The other afterlife

Editor's note: Dr. Theodore Bach is an associate professor of philosophy at BGSU Firelands. He recently submitted this column to the Register.HURON — Many people conduct their lives with an eye on a metaphysical afterlife.By "metaphysical afterlife" I mean a literal place of some sort, perhaps a heaven or a hell, where a person will continue existing and having conscious experience after the expiration of his or her physical body.Believing in this type of afterlife can provide moral motivation and give meaning to one's current, earth-bound life. But is the belief true? Is there really a place in which a non-physical soul or mind will reside and continue to have experience? These are thorny questions. One complication is that a belief's capacity to provide practical value is not in itself a good justification for the truth of that belief. Nor is the fact that a belief is commonly held a good justification. For example, many Northern Ohioans might derive satisfaction from believing that the Cleveland Browns have an excellent shot to win each football game, but surely (and unfortunately for Browns fans) we are not justified in thinking this belief true.But I am not going to discuss here whether we are rationally or evidentially justified in believing in a metaphysical afterlife. This is because, in part, there is a distinct afterlife that, while sometimes neglected, is a rich source of existential meaning and moral motivation. It is also an afterlife the reality of which is not in doubt. To think about this "other afterlife" from a fresh perspective, consider the following imaginative exercise, discussed recently by the philosopher Samuel Scheffler. Suppose you learn as a young adult that you will die in old age by natural causes. But suppose you also learn that, a few weeks after your death, the earth and all remnants of human culture will be obliterated in a meteor shower. There is nothing that you or others can do to halt the destruction.Scheffler's question is: how would this foreknowledge affect your attitudes as you live out the rest of your life? How would it affect the way that you value your projects, goals, and everyday activities? I agree with Scheffler that we would not be indifferent. We would not say "because I am not going to experience this, and because it will not affect my life at all, it doesn't really matter to me."While the doomsday event may be especially troubling for those who have children or family who will die in the event, these are not the only matters at stake. In my own case, I would feel that a great many of my projects and activities would become emptied of much value. Why invest time in teaching college classes? What is the point of carefully following world politics? Why contribute, in my own very small way, to the edifice of human knowledge? Even reading a classic novel becomes less engaging, as I would no longer feel that I was participating in a cultural conversation that stretched not only backward but forward in time.The point of the imaginative exercise is not, of course, to game-plan for an apocalyptic event. Like most philosophical thought experiments, Scheffler's doomsday scenario helps us isolate in our imagination a particular variable so that we can manipulate it and better analyze its importance. Such thought experiments are particularly helpful when for scientific or ethical reasons we are unable to carry out the actual experiment.The variable of interest in the doomsday thought experiment is the ongoing march of human civilization – its art, knowledge, culture, politics, photo-albums, cyberspaces, memories, and so forth. When we imaginatively toggle this variable – turning it "off" via the doomsday event – we get a better sense of how a persisting human culture is of profound value to our current lives.There are two conclusions I want to draw.First, we need to give this "other afterlife" the credit it deserves. The thought experiment suggests that, regardless of how we might judge the reality or value of a metaphysical afterlife, the human afterlife infuses our current lives with existential value, and we tend to underestimate greatly the extent to which it does so.Second, and following from the first conclusion, we ought to take more seriously the project of protecting this source of value. We often place what we perceive as our culture's immediate needs on the front burner, and we relegate to the back burner our culture's future needs. But by revealing to us that our current needs are tightly bound up with the needs of people who will be living long after we are gone, the thought experiment scrambles the logic of that arrangement.It compels us to recalibrate our political and personal priorities, motivating greater consideration for how our actions, technologies, and political agendas will impact the well-being of the planet and its future inhabitants.