survival continued existence after one’s biological death. So understood, survival can pertain only to beings that are organisms at some time or other, not to beings that are disembodied at all times (as angels are said to be) or to beings that are embodied but never as organisms (as might be said of computers). Theories that maintain that one’s individual consciousness is absorbed into a universal consciousness after death or that one continues to exist only through one’s descendants, insofar as they deny one’s own continued existence as an individual, are not theories of survival. Although survival does not entail immortality or anything about reward or punishment in an afterlife, many theories of survival incorporate these features. Theories about survival have expressed differing attitudes about the importance of the body. Some philosophers have maintained that persons cannot survive without their own bodies, typically espousing a doctrine of resurrection; such a view was held by Aquinas. Others, including the Pythagoreans, have believed that one can survive in other bodies, allowing for reincarnation into a body of the same species or even for transmigration into a body of another species. Some, including Plato and perhaps the Pythagoreans, have claimed that no body is necessary, and that survival is fully achieved by one’s escaping embodiment. There is a similar spectrum of opinion about the importance of one’s mental life. Some, such as Locke, have supposed that survival of the same person would require memory of one’s having experienced specific past events. Plato’s doctrine of recollection, in contrast, supposes that one can survive without any experiential memory; all that one typically is capable of recollecting are impersonal necessary truths.
Philosophers have tested the relative importance of bodily versus mental factors by means of various thought experiments, of which the following is typical. Suppose that a person’s whole mental life – memories, skills, and character traits – were somehow duplicated into a data bank and erased from the person, leaving a living radical amnesiac. Suppose further that the person’s mental life were transcribed into another radically amnesiac body. Has the person survived, and if so, as whom?
See also PERSONAL IDENTITY, SOUL. W.E.M.