is a researcher interested in such issues, that a bereaved individual will stop and wonder how and why they are imagining their deceased loved one with a body. And why should they? They imagined the now deceased as embodied during their previous absences. Metaphors We Die By Our cognitive ability for offline social reasoning produces an interesting artifact in both reasoning and thinking about the dead – namely, because it is designed to think about and track absent third parties and it is activated in the case of death, our default way of thinking about the dead is that they are absent rather than annihilated. Our offline social reasoning system treats the deceased as an absent third party, and our reasoning about them and our speech reflects this. We naturally think about and reason about deceased individuals as if they are absent rather than annihilated. We are predisposed to treat death as an absence. We imagine the deceased as if they still exist, just not here. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) argue that underlying the folk understanding of existence is a location metaphor, “existence is being located here.” Most importantly, ceasing to exist is understood by the location metaphor “going away.” We treat death as an absence and we talk about the decedents as if they are not here (e.g., “he is gone,” “she has departed,” “he passed away”).6 Because existence is understood in terms of location, death is not understood as an annihilation of an individual, but rather as a change in that individual’s location. The individual is gone, though the body remains. In fact, it is the word 6 My use of the word “we” here is meant to mean all of us who are susceptible to folk reasoning processes which I take to be the vast majority of humans. K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 373 “remains” that we use to refer to the body because that is what is located here. The person, our loved one, is absent – that is, not located here. We also employ this metaphor even in cases where the body, itself, still exhibits signs of life. Individuals who have fallen into long-term comas, vegetative states or suffering the final stages of Alzheimer’s are described as “already gone.” In these cases, social death has preceded physical death (Palgi and Abramovitch, 1984) – that is, the person with whom we could carry out our normal social interactions is no longer present; she has gone even though her body still exhibits signs of life.7 Developmental research suggests that it is not until age 10 that children fully grasp the concept of death (Speece and Sandor, 1984; Norris-Shortle et al., 1993; Cox et al., 2005). One of the key intensions of the death concept is that death is irreversible. Yet, as both the metaphors we use for death and the research conducted by Bering and colleagues (Bering, 2002, 2006, 2008; Bering and Bjorklund, 2004; Bering et al., 2005) suggests, most humans never fully grasp nor believe that death is a terminus for an individual. What children come to understand is not that the individual has been annihilated, but rather that the present physical body to which that person was attached will not become reanimated. In addition, findings by Harris and Gimenez (2005), Astuti (2007a,b) and Astuti and Harris (2008) suggest that as a child develops, her understanding of death becomes more context sensitive – that is, they are more likely to associate death of the physical body as a terminus in secular contexts, but still assert the continued existence of the individual in religious contexts. In other words, it is not that the children come to understand that the physical death of a body means the annihilation of an individual, but rather become more culturally oriented in how they understand that individual surviving death. They come to believe that the physical body will not reanimate, but that does not necessitate that they believe death is the destruction of the individual. This is, according to both the psychological research and the anthropological evidence, the pervasive adult understanding of death. Thus, when a loved one dies, as the Bering’s research suggests, we do not think that they have ceased to exist. Instead, we think about them and react to their absence as if they have changed location. This is why the afterlife is imagined as a place (Bering, 2006) and the first indication that we continue to envision the decedent as embodied – even though their physical body is dead, 7 In addition to physical causes of social death, there can be social causes as well such as ostracism. 374 K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 they live on in our minds in an imagined body. They are imagined to have, and can change, locations in physical – albeit imagined – space (Kim, 2001). Alief and Afterlife Beliefs If this thesis is correct, and the offline social reasoning processes in the brain are activated, then this goes a long way in explaining why humans intuitively and metaphorically speak of and treat decedents as absent. This default can be overcome, but only with cognitive effort and not always successfully as found in Bering’s (2002) experiment. Extinctivists who explicitly believed that all processes ceased at death nevertheless asserted that the decedent was still capable of some states such as the epistemic state of knowing that he is dead. This is interesting in that it shows that a process more primitive than belief is influencing the answers of participants. I