PROPOSED COGNITIVE MECHANISMS AND REPRESENTATIONAL STRUCTURES OF AFTERLIFE BELIEFS: A REVIEW

K. MITCH HODGE, PAULO SOUSA, AND CLAIRE WHITE ABSTRACT The authors present a comprehensive review of experimental and theoretical research into the psychology of afterlife beliefs in the past decade and a half. Specifically highlighted in this review are the cognitive mechanisms and representational structures that the researchers have proposed to undergird the universal cognitive architecture of afterlife beliefs. After presenting each proposal, the authors then present themes derived from comparing those proposals which can be utilized in future research that would serve to narrow the field of proposed explanations. KEYWORDS Afterlife beliefs, intuitive folk dualism, ensoulment theory, contextual theories, cognitive mechanisms, representational structures INTRODUCTION In the decade and more since Bering’s initial empirical investigations into humans’ implicit reasoning about the possibility of others surviving death (Bering, 2002), a flurry of research into the cognitive foundations of afterlife beliefs has been published. Where subsequent research largely agrees is that humans have a cognitive predisposition to accept the belief that it is possible for an individual to survive biological death in a manner that preserves “thick” personal identity.1 Where the subsequent research disagrees pertains to the cognitive mechanisms involved in predisposing humans to accept this belief, and the representational structure of that belief. Here, we will attempt to correlate and elucidate the various cognitive mechanisms and representational structures that have been proposed in the past decade of publications.

1 The philosophical distinction between “thick” and “thin” preservation of identity is relevant here (Kaufman, 2004; Perry, 1978). Thick identity preserves personal identity through the retention of properties that make an individual a person (e.g., autobiographical memories, personality, and other identifying personal features); whereas thin identity strips the individual of such identifying properties and is described as a life-force, consciousness, or energy, which alone does not qualify for personhood.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 2 It is important to understand both the logical and causal relationships between proposed cognitive mechanisms for afterlife beliefs and the proposed representational structure of those beliefs. Certain cognitive mechanisms logically and causally mandate certain representational structures, as we shall see. For instance, a causal cognitive mechanism that processes both psychological and bodily representations of another individual will (and should) produce a representationally structured belief that includes both psychological and bodily conceptual intensions as a component of the endorsed proposition. Some researchers have first proposed the cognitive mechanism based on empirical studies and then proposed the logically derived representational structure. Other researchers have first attempted to demonstrate empirically the representational structure, and follow the causal chain backward to what the cognitive mechanism producing such a structure must be like. The result has been diverse packages of proposed cognitive mechanisms and representational structures. Currently, the majority trend in the literature has been to propose a cognitive mechanism that produces a folk-dualist representational structure of the intensional content that either denies any bodily representation to deceased individual being represented in the afterlife (hereafter: afterliving deceased), or a marginal role to bodily representations. This is in-step with the dominant, yet controversial, trend in the cognitive science of religion to describe folk representations of all supernatural agents as disembodied minds (cf., Bering, 2010; Bloom, 2007; Hodge, 2012b; Nikkel, 2015; Pyysiäinen, 2009). We will discuss this majority trend in-depth as we analyze previous research. We will also discuss other scholarly research that suggests that religious notions such as the soul or spirit play a substantial intensional role in representations of the afterliving deceased. In addition, we will introduce and discuss independent research conducted by the authors which present a substantial challenge to this trend by suggesting that bodily representations play an important role in maintaining the personal identity (in the minds of the living) of the afterliving deceased. Following these discussions, we discuss emergent themes which allow us to propose targeted methodologies that will aid in discerning which, if any, of the proposed cognitive mechanisms and representational structures of afterlife beliefs bear empirical weight. Our suggested paradigms should make it possible to determine whether proposed mechanisms produce the delimited type of representational structures compatible with those mechanisms, and whether empirically determined representational structures are consistent with types of information processed by the cognitive mechanism such as to produce those structures. Finally, to aid readers in keeping the researchers and their positions straight, we provide a table which provides an overview of the positions held by all those discussed in this

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 3 article, and whether and how they address certain theoretical concerns (see Table 1: Breakdown of Mechanisms and Structures by Authors). INTUITIVE FOLK-DUALIST THEORIES Intuitive folk dualism, as used in psychology, is the notion that humans are predisposed to conceive themselves as composed of two substances: an immaterial mind and a physical body. In the context of afterlife beliefs, numerous researchers have proposed that humans intuitively believe the immaterial mind of an individual survives the biological death of her body, and that the mind (alone) is capable of preserving her identity through the psychological continuity of thoughts, emotions, desires and memories.2 Folk dualism is intended to provide detail into how humans essentialize themselves—that is, reduce themselves to identity preserving properties—in comparison to other types of entities, through a widely accepted folk process of psychological essentialism (Gelman, 2004). Psychological essentialism, itself, is an underspecified and underdetermined psychological process which suggests humans conceptually treat categories as if they have an unobservable (and often immaterial) essence that provides an object its identity and its category membership.3 Folk dualism, then, is offered as the essentializing process and representational structure by which humans conceptualize themselves. In the context of the cognitive science of religion, current folk dualist theories claim that the folk conceptualize the mind (and its cognates) as intensionally identical to the soul—that is, the mind is the soul (cf., Bering, 2010, 2006; Bloom, 2004, 2007; Fiala, Arico, & Nichols, 2011; Pereira, Faísca, & Sá-Saraiva, 2012; Slingerland & Chudek, 2011).4 This claim about the folk conception of the mind, as we shall see in a later section however, has a number of critics; nevertheless, for our present purposes it is an important claim in folk dualist theories pertaining to the representational structure of how the folk conceptualize the afterliving deceased. By claiming that the mind is intensionally identical to the soul, these theories attempt to provide explanation for how the folk are able to coherently believe that mental activities are

2 Psychological folk-dualism owes much to the philosophical ideas of John Locke (1975/1690-1694) and René Descartes (1637/2007, 1641/1993), specifically their ideas of psychological continuity and (Cartesian) substance dualism, respectively. These philosophers would likely be surprised to learn, however, that these ideas which were logical product of much philosophical deliberation are now considered to be simple, intuitive, folk ideas. 3 The similarity of folk psychological essentialism and Plato’s (Cooper, 1997) description of the forms cannot be overstated here. Here again, psychologists’ willingness to attribute educated and subtle philosophical positions which arose from hard-fought philosophical argumentation to today’s common-folk would come as a shock to most educated individuals at the turn of the last century. What is even more interesting is that philosophers Plato, Descartes, and Locke all offered their philosophical positions in opposition to what they considered to the folk understandings of the topics which relied heavily on sense data. 4 This claim too owes much to Descartes’ formulation of dualism.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 4 capable of continuing for the afterliving deceased in the absence of a physical body, particularly the brain.5 None of that is to claim that all folk dualist theories are identical themselves; there are several varieties which will be detailed in what follows. The above simply provides—in broad strokes—the theoretical similarities between them. Due to differing theoretical commitments and differing interpretations of empirical data, researchers have promoted a wide array of folk dualist theories which produce specific representational structures from specific cognitive mechanisms. THE SIMULATION CONSTRAINT HYPOTHESIS AND COMMON-SENSE DUALISM The first folk dualist theory pertaining to afterlife beliefs was offered by Bering himself (2002, 2006). In his initial experiments, Bering provided participants from a variety of religious backgrounds with a vignette about an individual to whom numerous types of states were attributed (i.e., biological, psychobiological, perceptual, desire, emotional, and epistemic), who meets with an untimely death at the end of the story. Then Bering asked those participants which, if any, of those states continued after death (affirmative answers to these questions Bering refers to as “continuity responses”). The data revealed a strong trend: Desire, emotional, and epistemic questions (which he places in the domain of the mental) received significantly more continuity responses than did biological, psychobiological, and perceptual states (which he places in the domain of the physical body). Moreover, these responses were in agreement with Bering’s simulation constraint hypothesis born from simulation theory that it would be easier to imagine the absence of our own physical, bodily, states (what Bering calls “easy to imagine absence states” or EIA states) than to imagine the absence of our own mental states (“difficult to imagine absence states” or DIA states).6 In other words, Bering hypothesized that when participants attempted to simulate what it is like to be dead—which he took to be an attempt to simulate being devoid of all states7—participants would find it very difficult to image themselves or others as not having any mental states since those are with us all the time

