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What I Saw When I Was Dead
MY FIRST ATTACK of pneumonia occurred in the United
States. I was in hospital for ten days in New York, after which
the doctors said that I was well enough to leave. A final X-ray,
however, which I underwent on the last morning, revealed that
one of my lungs was not yet free from infection. This caused the
most sympathetic of my doctors to suggest that it would be good
for me to spend a few more days in hospital. I respected his
opinion but since I was already dressed and psychologically
disposed to put my illness behind me, I decided to take the risk. I
spent the next few days in my stepdaughter's apartment, and then
made arrangements to fly back to England.
When I arrived 'I believed myself to be cured and incontinently
plunged into an even more hectic social round than that to which
I had become habituated before I went to America. Retribution
struck me on Sunday, May 30. I had gone out to lunch, had a
great deal to eat and drink and chattered incessantly. That
evening I had a relapse. I could eat almost none of the food
which a friend had brought to cook in my house.
On the next day, which was a bank holiday, I had a longstanding
engagement to lunch at the Savoy with a friend who was very
anxious for me to meet her son. I would have put them off if I
could, but my friend lives in Exeter and I had no idea how to
reach her in London. So I took a taxi to the Savoy and just
managed to stagger into the lobby. I could eat hardly any of the
delicious grilled sole that I ordered, but forced myself to keep up
my end of the conversation. I left early and took a taxi home.
That evening I felt still worse. Once more I could eat almost
none of the dinner another friend had brought me. Indeed she
was so alarmed by my weakness that she stayed overnight. When
I was no better the next morning, she telephoned to my general
practitioner and to my elder son Julian. The doctor did little more
than promise to try to get in touch with the specialist, but Julian,
who is unobtrusively very efficient, immediately rang for an
ambulance. The ambulance came quickly with two strong
attendants, and yet another friend, who had called opportunely to
pick up a key, accompanied it and me to University College
Hospital.
I remember very little of what happened from then on. I was
taken to a room in the private wing, which had been reserved for
me by a specialist, who had a consulting room on the same floor.
After being X-rayed and subjected to a number of tests which
proved beyond question that I was suffering from pneumonia, I
was moved into intensive care in the main wing of the hospital.
Fortunately for me, the young doctor who was primarily
responsible for me had been an undergraduate at New College,
Oxford, while I was a Fellow. This made him extremely anxious
to see that I recovered; almost too much so, in fact he was so
much in awe of me that he forbade me to be disturbed at night,
even when the experienced sister and nurse believed it to be
necessary.
Under his care and theirs I made such good progress that I
expected to be moved out of intensive care and back into the
private wing within a week. My disappointment was my own
fault. I did not attempt to eat the hospital food. My family and
friends supplied all the food I needed. I am particularly fond of
smoked salmon, and one evening I carelessly tossed a slice of it
into my throat. It went down the wrong way and almost
immediately the graph recording my heart beats plummeted. The
ward sister rushed to the rescue, but she was unable to prevent
my heart from stopping. She and the doctor subsequently told me
A.J. Ayer: “What I Saw When I Was Dead” – page 1 of 5
that I died in this sense for four minutes, and I have no reason to
disbelieve them.
The doctor alarmed my son Nicholas, who had flown from New
York to be at my bedside, by saying it was not probable that I
should recover and, moreover, that if I did recover physically it
was not probable that my mental powers would be restored. The
nurses were more optimistic and Nicholas sensibly chose to
believe them.
I have no recollection of anything that was done to me at that
time. Friends have told me that I was festooned with tubes but I
have never learned how many of them there were or, with one
exception, what purpose they served. I do not remember having a
tube inserted in my throat to bring up the quantity of phlegm
which had lodged in my lungs. I was not even aware of my
numerous visitors, so many of them, in fact, that the sister had to
set a quota. I know that the doctors and nurses were surprised by
the speed of my recovery and that when I started speaking, the
specialist expressed astonishment that anyone with so little
oxygen in his lungs should be so lucid.