suggest that when the offline social reasoning processes are activated in the case of reasoning about dead agents, that these processes activate an alief in the respondents which may or may not coincide with their explicit beliefs. An alief (Gendler, 2008b, p. 555) “provides an alternative that falls somewhere in between a classic reason-based explanation (of the sort offered by belief/desire accounts) and a simple physical-cause explanation (of the sort offered by accounts that appeal to physical or chemical descriptions.)” Alief as further defined by Gendler (2008a, p. 634) is: . . . [C]haracterized as a mental state with associatively-linked content that is representational, affective and behavioral, and that is activated – consciously or unconsciously – by features of the subject’s internal or ambient environment. Alief is a more primitive state than either belief or imagination: it directly activates behavioral response patterns (as opposed to motivating in conjunction with desire or pretended desire.) An example provided by Gendler (2008a) of an alief is when people approach the glass-bottomed Skywalk which spans out over the Grand Canyon. Even though the individuals can see others walking out on the span, and even though they explicitly believe that the span will support them, they nonetheless experience the affective (i.e., fear) and behavioral (i.e., hesitation, tensing of muscles) responses that one would normally experience when approaching the edge of the canyon.8 It is not that they believe that they will fall, but they alieve that they will.9 This alief, with cognitive effort, can be overridden or 8 Gendler (2008b) indicates that the affective and behavioral components of alief are typically present, but not necessary. 9 Gendler (2008b) discusses cases similar to this one at some length. K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 375 suppressed but doing so is taxing (Gendler, 2008b). Moreover, beliefs are subject to change based on evidence; aliefs are recalcitrant in the face of evidence. It is my contention that our offline social reasoning processes provide our reasoning processes with an underlying alief which “infects” all subsequent reasoning – that is, the absent third party is somewhere doing something. This is the activated alief. This alief is a necessary condition for offline social reasoning. In order for us to reason about an absent third party, we must alieve that the party is at least somewhere doing something. This need not be visually imagined about the third party, but it must be “assumed” in order for us to reason about their whereabouts and activities – this is, after all, the proper function of offline social reasoning; it is well-suited (and its function is) to reasoning about living, absent third parties, particularly those in our social network. Because, however, of the recalcitrant nature of the alief that the absent party is somewhere doing something – even faced with the evidence that the party is deceased – the phenomenon of afterlife beliefs begin to take shape.10 In Gendler’s discussion (2008b, p. 566) concerning how beliefs are evidence-sensitive whereas aliefs are not, she quotes Hume’s curiosity (from A Treatise on Human Nature, 1739) at the behavior of family members following a death: “After the death of any one, ‘tis a common remark of the whole family . . .that they can scarce believe him to be dead, but still imagine him to be in his chamber or in any other place, where they are were accustomed to find him.” Here, the evidence-sensitive belief is that the individual is dead, but the belief-discordant alief is that the individual is still somewhere, doing something. This brings to the fore that it is not necessary for an individual to have an explicit belief in one or another afterlife doctrine. Because of the alief activated by the offline social reasoning mechanisms, we alieve that others – even after death – are somewhere, doing something. This is why even extinctivists get “caught” claiming, thinking and imagining that a deceased person is still capable of engaging in activities. The extinctivists’ responses can be, I propose, based on the alief (activated by offline social reasoning processes) that the individual they were invited to imagine (albeit dead) was still capable of activity and states just as anyone who was merely absent but still very much alive. 10 In Bering’s (2002) study, each question to the participant was primed with the clause “Now that X is dead. . . .” If death was neither understood as an absence, or if the alief was easily overridden by evidence, then the offline social reasoning processes should not have been activated. The finding of how easy it was for the participants – even the extinctivists – to reason and respond about the continued activities of the deceased should not be overlooked nor underestimated. 