5 Interestingly, this strong identity claim between the mind and the soul enables Swinburne (2001) to argue for the Christian doctrine of spiritual re-embodiment in the afterlife (Heaven). This is because Swinburne also accepts a modest version of the materialist claim that the mind (or mentalizing) is dependent on a physical brain. 6 In a modified cross-cultural replication of Bering’s studies, Misailidi and Kornilaki (2015) endorse the simulation constraint, but also propose (following Bek & Lock (2011) discussed below) that there are some perceptual (seeing, hearing) and mental (addition, planning) activities that are moderately-easy-to-imagine-the-absence-of, or MEIA states. They conjecture that this is because of these states’ close tie to specific body parts of the body, such as the eyes and brain. 7 According to Hodge (2012a, 2016), Bering’s hypothesis here confuses the biological conception of death with the secular conception of death. This conflation is widespread, as we shall see, and as such it will be discussed more thoroughly at the end of this article.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 5 (according to Bering), but would easily be able to imagine what it is like not to eat, be hungry, or taste since humans frequently experience their absence. The fact that participants gave significantly more continuity responses to the mental DIA states than the physical, bodily, EIA states, permitted Bering to argue that humans were what he called “common-sense dualists.” When confronted by death, Bering argued, humans are constrained in their simulations of what it is like to be dead in that they are unable to represent themselves as being devoid of mental states. Humans can, however, represent themselves—although this is not what was experimentally tested—as not having any physical, bodily states. From this, Bering argues that we represent another individual as surviving death in purely mental terms.8 This allowed Bering to further argue that afterliving deceased were represented by the folk as disembodied minds. For Bering, therefore, the cognitive mechanism for afterlife beliefs was his novel simulation constraint which produced common-sense dualist representations of individuals that mandated when the physical body died, only mental state representations of the deceased survived. These mental state representations of the afterliving deceased were conceptually contained by the folk in an abstract notion of the mind which was now unhindered by any physical, bodily representation. FOLK PHYSICS, FOLK PSYCHOLOGY, AND CARTESIAN SUBSTANCE DUALISM Using Bering’s experimental data concerning representations of the afterliving deceased (in part), 9 Bloom (2004, 2007) has proposed a different theory concerning both the cognitive mechanism(s) responsible for producing afterlife beliefs, and those beliefs’ representational structure. According to Bloom, humans have two dominant cognitive mechanisms for processing information about our environment(s): the folk physics module responsible for processing information about physical objects, and the folk psychology module responsible for processing information received from interaction with intentional agents. In the case of processing information about humans themselves, these two modules interact because humans are embodied intentional agents, meaning that they have both physical and intentional states that our brain must process to understand, explain, and predict the actions of our conspecifics. Under normal conditions, our conspecifics intentional (mental) states are a far more useful heuristic in understanding, explaining, and predicting their behavior than is their physical, bodily, states. Thus, when it comes to processing information regarding our conspecifics behavior, the folk psychology module is strongly dominant. Our cognitive default, therefore, is 8 Here Bering moves from an egocentric theory to an allocentric representation which will be addressed below. 9 Bloom’s theory was offered as an interpretation for other experimental findings not directly related to afterlife beliefs (see, Bloom, 2004; Valerie A. Kuhlmeier, Bloom, & Wynn, 2004; Valerie A. Kuhlmeier, Wynn, & Bloom, 2004).

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 6 to endow and to pay more attention to our conspecifics mental states than to their physical, bodily states. This means when it comes to thinking about and identifying our conspecifics, physical, bodily states play a negligible role in such processing. In the case of afterlife beliefs specifically, Bloom argues that this cognitive default easily allows humans to separate the mind (as the container of mental states) from the body. Thus, at the time of biological death of the physical body of any of our conspecifics, the folk naturally and intuitively believe that the deceased individual continues her mental life as a disembodied mind. Afterlife beliefs, according to Bloom, are created by the interaction between the folk physics and folk psychology modules. Since the folk psychology module, ceteris paribus, serves a more important and dominant role in thinking about and identifying an individual, humans can easily accommodate the belief that the individual survives the death of his physical body since the body played only a negligible role in such processing during life. Moreover, because the folk psychology module plays such a dominant role in processing information about ourselves, Bloom proposes that this places a restriction on the way we would imagine ourselves after death. According to Bloom, because the folk physics module plays such a negligible role in processing who we are, we can easily imagine the complete destruction of our physical body; what we find far more difficult (perhaps even impossible) to imagine, however, is that our mind (soul) dies. In fact, Bloom goes farther: He argues that humans view themselves as minds, and minds alone, which possess bodies; the body, therefore, plays no role in maintaining the identity of a person.10 This dynamic allows Bloom to endorse a strong claim: He argues that humans are intuitive Cartesian substance dualists. Even though Bloom’s dissection between the mind and the body is not wholly instep with Descartes’ formulation,11 Bloom nonetheless accepts the stronger claims of Cartesian substance dualism such that humans intuitively endorse the following propositions: the mind is an immaterial substance; humans’ personal identity is conferred by their minds, and minds alone; that the mind is intensionally identical with the soul; and that when one’s body dies, she continues existence as a disembodied, immaterial mind. Therefore, according to Bloom, humans intuitively represent afterliving deceased as the same individual even though that individual is now wholly a nonphysical disembodied soul who is only endowed with mental states.

10 Bloom not only makes the descriptive claim that humans do, in fact, view themselves as disembodied mind/souls after death, but also a normative claim that all (even young children) should view the survival of death in this fashion. 11 In Meditation V of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (1641/1993) lists his catalogue of things the mind contains and does. Where Bloom’s formulation differs with Descartes is that Bloom (following Bering) includes perception with the bodily states, and includes emotions as mental states. For Descartes, however, perception was thinking, and emotions were products of the body, not the mind.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 7 The influence of Bloom’s account of the representational structure of the afterliving deceased—and supernatural agents, in general—as disembodied minds cannot be overstated. Several of the researchers discussed here have sought to align or compare their theory of representational structure and content of the afterliving deceased to Bloom’s intuitive Cartesian substance dualism, and for many of them, Bloom’s intuitive Cartesian substance dualism is synonymous with folk dualism (cf., Bering, 2006b; Dennett, 2006; Fiala, et al., 2011; Huang, Cheng, & Zhu, 2013; Nichols, 2008; Pereira, et al., 2012; Slingerland, 2012; Slingerland & Chudek, 2011; Uhlmann, Poelhlman, & Bargh, 2008; Wellman & Johnson, 2007). THE IMAGINATIVE OBSTACLE AND FOLK DUALISM Nichols (2007) introduces another novel cognitive mechanism in an attempt to explain Bering’s findings which he claims could be responsible for humans’ predisposition to accept afterlife beliefs. Nichols’ proposed mechanism, the imaginative obstacle, has a similar structure to Bering’s simulation constraint, but has a different imaginative scope. According to Nichols’ study, in the same way that our mind has an obstacle to entertaining the belief that contains the straightforward contradiction “it is the present, and I do not exist,” our mind encounters a similar obstacle in the imagination in entertaining the proposition, “there is a present in which I do not exist.” From this, Nichols manipulates the temporal scope of the imaginative enterprise and argues that humans have an obstacle to imagining the proposition, “it is the future, and I do not exist.” Thus, when we attempt to imagine a time after our biological death, our mind encounters an obstacle to imagining that “it is that future and we no longer exist.” This imaginative obstacle, Nichols argues, facilitates a belief in the afterlife, but does not mandate one. With this latter argument, Nichols attempts to tackle a problem that most other theories regarding the cognitive mechanism for afterlife beliefs ignore—namely, while these theories attempt to explain why beliefs concerning continued postmortem existence are pancultural, they fail to explain why that same mechanism does not mandate pancultural pre-vital existence.12 In other words, most of the cognitive mechanisms that researchers have suggested are responsible for afterlife beliefs should also have mandated that humans have some sort of pre-life belief which maintains their existence as well. Yet, while afterlife beliefs are pancultural, pre-life beliefs are not. Nichols response here is two-fold: first, his suggested mechanism, as stated, only facilitates afterlife beliefs, it does not mandate them; and second, he 12 While this is similar to the Epicurean asymmetry problem (discussed below) regarding fear of death versus the lack of fear regarding the time before we were born, Nichols formulation has a different scope in that it discusses the cognitive mechanisms involved in afterlife beliefs, and this is something not considered in the standard formulation of the asymmetry problem (cf., Feldman, 2004; Kaufman, 2004; Nagel, 1970; Rosenbaum, 2004; Suits, 2004)