My first recorded utterance, which convinced those who heard it
that I had not lost my wits, was the exclamation: "You are all
mad." I am not sure how this should be interpreted. It is possible
that I took my audience to be Christians and was telling them
that I had not discovered anything "on the other side." It is also
possible that I took them to be sceptics and was implying that I
had discovered something. I think the former is more probable as
in the latter case I should properly have exclaimed "We are all
mad." All the same, I cannot be sure.
The earliest remarks of which I have any cognisance, apart from
my first exclamation, were made several hours after my return to
life. They were addressed to a French woman with whom I had
been friends for over fifteen years. I woke to find her seated by
my bedside and starting talking to her in French as soon as I
recognised her. My French is fluent and I spoke rapidly,
approximately as follows: "Did you know that I was dead? The
first time that I tried to cross the river I was frustrated, but my
second attempt succeeded. It was most extraordinary, my
thoughts became persons."
The content of those remarks suggests that I have not wholly put
my classical education behind me. In Greek mythology the souls
of the dead, now only shadowly embodied, were obliged to cross
the river Styx in order to reach Hades, after paying an obol to the
ferryman, Charon. I may also have been reminded of my
favourite philosopher, David Hume, who during his last illness, a
"disorder of the bowels," imagined that Charon, growing
impatient, was calling him "a lazy loitering rogue." With his
usual politeness, Hume replied that he saw without regret his
death approaching and that he was making no effort to postpone
it. This is one of the rare occasions on which I have failed to
follow Hume. Clearly I had made an effort to prolong my life.
The only memory that I have of an experience closely
encompassing my death, is very vivid. I was confronted by a red
light, exceedingly bright, and also very painful even when I
turned away from it. I was aware that this light was responsible
for the government of the universe. Among its ministers were
two creatures who had been put in charge of space. These
ministers periodically inspected space and had recently carried
out such an inspection. They had, however, failed to do their
work properly, with the result that space, like a badly fitted
jigsaw puzzle, was slightly out of joint.
A further consequence was that the laws of nature had ceased to
function as they should. I felt that it was up to me to put things
right. I also had the motive of finding a way to extinguish the
painful light. I assumed that it was signalling that space was
A.J. Ayer: “What I Saw When I Was Dead” – page 2 of 5
awry and that it would switch itself off when order was restored.
Unfortunately, I had no idea where the guardians of space had
gone and feared that even if I found them I should not be allowed
to communicate with them. It then occurred to me that whereas,
until the present century, physicists accepted the Newtonian
severance of space and time, it had become customary, since the
vindication of Einstein's general theory of relativity, to treat
space-time as a single whole. Accordingly I thought that I could
cure space by operating upon time.
I was vaguely aware that the ministers who had been given
charge of time were in my neighbourbood and I proceeded to hail
them. I was again frustrated. Either they did not hear me, or they
chose to ignore me, or they did not understand me. I then hit
upon the expedient of walking up and down, waving my watch,
in the hope of drawing their attention not to my watch itself but
to the time which it measured. This elicited no response. I
became more and more desperate, until the experience suddenly
came to an end.
This experience could well have been delusive. A slight
indication that it might have been veridical has been supplied by
my French friend, or rather by her mother, who also underwent a
heart arrest many years ago. When her daughter asked her what it
had been like, she replied that all that she remembered was that
she must stay close to the red light.
On the face of it, these experiences, on the assumption that the
last one was veridical, are rather strong evidence that death does
not put an end to consciousness. Does it follow that there is a
future life? Not necessarily. The trouble is that there are different
criteria for being dead, which are indeed logically compatible,
but may not always be satisfied together.
In this instance, I am given to understand that the arrest of the
heart does not entail, either logically or causally, the arrest of the
brain. In view of the very strong evidence in favour of the
dependence of thoughts upon the brain, the most probable
hypothesis is that my brain continued to function although my
heart had stopped.