376 K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 Thus far, I have argued why the deceased is imagined as still existing, embodied and active. I have argued that this phenomenon begins because the offline social reasoning processes in the human mind activate the absence metaphor of existence and the (evidence recalcitrant) alief that the deceased individual is still somewhere doing something. Now I wish to turn attention to constraints on these imaginative processes which give rise to an eternal social realm inhabited by the deceased, the afterlife. Social Embodiment Barsalou et al. (2003, p. 43) use the term “social embodiment” to describe “states of the body, such as postures, arm movements, and facial expressions [that] arise during social interaction and play central roles in social information processing.” Their emphasis and research focuses on how both online and offline social reasoning and interaction affect the individual. For my purposes, however, I am interested in how an individual represents another when engaged in offline social reasoning. In order for offline social reasoning to be effective an individual must simulate the other social agent acting in some way with his social environment (whether this interaction is with the individual doing the simulating or not). These simulations – it seems obvious – require that the simulated agent is embodied in such a way that the imagined states of his body which arise during imagined social interaction play a central role in the social information processing of the simulator. Underlying this processing is perceptual symbol systems theory (Prinz and Barsalou, 2000; Niedenthal et al., 2005). “A perceptual symbol is characterized as a facsimile of a perceptual state that can stand in for external entities in offline simulations (Prinz and Barsalou, 2000, p. 73).” Moreover, these perceptual symbols, in offline processing, produce the same embodied states in the simulator as if the object being simulated is actually present (Niedenthal et al., 2005). While these effects are subtle in adults (Chartrand and Bargh, 1999; Bargh, 2006; Gendler, 2006, 2008a), nonetheless just imagining an interaction with an object or other individuals can cause embodied manifestations in the simulator. In other words, the simulator acts as if he is interacting with a real physical entity. These effects are even more prominent in children in acts of imaginary play (Scheffler, 1992, 1997; Taylor, 1999; Gendler, 2006, 2008a). Children interact with imaginary objects and individuals as if they are actually there. Furthermore, when asked to describe or draw with what or whom they are interacting with, they describe or draw physical beings that might be invisible to some, but nevertheless physically present and agentive K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 377 (Taylor, 1999). They are affected by those objects and individuals in many ways as if they are real (e.g., if children are told to imagine that there is a monster in a box that has been demonstrated to be empty, they react with real fear when asked to open the box (Taylor, 1999)). Our imagination of persons or scenarios affects us in embodied ways. Adults express genuine embodied reactions when reading about fictional characters (Currie, 1997; Walton, 1997). The point is that these perceptual symbols cause us to (re)act in an embodied way because what they represent (i.e., symbolize in social interactions) is embodied. How would a deceased loved one be imaged as embodied? What cognitive constraints would be present in imagining them? Most important for the simulator is that the imagined person is recognized to be the same as the actual person (at some point in time) being imagined. In other words, the personal identity of the individual needs to be maintained. Interesting research performed by White (2009) on reincarnation beliefs suggested that two indicators are deemed most important in determining the continuity of an individual; congenital traits and autobiographical (episodic) memory. In other words, in establishing the identity of an individual it is not only important that they display psychological continuity, but also that they display physical continuity as well.11 Another constraint which is present when imagining an individual in the afterlife based on offline social reasoning is that the social relationship between the simulator and the deceased should be maintained; fathers are still fathers and grandmothers are still grandmothers.12 Since social relationships rarely, if ever, occur in isolation, it seems reasonable to suggest that other social relationships – even social roles (see Palgi and Abramovitch, 1984 for the importance of social roles in perception of the deceased) should be carried over into the imagination of the simulator. This suggests that two deceased individuals who were married to each other should be imagined as still married White’s research was concerned with how one would recognize an individual who had been physically reincarnated. What is important for my purpose, however, is that her research gives great insight into the folk concept(s) of identity and re-identifying an individual as the same. Behavioral and personality traits were also important, but not as significantly important as autobiographical memory and congenital traits. It should be pointed out, however, that White does take liberties with the phrase “congenital traits” as she is not meaning them in the sense that they are inherited – since the reincarnated person might be born to a different family – but rather they are physical traits that we normally think of as inherited which reappear in the reincarnated person. 12 Osis and Haraldsson (1997) found in a cross-cultural analysis of near-death experiences that apparitions of deceased relatives (and visually recognized as such) were one of the most common greeters to the afterlife for the person having the near-death experience. 