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Suppose Jane and Bob live alone on their planet, hundreds of lightyears from any other people.  They are 20 years old, and they find themselves with a deadly disease that will suddenly and painlessly kill both of them in a year.  They pray for divine aid, and an angel comes to them with the following offer: While they will die in a year, their mental and bodily functioning, as well as that of their environment, will be sped up by a factor of seventy, so that while they will die in a year, during that year they will have lived the equivalent of seventy ordinary years of life. Since their internal clock is sped up, it will feel to them as if they lived through seventy years. Moreover, they will forget that the angel had visited them, and so they will not know that each subjective minute is only a seventieth of a minute.

Question 1: Prudentially, should Jane and Bob take up this offer?  (My intuition: Yes.)  Note that it is not just a matter of it feeling like they get seventy years of life.  They really do get seventy years' worth of learning, interacting, stewarding their environment, praying, growing emotionally, and so on.

Question 2: Are Jane and Bob as well off in this scenario as they would be in a scenario on which their disease is cured and they live for another seventy years?  (I go back and forth. My initial inclination is to say "Yes" or "Almost".)

Suppose we answer Question 2 in the affirmative.  Now modify the case.  Jane and Bob pray for eternal life.  An angel comes to them with an offer: Instead of eternal life, God will do the following for them.  During the next six months, their and their environment's speed of functioning will be increased up by a factor of two, so they will feel like they are living the equivalent of a year.  During the next three months, their and their environment's speed of functioning will be sped up another factor of two, so it'll feel like they are living the equivalent of another year during those three months.  During the next 1.5 months, we get another speedup, so it will feel like those 1.5 months were a year of life.  And so on.  And then at the end of the year they will die.  But it will have felt to them like they were living forever.

Question 3: Is this just as good as eternal life?

Question 4: Do answers to any of these questions depend on the nature of time?

I came across this story earlier today, and I was nonplussed by the title: "Belief in Reincarnation Tied to Memory Errors."  After reading the story, I realized that 'belief in reincarnation' here meant belief that one had been reincarnated as some particular person, as opposed to the belief that people qua souls/atmans are reborn in different bodies commensurate with their latent karma.

It's a standard assumption in the Hindu literature with which I'm familiar that an individual is not and cannot become aware of his or her past lives--at least as long as he or she continues to have an embodied existence.  Buddhism is a bit different, but even there it is only an Arhat (one who has achieved full enlightenment) who can become aware of his past lives.  The point here, outside of the ambiguity in the article's title, is that even within the traditions I'm aware of which accept the occurence of rebirth in some form, there's still not much reason to take most people's claims about the particulars of any previous births seriously.  Even from within those traditions, one should probably put as much credence in such claims as a typical Catholic should in the divine origins of the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich.

Link

Here are some highlights:

*He seems to share with Plantinga (esp. the recent Faith and Philosophy article and some of the correspondence with PvI) the view that it's just bloody obvious that the concepts of the mental and physical are exclusive. Me: Pro: Can anything upon which both Plantinga and Swinburne agree methodologically be wrong?! Con: a posteriori physicalists will be entirely unmoved.

*He says that Physicalists are just too enamored with the apparent success of science. That sounds about right to me. I find the Success of Science argument very unpersuasive. I think its advocates don't pay enough attention to the reference classes in the induction.

*Explicitly endorses souls for animals. I spend a lot of time arguing for this and freaking people out that its the traditional view.

*Makes predictions like: "Scientists will discover that when the brain is in this state it gives rise to the thought that ‘today is Friday’, and when it is in that state it gives rise to the thought that ‘Russia is a big country’."

*Does philosophical Judo: " it is the very success of science in explaining physical events , which makes it immensely unlikely that it will be able to take the final step to explain the very different kind of events which are mental events. Souls and their mental lives of thought and sensation are so different from waves and particles that you cannot have an integrated theory which explains their interaction."

Given the recent discussion of materialism and the afterlife some readers might be interested in Lynne Rudder Baker's review of Nancey Murphy's Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? is a welcome book. Nancey Murphy defends a version of physicalism for Christians. She characterizes the physicalism that she endorses as the thesis that "we are our bodies -- there is no additional metaphysical element such as a mind or soul or spirit." Nevertheless, biology does not tell the whole story: We are "complex physical organisms, imbued with the legacy of thousands of years of culture, and, most importantly, blown by the Breath of God's Spirit; we are Spirited bodies." (ix) Murphy takes her main opponent to be a soul- or mind-body dualist.