If I had acquired good reason to believe in a future life, it would
have applied not only to myself. Admittedly, the philosophical
problems of justifying one's confident belief in the existence and
contents of other minds has not yet been satisfactorily solved.
Even so, with the possible exception of Fichte-who complained
that the world was his idea but may not have meant it literally-no
philosopher has acquiesced in solipsism, no philosopher has
seriously asserted that of all the objects in the universe, he alone
was conscious. Moreover it is commonly taken for granted, not
only by philosophers, that the minds of others bear a sufficiently
close analogy to one's own. Consequently, if I had been
vouchsafed a reasonable expectation of a future life, other human
beings could expect one too.
Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that we could have future
lives. What form could they take? The easiest answer would
consist in the prolongation of our experiences, without any
physical attachment. This is the theory that should appeal to
radical empiricists. It is, indeed, consistent with the concept of
personal identity which was adopted both by Hume and by
William James, according to which one's identity consists, not in
the possession of an enduring soul but in the sequence of one's
experiences, guaranteed by memory. They did not apply their
theory to a future life, in which Hume at any rate disbelieved.
For those who are attracted by this theory, as I am, the main
problem, which Hume admitted that he was unable to solve, is to
discover the relation, or relations, which have to be held between
experiences for them to belong to one and the same self. William
James thought that he had found the answers with his relations of
A.J. Ayer: “What I Saw When I Was Dead” – page 3 of 5
the felt togetherness and continuity of our thoughts and
sensations, coupled with memory, in order to unite experiences
that are separated in time. But while memory is undoubtedly
necessary, it can be shown that it is not wholly sufficient.
I myself carried out a thorough examination and development of
the theory in my book The Origins of Pragmatism. I was
reluctantly forced to conclude that I could not account for
personal identity without falling back on the identity, through
time, of one or more bodies that the person might successively
occupy. Even then, I was unable to give a satisfactory account of
the way in which a series of experiences is tied to a particular
body at any given time.
The admission that personal identity through time requires the
identity of a body is a surprising feature of Christianity. I call it
surprising because it seems to me that Christians are apt to forget
that the resurrection of the body is an element in their creed. The
question of how bodily identity is sustained over intervals of
time is not so difficult. The answer might consist in postulating a
reunion of the same atoms, perhaps in there being no more than a
strong physical resemblance, possibly fortified by a similarity of
behaviour.
A prevalent fallacy is the assumption that a proof of an afterlife
would also be a proof of the existence of a deity. This is far from
being the case. If, as I hold, there is no good reason to believe
that a god either created or presides over this world, there is
equally no good reason to believe that a god created or presides
over the next world, on the unlikely supposition that such a thing
exists. It is conceivable that one's experiences in the next world,
if there are any, will supply evidence of god's existence, but we
have no right to presume on such evidence, when we have not
had the relevant experiences.
It is worth remarking, in this connection, that the two most
important Cambridge philosophers in this century, J. E.
McTaggart and C. D. Broad, who have believed, in McTaggart's
case that he would certainly survive his death, in Broad's that
there was about a fifty-per-cent probability that he would, were
both of them atheists. McTaggart derived his certainty from his
metaphysics, which implied that what we confusedly perceive as
material objects, in some case housing minds, are really souls,
eternally viewing one another with something of the order of
love.
The less fanciful Broad was impressed by the findings of
psychical research. He was certainly too intelligent to think that
the superior performances of a few persons in the game of
guessing unseen cards, which he painstakingly proved to be
statistically significant, has any bearing on the likelihood of a
future life. He must therefore have been persuaded by the
testimony of mediums. He was surely aware that most mediums
have been shown to be frauds, but he was convinced that some
have not been. Not that this made him optimistic. He took the
view that this world was very nasty and that there was a fair
chance that the next world, if it existed, was even nastier.
Consequently, he had no compelling desire to survive. He just
thought that there was an even chance of his doing so. One of his
better epigrams was that if one went by the reports of mediums,
life in the next world was like a perpetual bump supper at a
Welsh university.
If Broad was an atheist, my friend Dr Alfred Ewing was not.
