Disembodied Existence Essay

A linguistic philosopher heavily supports this statement, since it is a contradiction in terms, using their monistic thoughts. To them life after death, is a contradictory concept, because you cannot continue to live, after you have died; it would be surviving death. The concept of disembodied existence to the linguistic philosopher cannot be coherently explained because it is a contradiction, as they already hold the presupposition of monism, which believes that soul and body are one entity, which cannot be separated. For them a disembodied existence, is not an option and therefore using linguistic philosophy, the premise of disembodied existence does not hold well, because there should be no life after death. Other thinkers have criticised with this type of philosophy, but they themselves are dualists. For example, Schlick argues that it is possible to have life after death, by claiming you could witness your own funeral. It now, becomes plausible that disembodied survival is coherent and not a contradiction in terms, from this point of view, as mind and body after death could have been have been separated, as they are composite natures, to the dualist. So when the body is experiencing the funeral processes, your mind can be watching from somewhere else. Pronouns, such as ‘you’, ‘her’ and so on, are used in linguistic philosophy to refer the person, and mainly the physicality of the person, but if the context changes, the meanings of the pronouns can be applied to others things, such as the non- physical objects. Subsequently, it is also valid to claim that, the pronoun ‘I’ is not like the other pronouns. When you use the word, ‘I’- it is not in reference to the physicality of yourself, but you are referring to your mentality. It is subjective, and personal. The ‘I’ does not refer to the body but to the mind inside the body, and therefore if people can talk about themselves without consideration of their body, then disembodied existence of both themselves and others, becomes less contradictory and coherent from this point of view. On the other hand, even if the linguistics were to accept the life after death proposition, they could argue the problems of identification, because now, we recognise others, by their physicality. We look at a person and think, ‘Ah yes brown hair- that is Susan’. Others know the person by their physical natures, like voice and so forth. However, when we are in this afterlife world, how are we to recognise each other without a body or voice? To them, identification of others becomes impossible without the body, and therefore they advocate that the disembodied survival, to not only a contradiction and incoherent, but problematic. Although, many arguments have attacked this stand, the easiest approach to this problem is to argue that a person knows another person, not only by their physicality, but also by their own, distinctive and unique personality. For dualists, personality is not part of the physicality, but a mind state. As a result, if disembodied existence is to be accepted, for a dualist, the identification of others is not a contradiction, and is logical and coherent. The coherency of disembodied existence can be supported by cases of telepathy, which also regards the workings of mind states, without physical input. Telepathy shows that the concept of disembodied survival is not only conceivable, and can be understood coherently and telepathy is somewhat of tangible evidence, as it can be proved, through stringent tests, also by analysing the records already at our disposal, because the mind can work independently to the body. The other problem, of proclaiming the philosophy of disembodied life after death, is continuation. For us to survive death and even begin to discuss the chances of an after life, there must be this non-stop flow; a continuity of us. The person who dies and survives death should be us, we are the ones to move in to the afterlife. Physco- physical advocate, John Hick’s uses his famous, Replica Theory, in order to show that, continuity is logical possibility. Hick’s start by saying imagine a person sitting somewhere, and then all of a sudden stops existing in that place, only to exist somewhere else, without journeying to that new place. Some could argue this person is not the actual person who had disappeared, but examining the person in question thoroughly, such as memories, stomach contents and fingerprints, it does turn out to be them, even if they themselves do not know how they got there in the first place. The person at the second place would be regarded as an exact ‘replica’ of the person who died. The replica is created as soon the person dies, and they cannot exist simultaneously. Then imagine, if that person died, and emerged in the second place. Even though this is not ordinary, it could happen. He uses these two instances to claim, that if a person dies here, only to reappear in another world, it can happen, and nothing is wrong with assuming that it does happen. This theory is used to show the continuity of ourselves, in entering the after life. It seems coherent and completely logical, thus disembodied existence is not contradiction. Admittedly, there are problems with this theory, as it does not prove continuity at all, because the replica becomes the problem. When we die, the replica is going to the after life, not us -the original. The continuity stops for the briefest of moments, when the replicas are made, and from that point, the argument no longer is coherent, as it tries to advocate continuity but becomes contradictory, because the replica, used to maintain the coherence, becomes the article that starts the contradiction, because it stop the coherence. It seems that if talks of disembodied survival were to be taken into account, the coherency, the lack of evidence and the frequency of its contradiction would become a major issue, in particularly with the Replica Theory. An explanation for a type of disembodied existence can be explained by using both subjective and objective immortality arguments. Beginning with subjective immortality, it proposes that Jesus’ teaching and Gospel records, the resurrection and the fact that we believe in a God of love, we can justified in believing that we could have a disembodied existence. Other reasons stem from the philosophical reasoning at hand, such as Plato’s and Kant’s philosophy, which argues for the soul’s immortality, and in addition the human capacity to even experience the ‘eternal’ does seem to mean that there must be something that is eternal is us. It is disputed, admittedly, that even though we can experience little of the concept ‘eternal’ we do not necessarily have to be eternal. There are qualities that are associated with the divine, that we seem to be aware of , such as compassion and forgiveness, and still we are not divine ourselves. Therefore disembodied survival can not be coherently explained In addition, it is not reasonable to argue from the Platonic version of the immortal soul or the moral argument as represented by Kant, because there is no empirical evidence to support either of these. The immortality of the soul is highly dependent on the world of the Forms which has yet to be proven, just like, the Kantian moral argument, which calls for there to be a God to provide us with the summum bonum in another life. Again, God is an unproven, unsupported concept. An argument cannot be used to prove something else, if it is not proved itself.