Is the Feeling That We're Immortal Innate

“What I have discovered by looking at children’s untaught intuitions is that, rather than intelligence, the part of the self that is most central to our ideas about eternal life is our capacity for feeling and desiring.”

“Intentional burials show a level of empathy that seems a core part of us: when found in other species, we cannot help but feel connected to them.”

“Although we often focus on details about the afterlife that vary by religion, it is the central notion that people continue to exist eternally in some form that unifies religions and suggests something unique and worth studying about the human mind.”

“the human mind is actively searching for agents, even in the most ambiguous of situations”

“intuitive mind-body dualism’ as an alternative. This cognitive tendency to treat the mind as separate from the body had been well-documented by developmental psychologists.”

“The researchers found that even from the youngest ages, children tended to respond that the dead mouse retained its mental faculties, such as the ability to experience sadness and know things, but that it no longer had bodily states, like the need to eat or drink. As the researchers reported in Developmental Psychology in 2004, this was consistent with intuitive mind-body dualism and confirmed that children reasoned about the mind differently from the body after death: it was only the mind that tended to be viewed as immortal. Notably, they found that younger children were more likely than older children to endorse the idea of eternal life.”

“Discrepancy between the studies meant that profound questions had yet to be resolved. Most especially: was cultural influence actually a necessary ingredient for eternal life beliefs, or is the sense that we are immortal so powerful and intuitive that it transcends culture and, instead, resides as a permanent fixture in the human brain and mind?”

“children from both cultures had a persistent bias to judge that their emotions and desires – but not their intelligence or bodily states – remained intact during the time before pregnancy. What’s more, the intuition that one’s emotions and desires were eternal endured even as the children grew older, although older children judged they had fewer prelife capacities overall.”

“children struggle to imagine a time when they did not feel or desire”

“Finding this pattern from early in development and among both indigenous and urban children strongly supports the notion that our deep-seated intuitions about what constitutes the core of a person – the capacity for experiencing emotions and desires – underlies the belief in eternal life.”

“While exposure to religion can elaborate these intuitions, as they certainly do in the case of afterlife beliefs, belief in eternal existence does not depend on being exposed to religious teachings that support these ideas.”

“In addition to showing that eternalist beliefs are not learned, another significant finding from this work is that children did not think that they had intelligence during the time before conception. This suggests that children are not simply relying on intuitive mind-body dualism to guide their judgments. Rather, from early on, they are sensitive to different aspects of the mind and view only emotionality and desires as the essential core of an individual; these traits, rather than pure intelligence, are what humans intuitively embrace as so elemental that they are thought to precede our existence on Earth.”

“The intuitive ideas that children hold about emotions and desires as being separate from intelligence have long functioned as cultural tropes. The Greek philosopher Aristotle argued that people have an ‘appetitive soul’ that involves feelings, desires and sensations as well as a ‘rational soul’ that involves reason and intelligence. He acknowledged that while the appetitive soul is present from early on, rationality emerges only later in development. More recently, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud similarly described two competing forces of the unconscious: the ‘id’, which comprises our primal self and urges, and is present from infancy, and the ‘superego’, which reflects our more controlled and rational abilities that derive from being part of a society.”

“Separating these divergent elements of the mind recurs across history and religion, and appeals to our underlying sense that what makes us human is more than just our intelligence.”

“Indeed, the most fundamental, ever-present part of us is not our rationality but rather our capacity for feeling and desiring.”

“While children’s prelife intuitions tell us that believing in eternal life is probably a largely unlearned part of our human psychology, engaging in religious practices can certainly strengthen and elaborate these beliefs.”

“It seems that while our intuitions provide the fodder for an underlying belief in eternal life, it is culture that shapes and maintains that belief in myriad forms, giving rise to the diversity of religious cosmologies observed worldwide.”