Ewing, who considered Broad to be a better philosopher than
Wittgenstein, was naif, unworldly even by academic standards,
intellectually shrewd, unswervingly honest and a devout
Christian. Once, to tease him, I said: "Tell me, Alfred, what do
you most look forward to in the next world?" He replied
immediately: "God will tell me whether there are a priori
A.J. Ayer: “What I Saw When I Was Dead” – page 4 of 5
propositions." It is a wry comment on the strange character of
our subject that this answer should be so funny.
My excuse for repeating this story is that such philosophical
problems as the question whether the propositions of logic and
pure mathematics are deductively analytic or factually synthetic,
and, if they are analytic, whether they are true by convention, are
not to be solved by acquiring more information. What is needed
is that we succeed in obtaining a clearer view of what the
problems involve. One might hope to achieve this in a future life,
but really we have no good reason to believe that our intellects
will be any sharper in the next world, if there is one, than they
are in this. A god, if one exists, might make them so, but this is
not something that even the most enthusiastic deist can count on.
The only philosophical problem that our finding ourselves landed
on a future life might clarify would be that of the relation
between mind and body, if our future lives consisted, not in the
resurrection of our bodies, but in the prolongation of the series of
our present experiences. We should then be witnessing the
triumph of dualism, which Descartes thought that he had
established. If our lives consisted in an extended series of
experiences, we should still have no good reason to regard
ourselves as spiritual substances.
So there it is. My recent experiences have slightly weakened my
conviction that my genuine death, which is due fairly soon, will
be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. They
have not weakened my conviction that there is no god. I trust that
my remaining an atheist will allay the anxieties of my fellow
supporters of the British Humanist Association, the Rationalist
Press Association and the South Place Ethical Society.
A. J. Ayer
A.J. Ayer: “What I Saw When I Was Dead” – page 5 of 5
The Recreation of the Psycho-Physical Person
The Immortality of the Soul
SOME KIND OF distinction between physical body and
immaterial or semi-material soul seems to be as old as human
culture; the existence of such a distinction has been indicated by
the manner of burial of the earliest human skeletons yet
discovered. Anthropologists offer various conjectures about the
origin of the distinction: perhaps it was first suggested by
memories of dead persons; by dreams of them; by the sight of
reflections of oneself in water and on other bright surfaces; or by
meditation upon the significance of religious rites which grew up
spontaneously in face of the fact of death.
It was Plato (428/7-348/7 B.c.), the philosopher who has most
deeply and lastingly influenced Western culture, who
systematically developed the body-mind dichotomy and first
attempted to prove the immortality of the soul.'
Plato argues that although the body belongs to the sensible
world, and shares its changing and impermanent nature, the
intellect is related to the unchanging realities of which we are
aware when we think not of particular good things but of
Goodness itself, not of specific just acts but of justice itself, and
of the other "universals" or eternal Ideas in virtue of which
physical things and events have their own specific
characteristics. Being related to this higher and abiding realm,
rather than to the evanescent world of sense, reason or the soul is
immortal. Hence, one who devotes his life to the contemplation
of eternal realities rather than to the gratification of the fleeting
desires of the body will find at death that whereas his body turns
to dust, his soul gravitates to the realm of the unchanging, there
to live forever. Plato painted an awe-inspiring picture, of
haunting beauty and persuasiveness, which has moved and
elevated the minds of men in many different centuries and lands.
Nevertheless, it is not today (as it was during the first centuries
of the Christian era) the common philosophy of the West; and a
demonstration of immortality which presupposes Plato's
metaphysical system cannot claim to constitute a proof for the
twentieth-century disbeliever.
