Imagining mortality

Scientific American has recently published a provocative article explaining humans’ seemingly universal inability to imagine a lack of consciousness and, thus, an end to consciousness at death. In short, the conscious imagination never experiences non-consciousness. When we’re not conscious, we’re not aware and thus can’t remember what it was like. At most, we can remember regaining consciousness. This inherent quality may be a key part of the explanation for the widespread belief in some sort of afterlife.

But the article does not address at least one important dimension of this issue: imagining that other beings – human or otherwise – have the same kind of consciousness. It is a categorical leap to apply insights about one’s own experience to that of others.

Gods’ pets?

While mucking around with my cats’ lives and seeing that they faintly comprehend that I enact my will on their universe, I often imagine that they see me as like unto a god. Will I feed them, let them out on the balcony, abandon them for several days … ? They undoubtedly notice that I exist in their world but that I also frequent a separate realm beyond theirs; I call it “outside” and “work.” To them, I must be awesome.

Here, then, is my hypothesis: Perhaps the roots of some religious beliefs lie in early believers’ imagination of how putatively less-conscious beings around them – such as domesticated animals – saw their relationship to humans. These incipient theologians might have taken inferences such as mine regarding my cats’ beliefs as analogous to humans’ relationship to other forces. In GRE fashion: ’(semi-)domesticated entity is to human as human is to other entity.’