by NATALIE EMMONS
We have this powerful sense that death is a transition, not an end. Why can’t we imagine a world without us?
What happens to people after they die? Do the deceased live on eternally as spirits? Are loved ones reunited in heaven? Or do personal memories, feelings, thoughts, desires, goals and preferences cease forever, along with brain functioning, at the point of death?
Scholars from theology to biology have attempted to answer these questions by carefully examining different pieces of evidence: they have looked to religious texts, philosophical musings and, more recently, physical anatomy and the biology of death. But for most people in most cultures, the answers to these questions do not require such fierce scrutiny. Even though accepted scientific evidence denies the possibility of immortal life, people the world over seem compelled to think about death as a transition, not an end.
This widespread, uniquely human way of thinking – observed across cultures and religions – has recently caught the attention of cognitive developmental psychologists, including myself. What I have discovered by looking at children’s untaught intuitions is that, rather than intelligence, the part of the self that is most central to our ideas about eternal life is our capacity for feeling and desiring.
This recent discovery is noteworthy in light of findings from paleontology and archeology telling us that belief in eternal life goes back tens of thousands of years. Some of the oldest documented evidence shows that modern humans were intentionally burying their dead with animal bones and shell beads in the caves of ancient Israel 100,000 years ago, long before the dawn of civilisation. Archaeologists interpret ancient ritual burials as showing a concern for the dead that likely extended beyond the physical world.
Notably, when intentional burials were discovered among our Neanderthal cousins, the stereotype of them as brainless brutes incapable of complex symbolic thought was called into question. This is because showing such concern for the dead reveals the value placed on social-group members, as well as the cognitive ability to represent group members even after they have died. Intentional burials show a level of empathy that seems a core part of us: when found in other species, we cannot help but feel connected to them.
The first written evidence of afterlife beliefs appeared around 4,000 years ago in preserved texts from ancient Sumer and Egypt. As writing spread, so did the accumulation of religious texts documenting different cultural beliefs about the fate of individuals following death: the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead outlines funerary practices to ensure a smooth transition to the afterlife; the ancient Indian Bhagavad Gita describes the life-death-rebirth cycle and moral codes that, if followed, can eventually lead to liberation from the cycle. Although we often focus on details about the afterlife that vary by religion, it is the central notion that people continue to exist eternally in some form that unifies religions and suggests something unique and worth studying about the human mind.
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