Plato used the further argument that the only things that can
suffer destruction are those that are composite, since to destroy
something means to disintegrate it into its constituent parts. All
material bodies are composite; the soul, however, is simple and
therefore imperishable. This argument was adopted by Aquinas
and has become standard in Roman Catholic theology, as in the
following passage from the modern Catholic philosopher,
Jacques Maritain:
A spiritual soul cannot be corrupted, since it possesses no
matter; it cannot be disintegrated, since it has no substantial
parts; it cannot lose its individual unity, since it is selfsubsisting, nor its internal energy, since it contains within
itself all the sources of its energies. The human soul cannot
die. Once it exists, it cannot disappear; it will necessarily
exist for ever, endure without end. Thus, philosophic
reason, put to work by a great metaphysician like Thomas
Aquinas, is able to prove the immortality of the human soul
in a demonstrative manner.
John Hick: “The Recreation of the Psycho-Physical Person” page 1 of 5
This type of reasoning has been criticized on several grounds.
Kant pointed out that although it is true that a simple substance
cannot disintegrate, consciousness may nevertheless cease to
exist through the diminution of its intensity to zero.4 Modern
psychology has also questioned the basic premise that the mind
is a simple entity. It seems instead to be a structure of only
relative unity, normally fairly stable and tightly integrated but
capable under stress of various degrees of division and
dissolution. This comment from psychology makes it clear that
the assumption that the soul is a simple substance is not an
empirical observation but a metaphysical theory. As such, it
cannot provide the basis for a general proof of immortality.
The body-soul distinction, first formulated as a philosophical
doctrine in ancient Greece, was baptized into Christianity, ran
through the medieval period, and entered the modern world with
the public status of a self-evident truth when it was redefined in
the seventeenth century by Descartes. Since World War II,
however, the Cartesian mind-matter dualism, having been taken
for granted for many centuries, has been strongly criticized by
philosophers of the contemporary analytical school. It is argued
that the words that describe mental characteristics and
operations–such as "intelligent," "thoughtful," "carefree,"
"happy," "calculating" and the like –apply in practice to types of
human behavior and to behavioral dispositions. They refer to the
empirical individual, the observable human being who is born
and grows and acts and feels and dies, and not to the shadowy
proceedings of a mysterious "ghost in the machine." Man is thus
very much what he appears to be–a creature of flesh and blood,
who behaves and is capable of behaving in a characteristic range
of ways–rather than a nonphysical soul incomprehensibly
interacting with a physical body.
As a result of this development much mid-twentieth-century
philosophy has come to see man in the way he is seen in the
biblical writings, not as an eternal soul temporarily attached to a
mortal body, but as a form of finite, mortal, psychophysical life.
Thus, the Old Testament scholar, J. Pedersen, says of the
Hebrews that for them ". . . the body is the soul in its outward
form." This way of thinking has led to quite a different
conception of death from that found in Plato and the neo-Platonic
strand in European thought.
The Recreation of the Psycho-Physical Person
Only toward the end of the Old Testament period did after-life
beliefs come to have any real importance in Judaism. Previously,
Hebrew religious insight had focused so fully upon God's
covenant with the nation, as an organism that continued through
the centuries while successive generations lived and died, that
the thought of a divine purpose for the individual, a purpose that
transcended this present life, developed only when the
breakdown of the nation as a political entity threw into
prominence the individual and the problem of his personal
destiny.
When a positive conviction arose of God's purpose holding the
individual in being beyond the crisis of death, this conviction
took the non-Platonic form of belief in the resurrection of the
body. By the turn of the eras, this had become an article of faith
John Hick: “The Recreation of the Psycho-Physical Person” page 2 of 5
for one Jewish sect, the Pharisees, although it was still rejected as
an innovation by the more conservative Sadducees.
question, but one may, perhaps, develop this thought along lines
such as the following.
The religious difference between the Platonic belief in the
immortality of the soul, and the Judaic-Christian belief in the
resurrection of the body is that the latter postulates a special
divine act of re-creation. This produces a sense of utter
dependence upon God in the hour of death, a feeling that is in
accordance with the biblical understanding of man as having
been formed out of "the dust of the earth," a product (as we say
today) of the slow evolution of life from its lowly beginnings in
the primeval slime. Hence, in the Jewish and Christian
conception, death is something real and fearful. It is not thought
to be like walking from one room to another, or taking off an old
coat and putting on a new one. It means sheer unqualified
extinction–passing out from the lighted circle of life into "death's
dateless night." Only through the sovereign creative love of God
can there be a new existence beyond the grave.