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 8 holds with Nagel (1970) that afterlife beliefs are more prominent because humans are evolutionarily designed to be future-looking creatures. Although Nichols does not provide us with a detailed account of what he takes the representational structure of afterlife beliefs to be, it is clear from later publications that Nichols endorses Bloom’s intuitive Cartesian substance dualism model for afterlife beliefs (Fiala, et al., 2011; Nichols, 2008). This presents a difficulty for Nichols that he fails to address and resolve: intuitive Cartesian dualism takes the mind and the soul to be synonyms, yet Nichols also advances the research by Richert and Harris (2006, 2008) that demonstrates that (Western) humans do not believe the mind and the soul are intensionally identical: on the contrary, they are conceptualized to be ontologically and functionally distinct. As we shall see below, Richert and Harris’ research presents a strong challenge to the intuitive Cartesian substance dualist representational structure championed by Bloom. CONFLICTING COGNITIVE SYSTEMS THEORY AND FOLK DUALISM In a replication of Bering’s 2002 study with slight variation, Bek and Lock (2011) attempt to determine whether Bering’s simulation constraint is adequate for explaining afterlife beliefs. In particular, they examined Bering’s delineation between DIA and EIA states.13 What Bek and Lock found was that visual and auditory sub-types of perceptual activities were more closely groups with the DIA states. On the other hand, taste, touch, and smell appeared to more closely correlate with the EAI states. Furthermore, they argue from this, if one were to compare token states to token states across the types—that is, directly compared the token psychobiological state “is thirsty for water” to a token epistemic state “knows today is Monday,” then it is less clear that either of those token states would be more difficult to imagine the absence of. What needs to be compared, they point out, is whether sub-type states such as proprioception (psychobiological) and memory (epistemic) show any substantial differences in imaginability. Though Bek and Lock’s results were far from conclusive, they do give pause for endorsing Bering’s simulation constraint.14 Finally, in agreement with Antony (2006), they argue that Bering’s simulation constraint cannot explain the emergence of afterlife beliefs because in order to simulate what it is like to survive biological death, one must first have the accompanying 13 Bek and Lock also studied priming effects on discontinuity responses, but we will defer discussion on this until the discussion of Harris and colleagues’ studies on context sensitivity. 14 They also suggest that their findings do not support a straightforward Cartesian interpretation either. A study by Huang, et al. (2013) in China found similar discrepancies in category effects. They are not fully included in this review since they did not explicitly propose any causal cognitive mechanisms or representational structures for afterlife beliefs. We should also mention that Bek and Lock’s, as well as Huang et al., further subcategorization of states, particularly perceptual states was influenced by (Cohen, Burdett, Knight, & Barrett, 2011) studies on person-body reasoning. Since these later studies did not directly address the causal mechanisms or representational structures of afterlife beliefs specifically, they are not addressed here.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 9 propositional belief that it is possible to survive death—otherwise, there is nothing for one to simulate.15 To explain the genesis of afterlife beliefs and their representational structure, Bek and Lock harken back to Boyer’s (2001) conflicting systems hypothesis and further subdivide Bering’s bodily and psychological categories. They argue, in-step with Boyer, that afterlife beliefs can be accounted for by a conflict that arises in the case of death between our everyday reasoning processes. In particular, the conflict arises between processing animacy and intuitive psychology and social cognition. Whereas the animacy system is susceptible to the consequences of biological death—that is, that the physical body is now both insensate and inanimate—the particular person-file system constructed from the interaction between intuitive psychology and social cognition continues to produce inferences about the deceased individual. In other words, the animacy system stops processing overtly physical cues from the decedent’s physical body, but the intuitive psychology and social cognition processing areas continue to process the decedents (supposed) mental activity. But, this does not mean that the representational structure of the afterliving deceased falls along the broad dual categories that Bering initially proposed. Instead, Bek and Lock (2011, p. 15) propose a further subdivision of categories in tripartite fashion between those states that are “tied to the body (biological, psychobiological and some perceptual states), those acquired via the body but that may be considered to have non-physiological properties (epistemic states and particular perceptual states) and those that might be treated as being independent of embodiment (emotions and desires).”16 While this representational structure is not straightforwardly dualistic, the rough division is still between the body and the mind: the distinction here is that Bek and Lock allow for a certain amount of overlap between the divisions which had not previously been considered by Bering’s initial dualistic framework. This perhaps makes their divisions a bit more “common-sense” than Bering’s more rigid folk dualism.

THE INTERACTION OF SELF-AWARENESS, THEORY OF MIND, AND CULTURAL AFTERLIFE BELIEFS AND SELF-BODY DUALISM.

Pereira, et al. (2012) performed a much needed experiment to fill a lacuna in previous research regarding afterlife beliefs; namely, do people reason about their own survival of biological death differently than they do that of others? Previous research discussed above addressed afterlife beliefs from the subject’s perspective of how they viewed the survival of biological death by 15 Antony (2006) argues that this belief must at least be held implicitly. It is likely that this objection, in part, rests on a conflation of the concepts of biological death and secular death. 16 Bek and Lock fail to consider, as do most other theorists, that there might be additional states attributed to the deceased such as spiritual and moral states.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 10 others (an allocentric view).17 The novel experiment of Pereira, et al. asked participants how (and whether) they viewed the possibility of their own survival of biological death (an egocentric view; the importance of this distinction will become clear in a later section). Their questions were targeted to discover how the participants represented themselves after death (hereafter, the dead-I). In the context of a semi-structured interview, participants were first asked to imagine what it would be like for them to be dead. If the participants’ initial responses did not relate to the dead-I (e.g., they might have replied simply, “it is dark”) the participants were asked a follow-up question intended to extract any potential (and assumed implicit) representation of the dead-I which asked questions of the sort, “if you were to imagine yourself in an afterlife, regardless of whether you believe in one or not, what would you be like there?”18 Once the researcher was confident that the participant was representing the dead-I through these follow-up questions, the participant was given a questionnaire to complete which detailed various states that an individual might incur, and asked to weigh them on a four-point scale as to their degree of body dependence (e.g., to what extent “feeling hungry” or “being in love” required possessing a body”). A number of interesting results came from this study. First, from the semi-structured interview, coders were asked to examine whether the participant described her future afterliving self as the subject of experience and action, felt to be independent of the physical body (the Subject-Self), or as an object, or embodied image of oneself (the Object-Self). In other words, the researchers were interested in whether the participants continued to represent themselves as physically embodied, perhaps continuing to exist within their now deceased body, or did they view themselves as observers of their own bodily demise.19 Overwhelmingly, 17 This is not wholly true in the case of Nichols (2007): Nichols discussed Bering and colleagues’ (J. Bering, 2002; J. Bering & Bjorklund, 2004; J. Bering, Blasi, & Bjorklund, 2005) experiments and interpretations as well as Bloom’s interpretation of those at length. These experiments all focused on how participants view the survival of death by another, rather than participants’ intuitive thoughts as to their own survival. Nichols then discusses the role of the indexical “I” in cases of imagining one’s self in the distant future, presumably after one is dead. What Nichols fails to explain is how he moves from the other of those experiments to the “I” in the imagination. This is especially important since Nichols agrees that the previous experiments demonstrated that we intuitively believe that others survive death. Nichols lacks an explanation for how we go from believing that we ourselves are immortal, which his theory seeks to explain, to how we believe that others are immortal without inferential reasoning (see, Hodge, 2011b for a full discussion of this explanatory gap). 18 Pereira, et al. (2012) as well as Bering (2002) queried participants about their explicit beliefs concerning the afterlife. While there are important observations to be made regarding correlations between the participants’ explicit beliefs and their implicit beliefs revealed through the experiments, such observations are beyond our present purpose. 19 This distinction does not get at the heart of the matter as to whether participants imagined their Subject-Self as embodied in any fashion. Pereira, et al. (2012) only probed the distinction between the Subject-Self and the physical body and failed to probe whether the participants viewed themselves with an imagined body. This is important because of the argument made by Tye (1983) which concluded that imagining what it is like to have out-of-body experiences is not the same as imagining oneself (the imagined you) as disembodied. Demonstrating the imaginability and conceivability of the former does

