Consciousness and Personal Identityinvolve the sensation that one is traveling in some kind of tunnel or dark passageway, towards a
bright light or ephemeral presence. It’s when one turns back, or is pulled back, from the bright
light or presence that one has the sensation of re-entering one’s body.^11
When such experiences occur merely near death, their value in supporting the possibil-
ity of life after death may seem questionable. It seems just as (if not more) plausible that such
experiences are hallucinatory in nature than that they provide a glimpse into an afterlife. But in
many such cases the experiences are reported after a patient has been (at least briefly) clinically
dead. For example, in a much-cited Dutch study, 62 of 344 patients (18%) who were success-
fully resuscitated after cardiac arrest reported having had NDEs (Van Lommel 2001). Given the
absence of neural activity at the time that such experiences were reportedly occurring, these
kinds of cases may seem to point to the conclusion that we can survive the death of our bodies.^12
In response, various alternative explanations of NDE are open to the proponent of the
physical approach. Most notably, they might deny that the NDE really occurred in the absence
of neural activity. Firstly, one might question how one can accurately pinpoint the timing of
an NDE. Perhaps it occurs slightly earlier than reported, before neural activity has ceased, or
perhaps it occurs slightly later than reported, once neural activity has resumed. Secondly, even if
the timing of the NDE was accurately pinpointed, one might still question whether all neural
activity had really ceased at that moment. Perhaps some brain activity continues, undetectable
by current instrumentation. Given these possibilities, it seems questionable that NDEs can be
taken as decisive evidence for post-bodily survival.^13
At this point in time, then, it seems that considerations about immortality cannot be used
effectively to help settle the debate about personal identity. That said, if futurists like Kurzweil
are correct, it may not be too long before the technologies arrive that will force the issue upon
us. Indeed, Kurzweil has predicted that the Singularity will be upon us by 2045. In the mean-
time, however – and perhaps even after – the debate about what exactly constitutes personal
identity will undoubtedly continue.
Notes1 Elsewhere I call these the identification question, the characterization question, and the reidentification question
(Kind 2015).
2 To deal with other more dramatic cases of forgetting, such as amnesia, contemporary proponents of this
view tend to broaden their conception of the continuity of consciousness, so that it requires not just
continuity of memories, but also of other psychological states more broadly (see, e.g., Parfit 1984: 205).
3 The problem of reduplication was raised earlier in the 18th century by British philosopher Samuel
Clarke in his correspondence with Anthony Collins. See Uzgalis (2008) for some of the relevant por-
tions of this correspondence.
4 Another common approach to the problem of reduplication is to adopt four-dimensionalism, a meta-
physical view about the general nature of an object’s survival through time. For a development and
defense of this view, see Sider (2001). For further discussion of the problem of reduplication, see Kind
(2015: Ch. 3) and Noonan (2003: Ch. 7).
5 For an extended discussion that is motivated by this worry, see Wilkes (1988).
6 Schechtman (2014: 152) suggests that the transplant intuition is almost universally held. For at least
one dissenting voice, see Thomson (1997). In John Perry’s Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality
(1978), the fictional character Gretchen Weirob also makes a case against this intuition.
7 Schechtman (1996) offers a different set of arguments to show that these sorts of practical matters can
come apart from the facts of numerical identity.
8 Not everyone thinks that an immortal life would be desirable (see, e.g., Williams 1973).
9 But here recall Locke’s objections (mentioned in Section 1 above) that mere continuation of immate-
rial substance would really preserve personal identity. For detailed further discussion of this issue, see
Perry (1978).