Suppose, first, that someone–John Smith–living in the USA
were suddenly and inexplicably to disappear from before the
eyes of his friends, and that at the same moment an exact replica
of him were inexplicably to appear in India. The person who
appears in India is exactly similar in both physical and mental
characteristics to the person who disappeared in America. There
is continuity of memory, complete similarity of bodily features
including fingerprints, hair and eye coloration, and stomach
contents, and also of beliefs, habits, emotions, and mental
dispositions. Further, the "John Smith" replica thinks of himself
as being the John Smith who disappeared in the USA. After all
possible tests have been made and have proved positive, the
factors leading his friends to accept "John Smith" as John Smith
would surely prevail and would cause them to overlook even his
mysterious transference from one continent to another, rather
than treat "John Smith," with all John Smith's memories and
other characteristics, as someone other than John Smith.
What does "the resurrection of the dead" mean? Saint
Paul's discussion provides the basic Christian answer to this
question. His conception of the general resurrection
(distinguished from the unique resurrection of Jesus) has nothing
to do with the resuscitation of corpses in a cemetery. It concerns
God's re-creation or reconstitution of the human psychophysical
individual, not as the organism that has died but as a soma
pneumatikon, a "spiritual body," inhabiting a spiritual world as
the physical body inhabits our present physical world.
A major problem confronting any such doctrine is that of
providing criteria of personal identity to link the earthly life and
the resurrection life. Paul does not specifically consider this
Suppose, second, that our John Smith, instead if
inexplicably disappearing, dies, but that at the moment of his
death a "John Smith" replica, again complete with memories and
all other characteristics, appears in India. Even with the corpse
on our hands we would, I think, still have to accept this "John
Smith" as the John Smith who died. We would have to say that
he had been miraculously re-created in another place.
Now suppose, third, that on John Smith's death the "John
Smith" replica appears, not in India, but as a resurrection replica
in a different world altogether, a resurrection world inhabited
John Hick: “The Recreation of the Psycho-Physical Person” page 3 of 5
only by resurrected persons. This world occupies its own space
distinct from that with which we are now familiar. That is to say,
an object in the resurrection world is not situated at any distance
or in any direction from the objects in our present world,
although each object in either world is spatially related to every
other object in the same world.
This supposition provides a model by which one may
conceive of the divine re-creation of the embodied human
personality. In this model, the element of the strange and the
mysterious has been reduced to a minimum by following the
view of some of the early Church Fathers that the resurrection
body has the same shape as the physical body, and ignoring
Paul's own hint it may be as unlike the physical body as a full
grain of wheat differs from the wheat seed."
What is the basis for this Judaic-Christian belief in the
divine re-creation or reconstitution of the human personality after
death? There is, of course, an argument from authority, in that
life after death is taught throughout the New Testament (although
very rarely in the Old Testament). But, more basically, belief in
the resurrection arises as a corollary of faith in the sovereign
purpose of God, which is not restricted by death and which holds
man in being beyond his natural mortality. In the words of
Martin Luther, "Anyone with whom God speaks, whether in
wrath or in mercy, the same is certainly immortal. The Person of
God who speaks, and the Word, show that we are creatures with
whom God wills to speak, right into eternity, and in an immortal
manner." In a similar vein it is argued that if it be God's plan to
create finite persons to exist in fellowship with himself, then it
contradicts both his own intention and his love for the creatures
made in his image if he allows men to pass out of existence when
his purpose for them remains largely unfulfilled.
It is this promised fulfillment of God's purpose for man, in
which the full possibilities of human nature will be realized, that
constitutes the "heaven" symbolized in the New Testament as a
joyous banquet in which all and sundry rejoice together. As we
saw when discussing the problem of evil, no theodicy can
succeed without drawing into itself this eschatological faith in an
eternal, and therefore infinite, good which thus outweighs all the
pains and sorrows that have been endured on the way to it.