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 11 and more importantly significantly, participants represented themselves in accord with the Subject-Self rather than the Object-Self—that is, they represented themselves as now detached from their physical body, yet still able to have thoughts, intentions and experiences in a continuous cohesive fashion rather than representing themselves as ensnared in a now insensate, inanimate corpse. Second, Pereira et al.’s experiments produced results consistent with the findings of Bek and Lock (2011) and Huang, et al. (2013) and inconsistent with Bering’s simulation constraint hypothesis (2002); specifically that vision and audition continued for the dead-I, and were scaled as being (more) body-independent experiences. Third, the study found that mere conceived bodily independence was not enough to guarantee that a state was imagined to be present for the dead-I. For instance, states such as decision-making did not receive significant continuity responses. Anomalies such as this lead Pereira et al. to suggest that explicit beliefs, or imaginative representations, adopted from cultural input concerning what the afterlife is supposed to be like influence the participants’ responses. Nevertheless, Pereira et al. maintain that the predisposition to accept afterlife beliefs via cultural transmission relies on intuitive cognitive artifacts of the human mind that fails to see (or infer) that biological death mandates the annihilation of oneself. With these findings in hand, Pereira et al. suggest that the cognitive mechanisms which predispose humans to accept cultural afterlife beliefs are self-awareness and theory of mind. The interaction between these two psychological mechanisms prompt the intuitive acceptance of cultural concepts such as the immortal soul20—that is, self-awareness promotes the conception of the self as continuous beyond biological death (the dead-I), and theory of mind provides this dead-I with the needed mental states. How this dead-I is structurally represented and what states from theory of mind are attributed to it can be heavily influenced by the culture in which the subject lives, but the predisposition to accept that the self survives the biological death of the body with certain mental states intact universally underlies cultural representations of the of the dead-I and perhaps all other afterliving deceased. ENSOULMENT THEORY Ensoulment theory is hard to pin down precisely because to date it has been underspecified in both cognitive mechanism and representational structure. For our purposes, we focus on how ensoulment theory challenges intuitive folk dualism theory as described above. The starkest contrast between ensoulment theory and intuitive folk dualism theory is that the former claims not entail the latter. Moreover, whether the distinction between the Subject-Self and the Object-Self addresses the concern raised by Hodge (2011b) as to whether the researchers are collapsing the distinction between the “I” doing the imagining and the “I” that is imagined is unclear. 20 Although Pereira et al. do not discuss this explicitly, they do seem to implicitly assume throughout their discussion that the immortal soul and the mind are intensionally identical.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 12 that the mind and the soul are not intensionally identical—that is, the soul (or something like it cross-culturally) is a fundamentally different concept than is the mind. The soul is conceived as having a different ontogenesis and functions than the mind has. Additionally, the soul is conceived as the essence of the individual which survives death and preserves the decedent’s thick identity. The most vocal proponents of this theory have been Richert and Harris (2006, 2008); however, their findings have been incorporated into research programs of others such as Astuti and Harris (2008), Hodge (2011a) and M. Roazzi, Nyhof, and Johnson (2013). PSYCHOLOGICAL ESSENTIALISM AND THE SOUL One of the earliest challenges to the folk-dualist interpretations of afterlife beliefs was levied by Richert and Harris (2006; 2008; see also Richert & Smith, 2012). Their experiments were designed to demonstrate that, even in Western societies heavily influenced by the interaction of Cartesian philosophy and Christianity, the folk do not intuitively represent the mind as intensionally identical to the soul; thus, a straightforward dualist interpretation of folk afterlife beliefs was unwarranted. Across their studies, both children and adult participants demonstrated that they conceived of the soul as being different functionally and ontologically than the mind. With regard to function, both children and adults reasoned that the mind performed more cognitive functions (e.g., solving problems) whereas the soul performed more spiritual functions (e.g., providing essential essence in the afterlife and providing a connection with the divine).21 With regard to the ontological distinction between the mind and the soul, participants were significantly more likely to express doubt about the existence of the soul over the mind, to claim that the soul existed prior to conception whereas the mind did not, and most importantly, to claim that the soul exists beyond death whereas the mind did not.22 Adding to these distinctions, M. M. Roazzi, Johnson, Nyhof, Koller, and Roazzi (2015) contend that there is an additional disembodied/immaterial substance/energy which the folk intuit to compose the afterliving deceased—namely, spirit: specifically vital energy. The authors describe this vital energy in terms of vitalism (a life-force/energy animating all things) and essentialism (a (individuating?) substance), and they argue that a domain general folk biological intuition underlies this concept. Thus, a person is composed, in their view, of an immaterial/disembodied mind, soul and spirit. It is not clear whether the authors intend spirit/vital energy to be unique to each token, type or shared across living things (and even non- 21 Another interesting finding from these studies is that participants conceived of the mind as more ontologically and functionally similar to the brain than to the soul. 22 One might be tempted to think that this implies that the folk do not think that the soul can have mental states. This inference only works, however, if one makes the theoretically and conceptually rich assumption that mentalizing can only occur in a mind. For a full critique of this assumption, see Hodge (in revision)

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 13 living things). Regardless, the authors see the soul concept as provided by Richert and colleagues above to be the component that conveys thick identity; thus, even if each spirit was individuated, it would only convey a thin identity to the afterliving deceased. While there is certainly some cross-cultural evidence that religions across time and space have committed to similar tripartite compositions of humans, it is not at all clear that the “spirit” component is univocal (enough) to be considered a singular concept as the authors suggest. Until that can be demonstrated, advancing claims of vital energy’s “intuitiveness” is premature. Nevertheless, these findings have strongly challenged the widely accepted intuitive folk-dualist interpretation of afterlife beliefs. Not only do they demonstrate that the folk do not conceive of the soul as intensionally identical to the mind, but they also demonstrated that the mind is much more closely associated with its physical counterpart, the brain, than intuitive folk-dualist interpretations would allow. Moreover, they add a spiritual and moral component to the structural representation of the afterliving deceased which was not explored in previous empirical designs.

Yet, even though these findings do present a serious challenge to intuitive folk-dualist interpretations, Richert and colleagues leave us an ill-defined sketch of the both the structure of the representation of the afterliving deceased and the cognitive mechanism which is responsible. It leaves certain questions unanswered as to whether the soul is viewed as a container for the individual, or whether it is the “essential” individual herself. Moreover, does the soul have the capability (and if so, how?) to carry out mental operations such as thinking, remembering and desiring? To what extent is this “soul” viewed as immaterial, or does it have bodily properties intertwined in its representation? Part of the problem with narrowing this down farther is Richert and colleagues’ invocation of an underspecified and underdetermined cognitive mechanism, psychological essentialism. As mentioned previously, all of the theories discussed in this article employ the overarching theory of psychological essentialism, but they are more specific in terms of what the “essence” of whatever the object under consideration (in this case, the afterliving deceased) would be. Psychological essentialism is a broad spectrum theoretical mechanism that proposes merely that humans generalize from tokens to types by considering one or more (usually shared) substances or properties to be essential to making the token the type that it is. What it does not disclose is what those essential properties might be. Addressing cognitive mechanisms of a more specific and determined scope would be of more help in uncovering the representational structure of the afterliving deceased that humans hold.

This is not to say that providing empirical support for the claim that humans (at least in the West) essentialize themselves and others as a soul is unimportant. On the contrary, it

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 14 provides a strong indication that intuitive folk-dualist theories which essentialize humans as minds maybe on the wrong track. The afterliving deceased seem to be conceptualized as more than disembodied minds. CONTEXTUAL THEORIES The core claim of contextual theories is that afterlife beliefs are significantly more likely to be elicited (i.e., activated) in humans in certain contexts over others.23 For instance, an individual would be more likely to state that another survives death in a religious context than a secular one. In other words, when humans are primed within certain contexts, they are more likely to assert the survivability of physical death than within other contexts. Researchers have thus far proposed a few such contexts: secular versus religious (Astuti, 2011; Astuti & Harris, 2008; Harris, 2011; Harris & Giménez, 2005; Lane, Liqi, Evans, & Wellman, in press); mortality salience (Goldenberg, 2005; Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 1997; Vail III, et al., 2010; Vallacher, 1997); and social death versus biological death (Hodge, 2011a, 2012a, 2016).24

