Afterlife Reflection Paper

Prior to this class, I was under the assumption that there is, in fact, an afterlife that would consist of either going to heaven or going to hell depending on one’s moral character during their life on earth. As a person who identifies with the Christian religion more than any other religion, but who rarely attends church and has never read the bible, I did not know the specific details on how a person eventually ends up in heaven or hell, but I was simply led to believe that these were the only options available to a person once they die. Essentially, I was not taught any further detail on these illusionary places, but I was socialized into believing in it as fact. It was not until a few weeks into the class that I started to question my

Albert G. Thomas refutes the notion of an afterlife in his article, “Continuing the Definition on Death Debate: The Report of the President Council on Bioethics on Controversies in the Determination of Death” by introducing the concept of an internal integrative unity which organisms possess and is a sign of life (106). This means that organisms are alive when all their parts are working in unity and are maintaining an internal homeostasis (Thomas 105). According to Thomas, once an organism exhibits integrative unity, then emergent, holistic properties will form, such as consciousness and a soul (106). Essentially, emergent properties are a sign of life that only comes about when the entire system of you is working together in unity. Thomas discusses integrated unity and homeostasis to point out that life is only possible when there is an internal integrated unity and organisms are maintaining internal homeostasis, while death is a loss of this unity. Furthermore, since the soul is an emergent property that results from one’s internal homeostasis and integrated unity, once your body stops being an integrated whole, your soul is dead, and you cannot move to the afterlife. Thomas argues that because the soul only emerges after the body works in unity, then

God would need to have a body ready for you in heaven and it would have to be one similar to the one you already have so it can feel like yours. Although Salamon does not go into much detail in how God would have to create this body, he does argue that having a body in a post-mortem experience would make more sense because the alternative of not having a body and simply just having a soul would be impossible. Salamon points out two important attributes that characterize a human person’s relation to their body—intentional action and perception (87). He uses these attributes to raise important questions about a disembodied experience that test its likelihood such as “can we still plausibly claim that after having lost her body to death, a human person can continue to exist as a person?” and “can an immaterial person have a specific location which would define the point in space from which she could ‘perceive’ her environment (whatever the nature of her perception)?” and “could a disembodied person operate on her environment?” (Salamon 87). His questions bring up important flaws in the notion of a