11 378 K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 in the afterlife.13 It would be difficult to disentangle for the imaginer, for instance, the relationship that she held with her deceased grandfather and grandmother and the relationship which the deceased parties had between themselves. Likewise, two deceased friends still would be imagined to be friends in the afterlife. Why the Afterlife is Believed to be Real Since my argument has placed so much emphasis on the role of the imagination concerning the continued existence of deceased individuals, an obvious question to be asked is why in this case would the distinction between reality and fantasy breakdown with such frequency and regularity? After all, humans, even at an early age (Taylor, 1999; Friedman and Leslie, 2007), are quite adept at distinguishing reality from fantasy. There are, I believe, six reasons for this phenomenon. First, humans cross-culturally from an early age do understand death as an absence rather than an annihilation of the individual (Irish et al., 1993; Barrett and Behne, 2005; Cox et al., 2005). The importance of metaphors and analogies for human understanding and knowledge cannot be overstated. As Butchvarov (1974, p. 33) concluded, “All understanding, including analytical understanding, is analogical.” This claim has been supported in much subsequent research (Gentner and Stevens, 1983; Johnson-Laird, 1983; Indurkhya, 1992; Gentner et al., 2001), and it has also been argued that metaphor is the most basic type of analogical reasoning which supports our (folk) understanding of the world (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, 1999; Johnson, 1987). Since underlying human’s folk understanding of death is the metaphor of death as an absence, then it follows intuitively that the decedent still exists somewhere. Thus, one imagines the deceased in the same manner as one would imagine an absent third party. Second, humans do not update their social registry quickly. Relatives, friends and even acquaintances with whom we have had no contact for years can still enter our thoughts. We can easily wonder and imagine where they might be or what they might be doing. Out-of-sight, out-of-mind is not the not the usual behavior of humans. As Bering noted above, even death does not 13 This constraint likely works on a continuum in that the more tangential the social relationship and social role of the deceased was to the simulator, the less likely the social relationship will be maintained. For instance, if one were to learn of the death of her dry cleaner, then it would seem unlikely that the deceased would be imagined to still be her dry cleaner in the afterlife even though that description might still used for the deceased. In such a case, the social role might be carried over as a friend or acquaintance. K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 379 cause us to delete an entry in this registry. We may still remain ready to interact with this individual, and may even attempt to interact with him.14 Third, offline social reasoning developed to predict and track actual behaviors of individuals. Here again, allow me to defer to Bering’s (2006, pp. 3–4, emphasis original) artful description of this process: When investigating peoples’ intuitive conceptions of dead agents’ minds, we are wise to remember, for instance, that human relationships are largely characterized by offline social events; those with whom we have relationships are only periodically directly observable. . . . An offline social system leads us to tacitly assume that individuals with whom we have relationships are engaged in actions even when we cannot observe them doing so. The fact that your mother is not in the room at the moment does not compromise your capacity to reason about her mind, though obviously the accuracy of your social judgments will be limited. When conjuring up her offline image you are likely to imagine her as somewhere and as doing something – in the kitchen washing dishes, in bed sleeping, playing squash with the neighbor, and so on. Similarly, the dead are envisaged not as inanimate objects slowly decomposing in situ under the earth, but instead as having relocated to some unobservable locale where they are very much “living” their dead lives.15 Bering’s analysis here provides the support for humans assuming that those about whom they think continue to exist even when they are not immediately present. Given that the folk understand death as an absence and they fail to update immediately their social registry for potential interaction, the offline social reasoning process includes the alief that those individuals about whom we are thinking continue to exist physically, doing something, somewhere.16 Fourth, states of emotional arousal can create a conflation between fantasy and reality. Our embodied responses to imaginative endeavors, including 14 As personal anecdotal evidence of this effect, shortly after the death of my father, I felt an overwhelming compulsion to call him because I had significant news. It was part of our normal interaction to call one another when there was significant news to report. This time, however, the news that I wished to relay to my father was that he was dead and that I would be flying home to attend his funeral! 15 The imaginative endeavor in this case would allow that the decedent might not be doing the activity which we are imagining her doing or not even be where we imagine her, but the tacit assumption is still that she is somewhere doing something. 