While some have suggested that contextual theories do away with the need to posit a cognitive predispositional mechanism for afterlife beliefs, there is nothing in the contextual theories themselves that oppose such a mechanism. Instead, it may be the case that certain cultural contexts enhance one’s natural predisposition (i.e., cognitive mechanism) to accept afterlife beliefs.25 For instance, the experiments of Lane et al. (Lane, et al., in press), Harris and Giménez (2005) and Astuti and Harris (2008) were conducted (in part) on young children, and following Evans (2001) and Sperber (1996), it seems reasonable to suggest that children would not be able to avail themselves of public (cultural) representations if such representations did not already possess an analogous intuitive belief system. The import of these debates centers on whether humans have more than one representational structure of death which are opposed, whether one representational structure is, or becomes, more dominant, and whether and how 23 The role of context in formation and expression of belief has long been investigated in psychology (see, Gentner & Gentner, 1983). 24 It might be argued that folk-dualist theories are contextual theories as well in that they propose that mental contexts prompt more continuity responses from participants than do physical (bodily) contexts. Moreover, Bering (J. Bering, 2002; J. Bering, et al., 2005) has argued (in contradistinction to Harris and Giménez (2005)) that as humans approach adulthood they are more likely to endorse the biological (more accurately, secular) conception of death which entails the annihilation of the individual at the time of death. Since we have already discussed these theories at length, we wish only to make the reader aware of this possibility. 25 The fact that young children across the various studies considered here have claimed that certain states continue for the deceased has been taken as strong evidence by some that there is such a cognitive predispotion (J. Bering, 2002, 2006; J. Bering, et al., 2005; Hodge, 2011a, 2016), Lane, et al. (in press) have hinted, however, that there may be no cognitive predisposition present. Continuity responses for certain states after death by the youngest children may simply be the result of not having a fully developed concept of biological death, particularly an understanding of death’s finality. This claim also rests on a conflation between the biological conception and the secular conception of death discussed below.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 15 these opposing representational conceptual structures are reconciled in the human mind (Hodge, 2012a, 2016; Lane, et al., in press). Another central question is the role that one’s culture plays in the formation and expression of afterlife beliefs. CULTURAL TRANSMISSION AND CULTURAL LEARNING Bering’s original hypothesis contended that as humans developed cognitively they would be more likely to endorse a secular conception of death, which entailed the terminus of the individual, rather than a religious conception of death, which entailed the continued existence of a deceased individual in the afterlife. In contradistinction to this hypothesis, Harris and Giménez (2005) and Astuti and Harris (2008) conducted cross-cultural experiments which, in part, demonstrated that as humans age the religious conception of death becomes more prominent over the course of normal cognitive development.26 These experiments provided children and adults one of two vignettes; one in which the participants were focused on the physical reality of death, and the other which presented the death in a religious context. What the researchers found was that the older the participant was, the more likely she was to provide continuity responses and justification for those responses that were aligned with the religious conception of death over the secular conception of death.27 Although they affirm that even the youngest children demonstrate a propensity toward dualistic thinking in both contexts of death, they suggest that exposure to cultural beliefs and rituals regarding the afterlife enhance and supplement this cognitive disposition (Astuti, 2011; Harris, 2011) which in turn makes the religious conception of death dominant among adults. Nevertheless, for both children and adults, presenting the death of an individual in a secular context increased discontinuity responses for both mental and physical process, albeit less so for adults than children. Additionally, by incorporating elements not only from Harris and Giménez (2005) but also Richert and Harris (2006, 2008), Astuti and Harris (2008) investigated whether the Vezo of Madagascar (from children to adults) reasoned differently about the continuity of the soul, mind 26 Because of the prevalence of religious ideas and rituals surrounding death, it may be that the religious conception of death becomes chronically accessible (see, Lambert & Chasteen, 1999) due to frequent activation through exposure to religious beliefs and rituals in most cultures. Astuti (2011) argues something similar to this to explain how children come to adopt the religious conception in Madagascar through religious rituals concerning ancestors. One significant problem for this transmission hypothesis, however, is that a recent study (Misailidi & Kornilaki, 2015) found no significant correlation between parents afterlife beliefs and their children’s continuity/discontinuity responses. This, in combination with the similar findings across studies and cultures about how children reason about deceased individuals, does seem to suggest that there is, at least, a cognitive predisposition toward children representing the deceased as surviving death with certain abilities intact. 27 It is important to note here that, although Harris and Giménez (2005) are careful to distinguish between the biological and secular conception of death, Astuti and Harris (Astuti, 2011; Astuti & Harris, 2008; Harris, 2011) later collapse this distinction and treat the two concepts as synonymous, which we argue below is not the case.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 16 and body after death.28 Their results showed that indeed the participants thought that the soul was more likely to continue than the mind, and that the mind was more likely to continue than the physical body. Moreover, in support of their enculturation hypothesis, adults gave significantly fewer discontinuity responses than children for both the soul and the mind. These findings seem to indicate (in contrast to Astuti (2011) and Harris (2011)) that humans have propensity toward tripartite thinking when it comes to human individuals which is further supplemented by enculturation, but the authors do not follow this line of inquiry. With these considerations, it is hard to pin down what Harris, Astuti and Giménez hold to be responsible for afterlife beliefs, and what the cognitive mechanism, if any, might be. While they seem to tentatively accept folk dualism as the cognitive mechanism, Astuti and Harris’ (2008) experiment seems to favor more an ensoulment hypothesis. Nevertheless, the thrust of their research was centered more on the representational structure of afterlife beliefs which they take to strongly influenced by cultural transmission in the contexts of religious testimony (Harris & Giménez, 2005) and ritual (Astuti, 2011). This hypothesis, in contrast to assertions of strong cognitive predispositions which exert strong constraints on how the afterliving deceased is conceived, allows for far greater religious diversity in afterlife representational structures while still allowing for universal trends. DEVELOPMENT OF THE BIOLOGICAL CONCEPTION OF DEATH AND CULTURAL TRANSMISSION Lane, et al. (in press) suggest that the spike across experiments, including their own, of continuity responses among the youngest children (3 to 5 year-olds) might not be due to a cognitive predisposition toward afterlife beliefs, but rather because the young do not have a fully developed biological conception of death. Thus, the youngest children fail to understand the finality of death with which a physical and mental processes cease. This is the reason, they suggest, that the youngest children across studies have given responses that contrast with older participants, specifically that the youngest children provide more continuity responses for biological, particularly psychobiological (e.g., hungry), states. As the children grow older, they begin to grasp the finality of biological death. Whether, and to what extent, the children will continue to provide continuity responses for individuals after they die is largely dependent on the culture in which the children are raised. For instance, Lane et al,, (in press) found that older children (7 to 8 year-olds) in the United States, where religion is openly practiced were more likely to continue the pattern of continuity responses for deceased individuals than were 28 Astuti and Harris (2008) use the word “spirit” in the text, and it is meant to by synonymous with “soul.” Given our previous discussion regarding Roazzi et al. (2015), we have used the word “soul” to avoid any confusion between spirit as soul versus spirit as vital energy.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 17 children of the same age in China where religious expression has been, and still is, suppressed. Thus, once the biological conception of death is developmentally attained, unless a cultural device for believing that humans can survive death is provided, children will believe that all activity, both biological and psychological, will cease at death. There are two things for which this study does not account: (1) the distinction between the biological conception of death and the secular conception of death as we will discuss below; and (2) why their findings about which states received continuity responses were stable across the wide variety of experiments.29 While (1) may confuse a contextual element that is central to the ubiquity of afterlife beliefs, (2) suggests that secular and religious contextual manipulations in narratives cannot alone account for the significant trend across experiments to continue to attribute certain states (e.g., desirous, emotional, etc.) than others (e.g., biological, and certain perceptual abilities). TERROR MANAGEMENT THEORY Terror management theory (TMT) predates the cognitive theories that we have discussed thus far (beginning with Becker, 1973), and in a strict sense, is not a cognitive theory, but a psychological one inasmuch as TMT does not specifically concern itself with cognitive mechanisms and processing tasks (but see, Jong, Halberstadt, & Bluemke, 2012; Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Solomon, 1999 in which both groups of authors advocate a dual-process model of dealing with mortality salience and death anxiety, but are silent with regard to cognitive mechanisms and processing of afterlife beliefs themselves). TMT’s central claim is that because humans are self-aware, we know, both consciously and unconsciously, that we will inevitably die and face absolute annihilation.30 This knowledge creates such psychological trauma within us that unless there were ways to ameliorate the existential fear arising from this terrifying piece of knowledge we would succumb to debilitating fearful anxiety and fail to do what is necessary to live. To assuage this debilitating terror, humans are predisposed to accept and believe culturally transmitted worldviews which promise literal and symbolic immortality. From whence those cultural worldviews first arise is not addressed by TMT theorists. All that is 29 There is another interesting finding that the authors do not address: why do children’s continuity responses seem to follow a clear pattern of endorsing not only psychological states by also psychobiological states while maintaining that biological functions simpliciter cease? Lane et al.’s findings stand in sharp contrast to Misailidi and Kornilaki (2015) who, as we saw above, found that children raised by Greek Orthodox parents not only displayed the similar reasoning patterns as has been found in many of the other studies discussed here, but also that the children’s’ responses had no significant correlation to parental testimony. 30 Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski (1991, p. 96 n. 4, emphasis original) clearly state, “Whenever we refer to the terror of death, we do not mean the immense fear of death per se, but rather of death as an absolute annihilation.” As will be addressed in full below, this rests on a conflation between the biological conception of death and the secular conception of death.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 18 important for TMT’s purposes is that these cultural worldviews are palliative toward the potentially debilitating death-anxiety of the knowledge of our inevitable annihilation at death. Religious afterlife beliefs which promise literal immortality are the most effective of these defenses because they are easily created and transmitted given humans’ natural cognitive proclivities, provide for social solidarity, and, most importantly, providing necessary emotional security to overcome the fear of death as absolute annihilation. To the extent that TMT theorists suggest any universal representational structure to afterlife beliefs, they propose mind-body dualism, such that an individual survives death as a disembodied mind, and her physical body is abandoned given its close cognitive association with death (Goldenberg, 2005; Goldenberg, Cox, Pyszczynski, Greenberg, & Sheldon, 2002; Solomon, et al., 1991, 1997; Vail III, et al., 2010; Vallacher, 1997). TMT is a contextual theory insomuch as it proposes that afterlife beliefs, whether literal or symbolic, are presented, defended and reinforced whenever humans are reminded of their own mortality (called “mortality salience”). TMT theorists have demonstrated across a wide variety of experiments that when mortality is made salient through either explicit or implicit means that humans seek to bolster their self-esteem through reinforcing their cultural in-group alliances, particularly those through which the participants are offered immortality. Even though TMT states that our potentially debilitating fear of death is with us all the time, it is contexts in which that fear of inevitable annihilation begins to rise to the level of conscious awareness that humans’ worldview defense mechanisms rise in a stalwart and bulwark fashion to mitigate the overwhelming fear that would immobilize us. Without this psychological defense mechanism in such contexts, we would be so petrified we would fail to do what is necessary to preserve our life.

