The self and what survives

What am "I" — a body, a soul, or a mind-body unity? And can any of it survive death? The mind-body problem shapes every answer.

• Substance dualism — mind/soul and body are two distinct substances.
• Materialism — there is only the physical; the "mind" is what the brain does.

Plato and Descartes on the soul

Plato (Phaedo) argued the soul is immortal and belongs to the eternal realm of the Forms; the body is a temporary prison, and death releases the soul.

Descartes defends substance dualism:

• The mind is a thinking, non-extended thing (res cogitans); the body is an extended, non-thinking thing (res extensa).
• He can doubt he has a body but not that he thinks ("I think, therefore I am"), so mind and body are conceivably separable.
• The mind is indivisible while the body is divisible — so they are different in kind.

Whose dualism?

Ryle: the ghost in the machine

Gilbert Ryle (The Concept of Mind) attacks dualism as "the dogma of the ghost in the machine". He says it rests on a category mistake: treating "mind" as a separate thing, like a visitor who tours Oxford's colleges and then asks to be shown "the University" — as if the University were an extra building.

Talk of the mind, Ryle argues, is really talk about dispositions and behaviour, not a hidden inner substance.

Dawkins and scientific materialism

Richard Dawkins argues the "soul" is a pre-scientific relic. He distinguishes:

• "Soul one" — a separable spirit that survives death. Dawkins rejects this as unsupported by evidence.
• "Soul two" — a metaphor for intellect, emotion and personality, which he accepts as brain activity, the product of evolution and genes.

Evaluation: materialism fits neuroscience (brain damage changes the "self"), but critics say it struggles to explain consciousness and first-person experience (the "hard problem").

Whose category mistake?

Immortality of the soul vs resurrection

Two religious models of survival:

• Immortality of the soul (Platonic, and in much Christian tradition) — a non-physical soul survives the death of the body.
• Resurrection — the whole person, body and all, is raised by God; favoured by many biblical scholars as more faithful to Hebrew and Christian thought about the psychophysical self.

Hick's replica theory

John Hick defends resurrection against the objection that a decayed body cannot be "me" again. His replica theory: at death God could create an exact replica of the person in a resurrection world — same memories, character and (recreated) body.

• Because there is only one such replica and it is continuous in character, Hick argues it would rightly count as the same person, not a copy.
• Challenges: would a replica really be you or merely a duplicate? What of personal identity if two replicas were made?

Compare H. H. Price, who imagined survival as a disembodied mind in a world of mental images shaped by desire.

Whose replica?

Sort each idea by camp

Tap a claim, then drop it under dualism or materialism.

Match the thinker

Tap a description, then the thinker it belongs to.

The big ideas to hold together

You can now link theories of the self to models of survival and evaluate both. Press Finish to see your score.