Balancing the idea of heaven in Christian tradition is the
idea of hell. This, too, is relevant to the problem of theodicy. For
just as the reconciling of God's goodness and power with the fact
of evil requires that out of the travail of history there shall come
in the end an eternal good for man, so likewise it would seem to
preclude man's eternal misery. The only kind of evil that is
finally incompatible with God's unlimited power and love would
be utterly pointless and wasted suffering, pain which is never
redeemed and worked into the fulfilling of God's good purpose.
Unending torment would constitute precisely such suffering; for
being eternal, it could never lead to a good end beyond itself.
Thus, hell as conceived by its enthusiasts, such as Augustine or
Calvin, is a major part of the problem of evil! If hell is construed
as eternal torment, the theological motive behind the idea is
directly at variance with the urge to seek a theodicy. However, it
is by no means clear that the doctrine of eternal punishment can
claim a secure New Testament basis. If, on the other hand, "hell"
means a continuation of the purgatorial suffering often
experienced in this life, and leading eventually to the high good
of heaven, it no longer stands in conflict with the needs of
John Hick: “The Recreation of the Psycho-Physical Person” page 4 of 5
theodicy. Again, the idea of hell may be de-literalized and valued
as a mythos, as a powerful and pregnant symbol of the grave
responsibility inherent in man's freedom in relation to his Maker.
PostScript (1988)
Terence Penelhum has discussed this concept of
resurrection and suggests that although the identification of
resurrection-world Mr X with the former earthly Mr X is
possible it is not mandatory. He argues that in my cases number
two and three (and probably number one also) it would be a
matter for decision whether or not to make the identification. The
general principle on which he is working is that there can only be
an automatic and unquestionable identification when there is
bodily continuity. As soon as this is lost, identity becomes a
matter for decision, with arguments arising both for and against.
He concludes that although "the identification of the former and
the later persons in each of the three pictures is not absurd," yet
"in situations like these it is a matter of decision whether to say
that physical tests of identity reveal personal identity or very
close similarity. We can, reasonably, decide for identity, but we
do not have to. And this seems to leave the description of the
future life in a state of chronic ambiguity." (Survival and
Disembodied Existence, New York: Humanities Press, 1970, pp.
100-1).
I agree with Penelhum that these are indeed cases for
decision. It is possible to rule that the John Smith in the
resurrection world is the same person as the earthly John Smith,
or that he is a different person. But that such a question is a
matter for decision is not peculiar to this case. Ordinary
straightforward everyday identity provides the paradigm that is,
by definition, unproblematic; but all cases that diverge from it
call for decision. This has recently been made very clear by
Derek Parfit in his Reasons and Persons, Part III. Suppose, for
example, that the cells of my brain are surgically replaced one by
one, under local anaesthetic, with physically identical cells. My
consciousness and other characteristics continue essentially
unchanged throughout the operation. When only 1% of the cells
have been replaced we shall probably all agree that I am the
same person. But what do we say when 50% have been replaced?
And what when 99% have been replaced? And what when they
have all been replaced? Is this still me, or do I no longer exist
and this is now a replica of me? Or again, consider the
teletransporter (somewhat as in Star Trek) which scans my body,
including the brain, records its state in complete detail, and then
destroys it, the next moment forming an exact replica on Mars.
The Mars replica's consciousness is continuous with that of the
earthly me; but nevertheless is it me on Mars? Have I been
teletransported, or has someone different been created in place of
me? This is a question for decision. My contention is that the
best decision, the one that best satisfies our intuitions and that
gives rise to the fewest practical problems, is that the replica on
Mars is me; and also that the John Smith "replica" in the
resurrection world is John Smith.
John Hick
from Philosophy of Religion
John Hick: “The Recreation of the Psycho-Physical Person” page 5 of 5