OFFLINE SOCIAL REASONING, THE INTENTIONAL STANCE AND SOCIAL EMBODIMENT Hodge (2008, 2011a, 2011b, 2012a, 2016) has offered an alternative theoretical interpretation of the evidence gathered across the numerous experimental studies investigating folk afterlife beliefs. According to Hodge, the continuity responses witnessed by experimenters were the product of two mundane psychological processes— offline social reasoning and the intentional stance. Offline social reasoning is the process by which we think about absent conspecifics. It is an imaginative process in which think about the absent individual as somewhere doing something of social significance.31 These imaginings depend upon us taking the intentional stance toward the absent individual, meaning that we attribute certain beliefs, desires, goals and

31 Offline social reasoning plays an important role in our ability to plan and facilitate future interactions between ourselves and our conspecifics based on certain desires and goals.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 19 some degree of rationality to her. Hodge has argued that when experimenters asked questions that included social elements (e.g., loves her mother) and intentional states (e.g., is hungry) they activated the respondents’ offline social reasoning, thus they intuitively imagined the decedent as somewhere doing something in the same way that they would imagine a living absent individual. This, according to Hodge, is why the afterlife is believed to be a socially active place.32 Further, to imagine these individuals as socially active requires that body parts necessary to engage in (whatever) social activity are represented by the imaginer. This representation is what Hodge calls social embodiment. This social embodiment plays two important roles: it allows the imagined individual to socially interact and it enables the imaginer to recognize the individual—thus, the imagined individual will maintain distinguishing characteristics, both mental and physical.33 Hodge has argued that not only is this interpretation faithful to the empirical evidence, but also to the wide array of cross-cultural anthropological evidence on how people represent the deceased. Across the religious spectrum, afterliving deceased are represented as embodied beings who continue to interact with the living and their fellow afterliving deceased in a variety of ways—from eating ritual meals, to appearing in recognized form, to embracing their afterliving deceased fellows upon their arrival to the afterlife. The afterliving deceased are represented as socially active embodied beings. They “keep” the body parts required to perform such interactions. Thus, according to Hodge, if the activity imaged being performed by the afterliving deceased has social significance, people are likely to imaginatively accommodate it.

As mentioned, Hodge’s theory has been reverse-engineered from the existing evidence as an alternative explanation for the experimental findings. To date, no direct experimental evidence has been offered on Hodge’s theory. Indirect evidence, however, has been slowly gathering in support. For instance, Bek and Lock (2011) and Huang, et al. (2013) found that continuity responses for auditory and visual perception increased when a social element was added (e.g., the afterliving deceased watched over his loved ones). Lane, et al. (in press) found that removing social elements from all the questions significantly lowered the participants’ continuity responses across the board. Questions regarding intentional states, however, were still significantly more likely to garner continuity responses than nonintentional states. Finally, although not specifically related to afterlife beliefs, De Cruz (2013) found that participants were 32 Hodge also argues that this is also why humans cross-culturally describe death as a change in location, from this life to the afterlife. 33 This coincides with White’s (2015b)findings, discussed below, concerning people’s intuitions in establishing the identity of a reincarnated individual as well. The top distinguishing characteristics were autobiographical memories (mental) and unique physical marks such as birthmarks.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 20 significantly more likely to represent supernatural agents as socially embodied in Hodge’s sense, than as disembodied minds (Bloom, 2004) or fully anthropomorphized agents (Guthrie, 1993).

REINCARNATION All of the research so far discussed has only dealt with the context of how an afterliving person would be represented in an ethereal afterlife shortly after death by the living. While there is strong cross-cultural evidence this sort of initial representational displacement of the deceased is universal, it is certainly does not account for the entire wide spectrum of afterlife beliefs. Another widespread afterlife representation is reincarnation where, after the deceased is initially displaced to some ethereal realm, she returns to Earth in a new embodied state. Conceivably, this new body the individual is to inhabit could be any physical object, from an inanimate object, an artifact, a single-celled organism, a plant, a wild animal, to another human being. Moreover, it is conceivable that the deceased, if reincarnated in human form, could be (re)born on the opposite side of the globe, to a different race and to the opposite sex. Reincarnation afterlife beliefs, therefore, could stand in sharp contrast to the studies we have discussed so far inasmuch as researchers have assumed, to the extent such transformations are conceivable after death, that there would be a great deal of representational continuity—that is, the afterliving deceased would enjoy a great deal of stability in such representations of their personal identity—to the extent that any of these characteristics would be represented at all. Thus, the context of reincarnation afterlife beliefs can reveal important clues for how the living represent and establish the continued identity of the afterliving deceased.

White (2015a, 2015b; Forthcoming, 2009; C. White, Kelly, & Nichols, 2016) has conducted a number of studies which reveal several cross-cultural intuitive biases with regard to maintaining personal identity of the afterliving deceased in the context of reincarnation. First, among those who claim to remember previous lives, White and colleagues (2016) found that their believed episodic autobiographical memories from those previous lives were instrumental in their conviction. They argued that the way by which one is convinced that her personal identity is maintained across previous lives to this one is the same (mundane) process by which one perceives personal identity continuity across the years of dramatic physical and psychological changes in a single life span. Episodic autobiographical memories provide an indexical referent by which one feels, believes and claims that a remembered event has happened to one-in-the-same individual. But, when it comes to identifying others who have reincarnated, episodic autobiographical memory is not the only important feature for identifying another as the same again.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 21 When it comes to identifying reincarnated others, White (2015a, 2015b) collected cross-

cultural experimental evidence that distinctive physical characteristics played an equally important role in identifying the reincarnated person.34 Birthmarks, scars, or other distinctive bodily cues that might be (intuitively) used in our everyday experience to recognize a person as “the same again,” are just as important in identifying a reincarnated individual. This finding is especially startling given that having a different body is central to reincarnation beliefs. From this, White argues that both episodic memory and distinctive physical characteristics play a key role in the identity and identification of individuals across the supernatural event of reincarnation. These are, of course, the same mundane social cognitive processes that humans use every day to recognize their conspecifics as “the same again.” Thus, the body is not so easily dispensed with in this system of afterlife belief as folk-dualist theorists would have it. The body still plays a substantial intuitive role in identity and identification of a reincarnated deceased loved one, even though of all the contexts of afterlife beliefs, bodily characteristics should play no such role in reincarnation beliefs. THEMES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH INCOMPATIBILITY ACROSS COGNITIVE MECHANISMS AND REPRESENTATIONAL STRUCTURES We have provided the reader with the table below which we intend to help further clarify the differences and similarities across authors and their proposed cognitive mechanisms and representational structures. Additionally, those authors’ views regarding many of the themes discussed here are presented. [INSERT TABLE HERE]

As we are sure the reader has gleaned, proposed cognitive mechanisms claimed to be responsible for intuitive afterlife beliefs are as plentiful as the researchers. Although certain trends in representational structure (e.g., intuitive folk dualism) seem somewhat stable across experimental findings,35 each group of researchers provide a different explanation for why humans represent the afterliving deceased as they do. We recommend that some future research seek to whittle down the number of cognitive mechanisms rather than continuing to propose new ones. In many cases, this could be easily done in that several of the proposed 34 The evidence was gathered from experiments conducted with both Jains living in India, and undergraduate students in Northern Ireland. 35 This may be due to the fact that none of the methodologies employed thus far have strayed much from Bering’s original formulation. What alternative methodologies might expose is unknown. We take this up below.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 22 mechanisms are incompatible with one another. For instance, Bering’s simulation constraint is incompatible with the cultural learning hypothesis and TMT. Additionally, certain proposed cognitive mechanisms are incompatible with certain proposed representational structures. For instance, several proposed mechanisms mandate the afterliving deceased be represented as disembodied minds, and thus they would be incompatible with ensoulment and socially embodied representations. Thus, if new experimental findings are produced that support ensoulment or social embodiment for the afterliving deceased, cognitive mechanisms that require intuitive folk dualist interpretations can be eliminated. Likewise, researchers can continue to manipulate the experimental questions posed to participants to determine the extent to which and whether intuitive folk dualism is the default representational structure for the afterliving deceased.36

