Science: Do our minds still function after our bodies are dead?

From one of my manuscripts:

Most of us have a feeling, deep inside, that this world isn’t all there is.  That death will not be the end.  The great English poet John Donne (d. 1631) summarized the long-standing view not only of Christendom but of the world of Islam and beyond when, in striking and memorable imagery, he wrote that

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated: God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again, for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.[1]

But is this mere self-deception?  Nothing more than outdated superstition?  Once, in Christian communities and very much similarly in religious communities around the globe, death was accepted, even welcomed, as the “happy harbour of the saints,” a rest and reward for the travails of life.[2]  However, as God was “evicted from the world” under the powerful influence of naturalism and materialism, “the story of death took on new meaning, or rather it suggested the absence of meaning entirely.  In time, dying signified leaving everything and arriving nowhere.”[3]  (One thinks of the description of the atheist’s funeral:  “All dressed up and nowhere to go.”)  The early twentieth century Spanish and American philosopher George Santayana announced, simply, that “all doctrines which adult philosophy can entertain are more or less subterfuges and after-thoughts by which the observed fact of mortality and the native inconceivability of death are more or less clumsily reconciled.”[4]  Thus, says the contemporary scholar Carol Zaleski, “the will to believe in immortality is easily reduced to a will to deceive oneself about death, and from this self-deception arises the whole fantastic panoply of compensatory paradises invented by the world’s religions.”[5] 

[1] John Donne, Devotions, Meditation 17.  

[2] The phrase is from an anonymous sixteenth century poem entitled “Hierusalem,” anthologized in Donald Davie, ed., The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 31.

[3] Arthur Krystal, Harper’s (February 2001).

[4] George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 2d ed. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1942-51), 3:237.  

[5] Carol Zaleski, The Life of the World to Come: Near-Death Experience and Christian Hope (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 12.  It should be noted that Professor Zaleski does not, herself, accept such a reduction.

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I’m eager to learn more about this study:

“When you die you KNOW you’re dead: Scientists discover the mind still works after the body shows no sign of life and reveal people have heard their own death announced by medics”

Posted from Jerusalem, Israel