16 Offline social reasoning concerning fictional characters might be used to object that humans are capable to maintaining the fantasy/reality distinction during such processing, and thus the process itself cannot be responsible for the failure to distinguish between what is imagined and the deceased individual’s actual (or lack of actual) activities. The difference here can be attributed to the fact that fictional characters, as such, are never entered into our social registry in the way that our real conspecifics are, and because of this negate the initial assumption used in offline social reasoning that we are thinking about an actual person. 380 K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 works of fiction, affect us in a physical manner. They cause thoughts, feelings and behaviors just as if they are real. The stronger the responses, the longer it takes us to realize – in many cases – that the cause of those responses was only imaginary. The feelings caused by the death of a loved one is one of the highest states of emotional arousal that a human can feel. The deceased person is still affecting our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. As we imagine her somewhere, doing something, our emotional arousal is a physical reaction as visceral as if she was affecting us. Fantasy bleeds into reality more often than we realize, and our body (including our brain) responds as if the emotions created by these imaginative circumstances are real (Damasio, 1994, 1999; Gendler, 2006). Fifth, cultural inputs reinforce the idea that the afterlife is real. Religious traditions the world over instruct that the afterlife is not merely a product of the imagination, but a real place inhabited by the deceased and other supernatural agents. Moreover, this religious instruction is offered to most at an early age and this testimony is reinforced throughout our lifetime. Since we are predisposed to accept the testimony of others (particularly the testimony of those we trust or who are in positions of authority), we easily incorporate such religious instruction into our belief structures (Harris and Koenig, 2006). In the case of the afterlife, our imaginative endeavor – that the deceased still exist and that they are someplace doing something – is reinforced by the religious instruction offered in our culture. Moreover, Schjødt (2007) has argued that, during states of high emotional arousal, specifically high stress (such the death of a loved one), coping by means of religious thoughts and behavior is a highly competitive strategy – often defeating secular thoughts and behavior – for helping the human organism to achieve (desired) homeostasis. Therefore, there is a biological incentive for humans adopting religious instruction concerning the afterlife. The fact that this instruction, cross-culturally, is in line with our natural intuitions and imaginative endeavors concerning life after death only serves to reinforce that our imagined scenario concerning the deceased is – at least in important measure – factual. Sixth, there can be a conflation between the mention-selection of a representation and the referent of that representation which can “trick” the brain into thinking that a representation of a thing is the thing itself. Scheffler (1997, p. 11) explicates his theory of mention-selection which attempts to resolve numerous Goodman-esque problems with reference and similarity:17 17 For Goodman’s objections to conventional philosophical and scientific treatments of reference and similarity, see Goodman (1968, 1988, 1992a,b; Goodman and Elgin, 1988). K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 [T]he semantic notion of mention-selection . . .relates a term not to what it denotes, but rather to parallel representations of a suitable kind. That is, it relates a term not to what it denotes but rather to those representations it appropriately captions. Thus, the word ‘tree’ denotes trees; but it mention-selects, that is serves as a caption for, tree-pictures, tree-depictions, and tree-descriptions; and the word “unicorn” denotes nothing, but it mention-selects, that is captions, unicornpictures, unicorn-descriptions, and unicorn-representations. 381 For example, consider two paintings; one of Abraham Lincoln and another of Pegasus. It would be natural for us to point to each painting in turn and say, “This is Abraham Lincoln,” and “This is Pegasus” all the while knowing that the painting of Abraham Lincoln is not itself Abraham Lincoln although the painting as a representation refers to Abraham Lincoln, as well as the painting of Pegasus is not really Pegasus and that both the term “Pegasus” and the representation of Pegasus refers to nothing in the world. In both of these cases our declarations have mention-selected the paintings as representations of a suitable kind. Likewise, we may mention-select each painting in turn with the statements, “This is a man,” and “This is a winged-horse.” In most circumstances, we are perfectly capable of understanding that the representation of a thing is not the thing itself, and thus confusion does not arise for us or for those to whom we are speaking when we point to those paintings and state, “This is Abraham Lincoln,” and “This is Pegasus” respectively. We cannot suppose, however, as Scheffler (1997) points out, that the distinction between reference and mention-selection was available to awareness in earlier times, or even now. To reinforce this point, Scheffler points to considerable historical and anthropological evidence