THE ROLE OF THE MIND, BODY AND SOUL Although ample research has now demonstrated that humans differentiate between the ontology and function of the mind, body and the soul, little work has yet been done to answer some fundamental questions. For instance, are souls essences or containers? Do souls think? How do we reconcile the vast archeological records of embodied representations of the afterliving deceased with present experimental findings that suggest dualism? If the afterliving deceased are represented as embodied, how do the folk reconcile that with the physical dead body with which they have disposed? Another interesting experimental question is whether negative mental states (e.g., anger and emotional anguish) would be considered as likely to continue for the afterliving deceased as positive mental states (e.g., love and positive desires). This question is particularly interesting inasmuch as the dead are treated with dread and fear in many cultures. In what contexts would this arise? Would the prior relationship between the now deceased and the living affect emotional response?37 Finally, are there any additional essential components, such as vital energy, that the afterliving deceased are represented to have? To date, none of these important questions have been addressed in full. EGOCENTRIC VERSUS ALLOCENTRIC Some of the cognitive mechanisms proposed rely on how I would imagine my own death first, and then projected that representational structure onto another. This is problematic for two reasons: (1) to date, only one experiment has tested how participants would imagine their own 36 Another issue that should be addressed is whether the novel mechanisms suggested (e.g., the simulation constraint and the imaginative obstacle) serve any purpose other than producing afterlife beliefs. If not, what environmental pressures (e.g., terror management) would give rise to such an isolated mechanism to solve such a specific problem? 37 A related question here is how differently are ghosts and ancestors represented versus a now deceased individual with whom one was close.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 23 death (Pereira, et al., 2012);38 and (2) it needs to be explained how afterlife beliefs can be considered intuitive if they require an inference from my own imagined state of affairs to others. Most of the experimental findings across the gathered research demonstrates that we intuitively believe that others survive death. Thus, the question is whether afterlife beliefs arise from cognitive mechanisms to create a representation of one’s deceased self from which one then projects onto others (egocentric mechanisms), or whether one intuitively create representations of deceased others directly (allocentric mechanism). Inasmuch as the research agrees that humans intuitively believe that others survive death, egocentric mechanisms proposed by Bering, Bloom, Nichols and TMT leave an explanatory gap—that is, how does one get from the representation of oneself surviving death to representing deceased others without an inferential step.39 Intuitive beliefs debar inferential reasoning. Bek and Lock, Hodge and White all propose allocentric mechanisms, thus eliminating the need for any inferential step from oneself to others and supporting the findings that we intuitively believe that others survive death. It may be the case that that there are egocentric mechanisms at play when one thinks about one’s own death and allocentric mechanisms in play when one imagines deceased others, but if the resulting belief representation requires an inferential step, it cannot be considered intuitive. THE ASYMMETRY PROBLEM This problem, initially raised by the classical Roman Epicurean school rhetorically asks why should we fear our future nonexistence after death when we have no fear regarding our prevital nonexistence (Kaufman, 2004; Nagel, 1970)? In other words, why do we seem to be concerned (or terrified!) with our (probable) nonexistence after death when we care so little about our nonexistence before our conception? Despite new research which shows that young children attribute some mental states to themselves prior to their conception (Emmons & Kelemen, 2014), and beliefs in living previous lives through reincarnation, prelife beliefs are not cross-culturally ubiquitous but afterlife beliefs are. The asymmetry problem is particularly acute for egocentric mechanics. Only two of the present afterlife theories address this issue: Nichols’ egocentric imaginative obstacle (2007) and Hodge’s allocentric offline social reasoning (2011b, 2016). Nichols argues that his imaginative obstacle only facilitates, and does not necessitate, afterlife beliefs since it would likewise mandate prelife beliefs. Nichols offers that the former are more prolific than the latter because humans are largely forward looking creatures. Hodge, however, argues that since afterlife beliefs arise from an allocentric mechanism the asymmetry 38 This experiment was a guided, reflective imaginative task undertaken by participants, therefore the findings cannot be taken as intuitive. 39 Albeit that TMT has both an egocentric mechanism and belief, it cannot explain the mounting evidence that humans intuitively believe that others survive death.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 24 problem never arises for oneself. Another individual can only be entertained in offline social reasoning after she is introduced, and offline social reasoning is geared toward negotiating future social interactions with that individual, so we rarely concern ourselves with another’s pre-introduction existence, let alone their prevital existence, and when we do, it is not an intuitive exercise. The other proposed mechanisms here have no answer for this psychological phenomenon. BIOLOGICAL VERSUS SECULAR CONCEPTIONS OF DEATH As noted in regard to several of the researchers above, it is commonly assumed that humans come to understand death as the annihilation of the individual. Contrariwise, Hodge (2012a, 2016) has argued this assumption is based on a conflation between the concepts of biological death and secular death. The biological conception of death allows humans to distinguish between living bodies and dead ones and only pertains to what happens to the physical body at the time of death, and makes no mention of the fate of the individual at that time (H. C. Barrett & Behne, 2005; Cox, Garrett, & Graham, 2005; Speece & Sandor, 1984). The secular conception of death, however, contains an additional scientific (materialist) assumption that the mental activities are dependent on the brain, and thus when the brain ceases to function so does the mind; therefore, this latter conception of death entails that the individual is annihilated at the time of bodily death. The psychological and anthropological literature to date, however, does not support the claim that the folk endorse the secular conception of death, but rather they endorse the individual as capable of surviving biological death, albeit in a different location. It has never been demonstrated that the secular conception of death is widely believed intuitively or otherwise, and given the immense anthropological evidence of the proliferation of afterlife beliefs among all human cultures, it is more likely that secular conception of death is never developed in the vast majority of humans.

Teasing apart these conceptions and empirically testing the assumption of whether humans conceive of death as the annihilation of the individual is crucial for many of the theories discussed here. It is perhaps most dire for TMT. If conceiving of death as the annihilation of the individual is not a cross-cultural phenomenon, then the very core process—extreme terror of our own death—that TMT suggests cultural beliefs in an afterlife serve to mitigate is dismissed. Yet, given that all the experiments across numerous cultures have shown that humans—from the youngest to the oldest—intuitively believe that others survive death, it is highly improbable that this assumption bears weight.40 In this same vein, TMT theorists need to explain how it is 40 As stated in note 29, there is considerable anthropological evidence that death is viewed, cross-culturally, as a change in the deceased individual’s location rather than his annihilation. This too, however, needs to be empirically tested.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 25 that the youngest children who do not yet know they are going to die (biological death’s inevitability and universality) intuitively endorse afterlife beliefs. THE PROBLEM OF THE CORPSE41 Another (implicit) assumption made by many researchers into afterlife beliefs is that the afterliving deceased must be represented as disembodied because the living are most often confronted with the reality of the dead physical body. How can the living attribute a body to the decedent if he is presented the decedent’s inanimate, insensate corpse? This line of reasoning, however, overlooks two important aspects of afterlife beliefs. First, cross-cultural expressions and beliefs about what happens to the individual at death suggest that death is viewed as a change in location of that individual. The decedent is stated (believed) to have departed, gone, and passed-on to the realm of the afterlife. Second, denying the deceased a body overlooks the power of human imagination to provide the deceased with a body in the same manner as has been previously done by the living during his absence.42 Given these two considerations, it is important to discern whether the problem of the corpse does arise for participants intuitively, or only when either pointed out by a skeptic or during their more reflective moments, if at all. Even if looked at from the egocentric perspective, it is still not necessary that the person imagining himself leaving his dead body imagine himself disembodied. There is an imaginative and conceptual difference between imagining oneself having left their body, as if he is floating above his body witnessing events happening after his death, and imagining oneself as disembodied (Sorabji, 2006; Tye, 1983). The former is imagined from one’s own point-of-view, whereas the latter is attempting to imagine oneself devoid of any bodily properties. While the former is acknowledged as conceivable, the latter is not. For if one tries to imagine oneself as wholly disembodied, what is, and could be, one imagining? This question, while rhetorical, demonstrates the immense difficulty in trying to imagine oneself without any bodily form. Again, imagining oneself as floating above one’s body is not the same as imagining oneself as disembodied. Instead, one could supply himself with an imagined body in the same way that he does with others. This too needs to addressed with further research. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF IMAGINATION

41 What I am describing as “the problem of the corpse” should be understood as a qualitatively different problematic than what should ritualistically be done with a dead body as in Boyer (2001). 42 It is not necessary that the individual be absent or deceased for us to imagine that individual as embodied someplace else. In cases such as these, there is no conflict between the body we see before us and the one that we are imagining, nor does it occur to us to think that the individual suddenly has two bodies.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 26 Although it is clear that many of the researchers recognize the important role that imagination plays in afterlife representations, few have attempted to engage with the vast philosophical and psychological literature on the subject.43 After all, none of the researchers are claiming that their participants have psychic access to the great beyond. The afterlife, for the majority of humans, is a place populated by the imagination.44 Certainly there is a great deal of imaginative license across cultures as to the nature of the afterlife, but those imaginings are also developed and constrained by the cognitive processes shared by all neurotypical humans. Since at least the cognitive revolution in philosophy and psychology, researchers have devoted a great deal of ink to understanding the nature of human imagination, and its processes and roles in cognition, from the simplest, workaday, implicit metaphor to the grandest novel. It would behoove those of us who wish to push research into the cognitive underpinnings of afterlife further to reacquaint ourselves with the current relevant literature on human imagination. It is likely that afterlife beliefs are even grander than cognitive researchers presently imagine.

