Lecture 15: The Nature of Death; Believing You Will Die

What this lecture covers

The lecture continues the course's physicalist account of personhood by asking a sharpening question: if being a person just means having a body capable of P-functioning (thinking, planning, communicating), what exactly counts as being dead? A naive answer - you're dead whenever you're not P-functioning - would wrongly count dreamless sleep as death, so the lecture works through several revisions until it lands on a "brokenness" account: you're dead when the underlying cognitive structures that make P-functioning possible are broken, not merely switched off.

After settling that question, the lecture turns to a claim that gets made often about death: that at some level, nobody really believes they are going to die. Kagan separates this into two distinct claims - not believing you'll cease to exist as a person, and not believing your body will die - and tests the standard argument (from Freud, via Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich) for the first claim. By the end, you should be able to state the brokenness account of death precisely and explain why the "smuggled-in observer" argument for universal death-denial fails.

Key ideas

• P-functioning: the higher-order cognitive activities (thinking, planning, communicating) that make someone a person, as opposed to B-functioning, the lower-level biological processes that keep a body alive.
• The sleep problem: defining death as "not currently P-functioning" would wrongly imply you die every time you fall into dreamless sleep.
• Temporary vs. permanent cessation: adding "permanently" doesn't work either, because it would mean someone resurrected on a future Judgment Day was never really dead in the meantime.
• The brokenness account: you are dead when you are unable to P-function, because the cognitive structures that would support it are broken - not merely when you aren't currently exercising that ability.
• Suspended animation as a puzzle: a body cooled to a stop isn't broken (so not dead by this account) but doesn't feel alive either, suggesting death, life, and a third state ("suspended") may all be needed.
• The "can't picture being dead" argument: the claim that since you can't imagine being dead, you can't believe you'll die.
• Picturing from outside vs. inside: you can't picture being dead from the inside (there's nothing there to picture), but you can picture it from the outside, the same way you can picture a meeting happening without you.
• The smuggled-observer mistake: imagining a scene always involves a point of view, but having a point of view on a picture doesn't put you inside the picture - so imagining your own funeral doesn't prove you believe you'll survive it.

Walkthrough

Refining the definition of death (0:01)

The lecture opens by revisiting last time's puzzle: if a person is a P-functioning body, does losing P-functioning during dreamless sleep mean you're temporarily dead? Kagan rejects that, then tests and rejects "permanent cessation of P-functioning" using the thought experiment of a Judgment Day resurrection - if the resurrected count as having been dead, permanence can't be the criterion, since their non-functioning wasn't actually permanent.

The ability-based, "brokenness" account (3:06)

The proposed fix: what matters isn't whether you're currently P-functioning but whether you're able to. While asleep you retain the ability to do arithmetic or speak French, even though you're not exercising it; you're dead when the cognitive structures underwriting that ability are broken. This handles sleep (ability intact) and future resurrection (ability currently absent because the brain is broken, to be fixed later) in a consistent way.

Applying the account to comas and suspended animation (7:10)

Kagan applies the brokenness test to harder cases. A coma where the "switch" is merely hard to turn back on (structures intact) counts as still alive; a case of genuine, irreversible structural decay (something like a persistent vegetative state) counts as no longer existing as a person. Suspended animation is trickier still: the relevant brain structures aren't destroyed, so the person isn't dead by this account, yet calling them straightforwardly "alive" also feels wrong - which leads Kagan to float a third category, neither alive nor dead, and to leave the precise line as an open problem for students.

Does anybody believe they will die? (15:20)

Shifting topics, the lecture introduces a recurring claim that death is uniquely mysterious: that nobody truly believes they will die. Kagan distinguishes two versions of this claim - disbelief in ceasing to exist as a person, and disbelief in bodily death - and sets out to examine the first using the most common argument for it.

Why "you can't picture being dead" doesn't prove disbelief (17:20)

The argument runs: belief requires being able to picture something; you can't picture being dead; so you don't believe you'll die. Kagan grants the premise but challenges the second step. Trying to picture being dead "from the inside" fails, but that's because there's nothing there to picture - the same way there's nothing it's like to be a ballpoint pen. That failure doesn't show you can't picture death at all, since you can easily picture it from the outside, such as imagining your own body in a coffin.

The Freudian "smuggled observer" argument (27:40)

Kagan presents the more sophisticated version of the argument, quoted from Freud: whenever you picture your own funeral, you're implicitly present as the observing spectator, so you never really imagine a world without you, and therefore don't really believe you'll die. Kagan rebuts this with a parallel case: imagining a club meeting you won't attend also involves picturing it from an observer's viewpoint, yet nobody would conclude from that you don't believe meetings happen without you. Having a point of view on an imagined scene is not the same as being a character inside it, so the argument fails.

Bodily death and Ivan Ilyich (36:52)

The lecture turns to the second version of the claim - disbelief in bodily death - and notes that ordinary behavior like buying life insurance or writing a will suggests most people do believe their bodies will die. But Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, who is genuinely shocked to discover his own mortality despite presumably having a will, complicates this picture. Kagan suggests a distinction between conscious "lip service" belief and a deeper, unconscious belief, and leaves open, as the question for next time, whether this pattern is widespread rather than a one-off case.

Before you watch

• This lecture continues directly from the prior lecture's discussion of physicalism, personhood, and P-functioning versus B-functioning, so that distinction is assumed knowledge.
• Familiarity with the course's earlier treatment of personal identity (including the discussion of van Inwagen) is referenced briefly regarding resurrection scenarios.
• Read or know the basic plot of Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which the lecture uses as a running example.

Check your understanding

1. Why does defining death as "not currently P-functioning" fail, and how does the "ability to P-function" revision fix that problem?
2. Using the brokenness account, explain why a coma patient might still be alive while someone in a persistent vegetative state might not be.
3. What is the difference between picturing something "from the inside" and "from the outside," and why does this distinction matter for whether you can picture being dead?
4. Reconstruct Freud's argument that nobody believes in their own death, and explain Kagan's objection to it using the meeting analogy.
5. What is the difference between believing you will cease to exist as a person and believing your body will die, and why does Ivan Ilyich's case blur that distinction?