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Big question

Does consciousness survive death?

Religions and philosophies have argued about death for as long as there are records. Theories of consciousness answer the question as a consequence of what they take the mind to be. If experience is something the brain does, it should stop when the brain stops. If it is a separate substance, or a feature of reality deeper than brains, survival stays possible.

Materialist theories answer no almost without exception. Thomas Hobbes, who held every thought to be a motion in a body, and modern physicalists such as Jaegwon Kim and Owen Flanagan agree that nothing is left to carry a mind once its physical basis is gone. A few functionalist views allow one exit, if a mind’s pattern could be copied into a new substrate, which is the subject of the mind uploading page.

Dualist and idealist theories mostly answer yes. A soul or nonphysical mind, as in Richard Swinburne’s substance dualism, need not share the body’s fate, and idealists who treat consciousness as the ground of reality see death as the end of one perspective within it. Theories built on anomalous evidence, such as the near-death research of Bruce Greyson and Pim van Lommel or Ian Stevenson’s studies of children who report past lives, often answer yes or possibly. Peter van Inwagen’s Christian materialism reaches survival by another route, through bodily resurrection.

The list below groups every theory under ‘Yes or likely’, ‘Possible or depends’, ‘Uncertain’ or ‘Unlikely or no’, each with a one-line reason drawn from the theory itself. Conditional answers usually turn on what counts as the same person, or on whether a nonphysical part exists.

How the theories answer

64 theories don't take a position on this question.

Yes or likely 75

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Possible or depends 52

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Uncertain 28

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Unlikely or no 238

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No position (64)

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