INCORPORATE THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL RECORD One of the growing complaints about the cognitive science of religion is that the religious representations researchers uncover in their labs bear little similarity to actual religious representations found in cultures (Hodge, 2008, 2012b; Nikkel, 2015). Even if it is the case that the representations discovered in the lab are qualitatively different than those found in cultures, cognitive scientists of religion needs to do more to explain why this may be the case. Currently, much of these discrepancies are dealt with by appealing to the theologically correct/incorrect distinction (J. L. Barrett, 1999), but more time and effort should be put into explaining the relationship between the laboratory and cultural representations. For instance, if humans intuitively fail to believe that the afterliving deceased need to eat, why are they ritually feed in so many cultures? And, if the afterliving deceased are disembodied minds, how do we account for the vast anthropological evidence which represents the deceased as embodied to varying degrees? Just as important, as we will discuss now, is to find out if the difference between laboratory and cultural representations is a simply a product of the present experimental paradigm investigating afterlife beliefs.

DEVELOP NEW EXPERIMENTAL PARADIGMS While there is certainly nothing wrong with experimental replication, particularly developmental and cross-cultural, the experimental paradigm developed by Bering (2002) has now produced similar experimental findings across age groups, cultures and slight 43 Nichols and Hodge being exceptions that we have discussed here. 44 Putting aside those who have had near-death experiences and those who do claim psychic abilities.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 27 methodological variations. Most of the experiments discussed here supply the participants with similar questions, break down the mental and physical state categories in the same fashion, and interpret the findings according to a folk-dualist paradigm.45 While it is well established that the afterliving deceased may be hungry, they don’t eat. But, to what extent and how are the afterliving deceased thought to interact with the living and their fellows in the afterlife? Can humans intuitively represent the afterliving deceased holding hands, feeling the warm glow of sunshine on their face, or embracing one another? Do we intuitively imagine our deceased loved ones watching over us in all circumstances (such when we might be performing an immoral act, showering, or celebrating a success)? Where is the intuitive/deliberative line in afterlife representations? Do participants represent themselves in the afterlife differently than they do others? Finally, what new paradigms can be created to begin to test and eliminate the number of the proposed cognitive mechanisms and representational structures? EVOLUTIONARY STATUS OF AFTERLIFE BELIEFS One argument of which we have steered clear is the debate about whether afterlife beliefs are adaptive (or exapted, J. M. Bering, 2006a; J. M. Bering, McLeod, & Shackelford, 2005), a by-product (Boyer, 2003; Hodge, 2011a, 2016), maladaptive (Dawkins, 2006) or culturally evolved (Astuti & Harris, 2008; Landau, Solomon, Pyszczynski, & Greenberg, 2007; Lane, et al., in press; Vail III, et al., 2010).46 To our minds, until the field of possible cognitive mechanisms and representational structures can be whittled down, such a debate is grossly premature. Having a clearer picture of what cognitive mechanisms and representational structures are involved in afterlife beliefs will reduce the cacophony in this debate. It is simply not possible to determine the evolutionary role of afterlife beliefs until we have a better understanding of their genesis and cross-cultural structure. Each of the proposed mechanisms and structures proposed here might mandate different answers. For instance, Bering’s simulation constraint would necessitate a different answer to this question than Harris and colleagues’ cultural testimony hypothesis. Thus, we suggest that this debate be differed until the field of possible explanations is substantially narrowed. CONCLUSION The past decade and a half has seen a flurry of research into how and why humans hold afterlife beliefs. Even though there has been a great diversity in cognitive mechanisms and representational structures proposed by researchers, certain trends have been definitively 45 Exceptions here being Richert and Pereria. 46 As mentioned previously, there is nothing inherent in the positions of Harris and colleagues or in TMT that outright deny a role for a cognitive mechanism (no matter its evolutionary role). Lane and colleagues’ position, however, does seem to rely heavily on a cultural evolutionary model.

Running Head: Mechanisms and Structures of Afterlife Beliefs | 28 established. First, from an early age, children have no problem intuitively representing an individual continuing to exist after physical death. Second, regardless of age, humans are significantly more likely to represent intuitively what are generally considered to be psychological processes and states continuing after death than they are mundane biological processes and states. Third, whether and which states are represented to continue appear to be sensitive to context(s). Fourth, these findings have so far held across cultures with diverse afterlife beliefs. Thus, these findings have all but obliterated the long-standing explanation that afterlife beliefs are solely cultural creations which are acquired by cultural transmission. On the contrary, humans appear to be cognitively predisposed to generate and accept afterlife beliefs.

As we have seen, however, even though there has been relative stability in the findings of why and how the living intuitively represent the afterliving deceased, there are about as many theories to explain these findings as there are researchers; each researcher endorsing a different (often novel) cognitive mechanism or structural distinction to the representation of the afterliving deceased. While it may be the case that none of the theories presented thus far are correct, it would still behoove researchers to begin to whittle down the contenders. After all, they cannot all be right. This can be achieved through new experimental paradigms which juxtapose different cognitive mechanisms and representational structures. Analytic approaches can be utilized as well to determine the extent to which a theory explains the findings (i.e., is the theory coherent and consistent with the findings? Or is there an explanatory gap?). Additionally, more cross-cultural experiments, whether novel or replication, could serve to establish more robustly whether human’s intuitive cognitive default is to believe that we survive death, as the current trends suggest.

Since 2002, a great deal of interesting and exciting research has investigated the cognitive aspects of afterlife beliefs. Now that the groundwork has been firmly established, we look forward to even more interesting research that aids us in understanding how and why the belief that we humans can survive our own death is the ubiquitous phenomenon that it is. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS REFERENCES Antony, M. V. (2006). Simulation Constraints, Afterlife Beliefs, and Common-Sense Dualism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29(5), 462-463. Astuti, R. (2011). Death, Ancestors, and the Living Dead: Learning without Teaching in Madagascar. In V. Talwar, P. L. Harris & M. Schleifer (Eds.), Children and Death: From

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Table 1: Breakdown of Mechanisms and Structures by Authors

Author Cognitive Mechanism(s) Representational Structure(s)

Mind & Soul Identical?

Egocentric (E) or Allocentric (A)

Belief Mechanism

Role for Body

Allow for Cultural

Variation Address Asymmetry Problem

Intuitive Folk Dualist Theories Bering Simulation Constraint Common-Sense Dualism

Disembodied Mind Yes A E No No No Bloom Folk Physics and Folk Psychology Cartesian Substance Dualism

Disembodied Mind Yes A E No No No Nichols Imaginative Obstacle Common-Sense Dualism

Disembodied Mind Yes A E No No47 Yes Bek & Lock Animacy, Intuitive Psychology, & Social

Cognition Physiological & Body

Independent Properties Yes A A No No No

Peieria et al. (Interaction of) Self-awareness Theory of Mind

Cultural Explicit Beliefs

Body-Independent (Disembodied) Minds

Subject-Self (Soul?) Cultural Representation

Yes E E No Yes No

Ensoulment Theories Richert et al. Psychological Essentialism Soul No N/A N/A Unclear Unclear N/A48 Roazzi et al. Psychological Essentialism

Vitalism Soul & Vital Energy No N/A N/A Unclear Unclear N/A Contextual Theories

Astuti, Harris & Gimenez Cultural Testimony/Transmission49 Mind & Soul & Cultural

Representation No50 A Unclear No Yes No

Lane et al. Development of Biological Concept of Death & Cultural Transmission

Cultural Representation (Common-Sense Dualism

Disembodied Mind?) Yes A Unclear No Yes No

TMT Fear of Death Cultural Transmission

Cultural Representation Disembodied Mind Yes E E No Yes No

Hodge Offline Social Reasoning & The Intentional Stance

Socially Embodied Cultural Representation No A A Yes Yes Yes

White Mundane Social Cognition (Used in Identification)

Reincarnated Individual Episodic Memory

Distinctive Physical Marks Unclear Both Both Yes N/A N/A

47 Nichols does briefly discuss reincarnation in relation to the asymmetry problem. 48 While the authors do not specifically address the asymmetry problem, they do discuss that participants believe the soul to be ontologically prior to the mind, but not how prior. 49 None of the authors seem opposed to an underlying cognitive mechanism/predisposition for afterlife beliefs to be at work as well. 50 Astuti and Harris waiver on this issue. In their joint 2008 study, they acknowledge the role of the soul (spirit) as opposed to the mind, but then collapse the distinction in their separate 2011 articles and discuss mind-body dualism