I'm interested in whether the *real* laws are free of such clauses. Some defenders of the possibility of miracles hold that all such laws have such clauses, so that God doesn't have to violate laws of nature in order to perform a miracle. Instead, he only needs to override them. I'm going to grant this point, since my question isn't intended to be about the possibility or nature of miracles. I'll say later where it really is, but it would be rhetorically untoward to give away the punchline so early. So what I want to know is whether laws are ceteris paribus-free from within the natural order itself (rather than from outside, as in the case of intervention by God). Fodor holds that all the laws of the special sciences are required to have c.p. clauses in them, because they can be overridden by more fundamental laws. That leaves open the possibility, however, that the fundamental laws of physics can be c.p.-clause-free. And if the c.p. clauses we're thinking of are from within the natural order itself, then perhaps we should expect them to be free of such clauses. My interest here concerns libertarians who talk in terms of the possibility of "losing one's soul," where what this is intended to mean is that an individual can come to a point where it is psychologically impossible for them to choose an option that used to be possible for them. Some talk as if this is an accurate description of what eternal consignment in hell involves. I'm interested in whether the suggestion makes any sense.

Readers and contributors to Prosblogion, I am a new contributor to Prosblogion, even though I have been a regular reader of the blog for some time. I work primarily in epistemology (for now at least). I wanted to ask a question about materialism and the afterlife. Van Inwagen's materialist vision of the afterlife is notorious and seems to be the first thing people generally mention on the topic. But I was wondering if you knew of any other attempts to combine materialism about the mind with our continued personal existence in the afterlife. I thought readers of this blog could tell me where to look, if anyone could. Thanks in advance.

Keith DeRose has three posts at Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank on universalism that might interest readers of this blog. "The Problem With Universalism"? deals with a worry some have raised about universalism, i.e. that it asks the wrong question. According to this objection, universalism relies on the assumption that salvation is about getting a lot of souls into heaven after they die. Keith responds that his universalism doesn't rely on that assumption at all. Hoping that Universalism Is/Will Be True examines various positions that might be described as "hoping that universalism is true". It gets into some interesting issues about holding to philosophical positions that you aren't comfortable saying you believe. He thinks we accept philosophical positions in a way that can involve the will, whereas belief is more involuntary. He follows this up with an extended discussion of how this might be affected on a view of future contingents according to which future contingents will be but are not now true. Underground Universalism? looks at the pressures on those whose livelihood depends on their theological convictions who might be pressured not to hold universalism and suggests that universalists recognize this and not push them too much, all the while seeking to alleviate those pressures by moving toward a removal of their causes.

I was reading Peter van Inwagen's essay "I Look for the Resurrection of the Dead and the Life of the World to Come" since I got stuck in vortex of airline incompetence at O'Hare airport on my way from Rochester to the Pacific SCP in San Diego. My only solace in having to spend 15 hours in an airport instead of hanging out with my friends was that PVI himself was diverted by the same SNAFU.

At any rate, he there discusses his intriguing early essay "The Possibility of the Resurrection" (which, in spite of the title has been misconstrued in its purpose). He says

My goal in "The Possibility of Resurrection," was to argue for the metaphysical possibility of the Resurrection of the Dead. My method was to tell a story, a story I hoped my readers would grant was a metaphysically possible story.

He had said the same thing in the postscript to the version collected in the volume by the same title. This caught my attention more than the first time I read the essay because in Ed Wierenga's seminar this week we discussed the logical or quasi-logical relationship between conceivability and possibility in connection with a Humean argument for the impossibility of necessary existents. I recalled PVI's "modal skepticism" expressed briefly in the introduction to Part One of God Knowledge and Mystery and then later more thoroughly in "Modal Epistemology" in Ontology, Identity, and Modality.

That the stated method could achieve the stated end--that the telling of a story could establish something as possible--suggests an answer to Yablo's question "Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?" that, interestingly, is parallel to PVI's own answer to the Special Composition Question.

In _Material Beings_ PVI wends his way between the Scylla and Charibdis of the two extreme answers--nihilism and universalism. Likewise, though most philosophers either say that conceivability entails (or in every case prima facie justifies) possibility or that the two bear no logical relation one to another, PVI says that sometimes conceivability supports possibility and sometimes it does not.

I'm worried, though, about the specific criterion he suggests: "ordinary propositions about everyday matters," for the Resurrection Story seems anything but quotidian. I'll put the rest beneath the fold.