The Ghost in the Machine Is the Elephant in the Room: Souls, Death, and Harm at the End of Life

Abstract

The idea that we human beings have souls that can continue to have conscious experiences after the deaths of our bodies is controversial in contemporary academic bioethics; this idea is obviously present whenever questions about harm at the end of life are discussed, but this idea is often ignored or avoided because it is more comfortable to do so. After briefly discussing certain types of experiences that lead some people to believe in souls that can survive the deaths of their bodies, I begin to answer the question, "If personal postmortem survival of some sort is real, then how should this alter the way we approach our bioethical discussions about death, the harm of death, and harming the dead?" The bioethics issues I briefly discuss in the remaining two sections are the debate about defining death and the decision whether to forego life-prolonging treatments.

Neuropsychiatric Aspects of Near-Death Experience

“…[7] The same principle can be applied to bioethical situations in which an individual who had a NDE may not be as concerned as their patients since they are certain that life continues after death of the physical body. [15] Accompanying Processes Near death experiences have been known to cause a variety of accompanying processes within their encounter of the world after death. Below are components of NDEs with further detail of the processes.…”