concerning word-magic such as incantations and curses as well as ritual activities and idolatry. Scheffler (1997, p. 15) assumes, contrary to other theorists, that “a gross confusion of symbol with a thing . . . [is a tendency to error] that besets everyone, but that it is, nevertheless, easy to overcome with a certain degree of care.”18 Consider as an example of how the confusion between the symbol and that which it represents would work in the ritual of the Sacrament.19 Here, bread and wine 18 Scheffler (1997, p. 11) also cautions: We live in a world of symbols as well as other things, and our commerce with them is itself continually mediated by symbols. As it matures, our thought increasingly grows in its capacity to wield appropriate symbols in reflecting, acting, reasoning and making. It is not surprising that it takes special effort to disentangle our references to things from our references to symbols denoting them. 19 The Sacrament is used here only to explicate how a confusion between denotation and mention-selection can occur. I am not attempting to explain the genesis of either the belief or the ritual. 382 K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 are taken not merely as a representation for the body and blood respectively of Jesus, but are believed to be the body and blood of Jesus through the doctrine of Transubstantiation. Rather than understanding that the body and the blood of Jesus are mention-selected by the bread and the wine respectively, the bread and the wine are understood to be the body and blood of Jesus. Moreover, the ritual of the Sacrament is performed in order to reenact the Last Supper, which itself was an act. Thus, according to the technicality of Scheffler’s distinction, the ritual of the Sacrament mention-selects the ritualistic behavior of the Last Supper as a representation which as an act itself was a mention-selection of the body and blood of Jesus. By a confusion of the symbol as that which it is to represent, the ritual of the Sacrament is not only considered to be a reenactment of the Last Supper, it is also taken to have all the efficacy of the Last Supper itself.20 The implications of Scheffler’s theory for imaginative representations of the afterlife are becoming clear. By taking imaginative representations of an individual in the afterlife as referring to the individual in the afterlife in reality (rather than mention-selections of that-individual-in-the-afterlife descriptions) we come to understand how we can easily believe that deceased individuals survive death. This becomes even more apparent when one hears others speaking of “signs” that their deceased loved ones are purportedly using to communicate with them. They may recall their words (perhaps even in their deceased loved one’s voice) and take that representation as the actual act of their loved one. Or, perhaps they will see something specific in their environment which causes them to recall a memory of their loved one at a moment of personal indecision (i.e., cognitive stress) and take that memory as demonstration of their loved one’s approval or disapproval. In either case, a confusion between a symbol and what that symbol represents has occurred. In addition, any of previous reasons discussed above for confusing fantasy and reality can encourage this phenomena of imaginative representations of the deceased in the afterlife to be taken as referring to a real individual in a real afterlife. These six reasons detailed here should not be taken to be exhaustive for why imaginative representations of the afterlife are conflated with the reality concerning the deceased. There may be other reasons not considered here. Nevertheless, these reasons are sufficient for beginning to understand how it is that the belief that our loved ones survive death is supplied and sustained 20 Likewise, at the beginning of the new year in ancient Mesopotamia the priests would retell the story of creation, and by doing so they were believed to be recreating the cosmos for the new year (Dalley, 2000). In addition, it has been argued that the Greeks frequently mistook their own thoughts and emotions to be thoughts and emotions of the gods (Dodds, 1951; Snell, 1953). K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 383 by our imagination – particularly the cognitive processes involved in offline social reasoning. Suggestions for Further Research I have previously argued (Hodge, 2008) that the assumption by many scholars that humans are intuitive Cartesian substance dualists with respect to how we survive death (i.e., as a disembodied mind) does not conform well with afterlife beliefs themselves. I suggested then that it was more likely that the bereaved represented their deceased loved ones as surviving death embodied – specifically socially embodied. I have, in this article, fully explicated how this should be understood. I have also previously argued (Hodge, 2011) that current psychological theories (the simulation constraint theory, the imaginative obstacle theory, and terror management theory) which place the impetus for belief in the afterlife on personal immortality fail to explain why we intuitively believe that others survive death. In this article, I have proposed that this intuitive belief is the result of a process we use in everyday social interaction, namely the offline social process by which we reason about the whereabouts and activities of absent third parties. I have argued that this is because at the most basic level of understanding death is an absence of the individual, not an annihilation of the individual, and that this understanding is supported by the alief that the absent party is somewhere doing something. What I will do now is propose some ways by which these hypotheses concerning why humans intuitively believe that others survive death can be further explored. While I will not supply detailed methodologies, I hope to provide an outline of what future research might look like. I suggested (Hodge, 2008) that one of the weaknesses in previous studies (Bering, 2002, 2006; Bering and Bjorklund, 2004; Bering et al., 2005; Astuti, 2007a,b; Astuti and Harris, 2008) showing that children and adults intuitively believe in the afterlife was an asymmetry in the questions asked between the biological and psychobiological states versus those asked for the psychological states. For instance, in a series of experiments Bering and colleagues (2005) showed participants a puppet show about a mouse who was living an active social life who was subsequently eaten by an alligator. After the demonstration, the participants were asked a series of questions about the dead mouse’s current abilities such as now that the mouse is dead can he still see, or does he still love his mother. The asymmetry occurred in that whereas the questions concerning psychological states were asked in the context of social interaction (e.g., does the [dead] mouse still love his mother?) versus the biological, psychobiological, and perceptual states, asking about a non-social 384 K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 activity (e.g., does the [dead] mouse still see, and is the [dead] mouse still hungry?). Given the social nature of afterlife beliefs, and how they serve to maintain the social relationships with the decedent, I suggested that questions for the biological, psychobiological, and perceptual questions should include such relationships in their asking (e.g., does the mouse still see his mother?). The current support for the hypothesis that adding social relationships to such questions will make a substantial difference comes from an unrelated study conducted by Systma and Machery (2009) concerning attributions of behavior and functional states which require attributing phenomenal consciousness to group agents. This study was intended to stand in contrast to a study conducted by Knobe and Prinz (2008) which suggested that the states which could be attributed to groups were much more limited than those that could be attributed to individuals. Systma and Machery, however, countered that one of the liabilities of the Knobe and Prinz’s studies was an asymmetry between the questions asked of participants concerning attributions of feelings to group agents. For instance Knobe and Prinz’s studies asked participants to evaluate which sentences sounded natural to them; (the “feeling condition”) “Acme Corp. is feeling upset,” versus (the “the non-feeling condition”) “Acme Corp is upset about the court’s ruling.” Knobe and Prinz’s study revealed that participants found the former to sound “weird” whereas the latter was acceptable. From this, Knobe and Prinz concluded that participants were not willing to attribute feeling to a group agent because that would require phenomenal consciousness. In contrast, however, Systma and Machery demonstrated that if they moved the prepositional phrase “about the court’s ruling” to the feeling condition, participants claimed that the sentence seemed natural (i.e., not weird). Systma and Machery suggest that the difference between the comfort levels of the two sentences was due to the addition of the prepositional phrase. I would suggest, however, that it is more than simply the addition of a prepositional phrase. The state in question must have the appropriate social connection between the agent and the intentional object of that state. For instance, while it seems natural to say “Acme Corp. is feeling upset about the court’s ruling,” it seems unnatural to say “Acme Corp. is feeling upset about little Tommy spilling his coke on his mother.” The difference here is the appropriate social connection between the agent and the intentional object of its state. The implications of Knobe and Prinz’s original concern carry over into how we should investigate the kinds of social relationships that the dead are imagined to maintain and how they maintain them. There are two considerations here; the kind of the relationship and location. I suggest that there will be a continuum of relationships that the deceased will be imagined to maintain. The strongest relationship that would be K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 385 imagined to be maintained would be kinship with both the living and the dead. This too, however would be on a continuum from the immediate family to more distant relatives. For instance, the relationship that a spouse would imagine to continue between himself and his wife would be more easily envisioned than he himself and his great-great-great grandfather or his third or fourth cousins whom he barely knew. The second strongest relationship that would be imagined to hold would be friendship. Again, a continuum is likely: the deceased would be more likely to be imagined continuing a relationship with his best friend than with a mere acquaintance. Third would be professional relationships. A teacher, for instance, might still be imagined as a teacher in the afterlife, and this effect would likely be stronger with his colleagues and his students than with his spouse. Moreover, inasmuch as the deceased’s profession was an essential part of how he was perceived by others, this too would affect the intensity of the finding (i.e., whether the deceased was a police officer or a part-time employee in a shopping mall). How the social relationship is imagined to be maintained also depends on the (imagined) present whereabouts of the deceased and those with whom he is to be interacting. Since death is understood as an absence, and the afterlife is imagined as a place, this imagined spatial difference in location would affect how the deceased agent would be imagined to maintain his social connections. For instance, the deceased may not be imagined to be attending and eating a meal held in his honor by his living friends since he is away in the afterlife, but he may be easily imagined as holding hands with his deceased spouse in the afterlife. He might, however, be imagined by some superhuman perception to be watching over his family and friends and hearing their invocations of him across the imagined spatial expanse between our world and the afterlife. He might even be imagined, through some human-formed apparition to visit them from time to time, or physically interact with them through some form of invisible presence. These phenomena too, however, would fall along a continuum. While the deceased might be imagined to be watching a family member during a crisis, he would not be imagined to be watching them while they shower. The interaction between the deceased and other deceased as well as with the living should be imagined to be both socially relevant and appropriate. Another phenomenon that should be investigated in the context of how the afterlife is imagined should be the placement of grave goods with the deceased.21 Since ancient times, all kinds of socially and personally relevant items have been buried with the deceased. This have included food, jewelry, 21 I would like to thank my colleagues Natalie Emmons and Karen Johnson for help in developing this idea. 386 K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 money, weapons, domesticated animals, slaves and family members (Burkert, 1983; Pearson, 1999; Rose, 1995). A study of grave goods could further demonstrate that the deceased are not imagined as disembodied, but rather as embodied. Not only could such research be carried out through relevant religious literature and writings, but it could also be empirically tested by asking participants – having read a vignette about the life of a now deceased individuals – what goods (if any) would they bury with the decedent and why. The questions would be whether they would choose goods at all and are items chosen that are socially and personally relevant to the deceased (no matter their value). The second question to be answered is why those objects were chosen. Were they chosen merely to honor the dead, or were they chosen for some future use? If they were chosen for some future use, then this would suggest that the deceased must maintain some physical presence in order to interact with those objects (while arguably a disembodied mind might make sense, a disembodied mind wearing jewelry or riding a disembodied horse do not). Such research could be very suggestive in the disembodied/embodied debate over how the deceased are imagined. Conclusion I have argued that folk beliefs that our deceased loved ones survive death are supported by our evolved cognitive architecture, specifically the architecture that supports offline social reasoning about absent third parties. I argued that this process supports both the metaphors used concerning death and the alief that the decedent is somewhere doing something. I have also argued that this imaginative process requires social embodiment of the deceased – we imagine the deceased in such a way so that we can socially interact with them. I have also suggested six ways by which our imaginative representations of the deceased in the afterlife are taken to be real. These have included both cognitive and cultural explanations, working in tandem, as to why we take these imaginings as representative of reality. In fact, I have argued, that this is both the default and the intuitive way for humans to represent deceased individuals. Finally, I have offered several directions for future research into humans’ belief in survival after death. There is still much work to be done to disentangle just exactly how the living are able to reconcile the fact that their loved one is dead while at the same time believing that they are still “after-living” in the afterlife. In addition, many of these proposed avenues can provide answers to whether the deceased are imagined to remain embodied and to what extent K. M. Hodge / Journal of Cognition and Culture 11 (2011) 367–389 387 they are imagined to maintain social relationships and interactions with both the living and other deceased. The theory I have presented here provides a cognitive explanation as to why it is intuitive for the folk to believe that others survive death. References Astuti, R. (2007a). Acestors and the Afterlife. In H. Whitehouse and J. Laidlaw (Eds.), Religion, Anthropology, and Cognitive Science (pp. 161-178). Carolina Academic Press, Chapell Hill, NC. Astuti, R. (2007b). What Happens After Death? In Astuti, R., Parry, J. P. and Stafford, C. 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