This comes out of the ethics in belief thread where a number of atheists are speculating that the reason theists believe in an afterlife is fear of death.
I believe that I wrote that. Fear of death is one of the biggest motivators for belief in an afterlife, in my opinion.
Most atheists believe that they will persist through 'their' lifetime.
Even those who are physicalists (or materialists), which is most of them, and know that all the matter in their bodies will be replaced in a much shorter period than most of their lives, still they hold this irrational belief that they, for example, will experience retirement, or that the 10 years old 'they were' was the same experiencer.
I'm not sure that I'd call it "irrational". We can remember the past that shaped us and, by extrapolation, can imagine futures when we will be remembering the events of today as past events. There's a kind of a common-sense sense of continuity built into our lives.
These people are all aware, through computer science or use of computers, that it is easy to copy information. That we can even make two copies (or more) of the entire memory of our computer's memories and this does not mean that both of these copies are the original. They know that the matter - which is all that exists in their world-view - is completely replaced in their bodies - is it every 7 years.
Closer to one year, I believe. We replace cells at a rate of approximately our body mass per year. (Though I think that some cells are replaced faster than others.)
Yet they spend at least most of their time living with the delusion of a continuous self - further note: they do not speak or think of a 'sort of me', or a 60% me, even though there are huge changes in mass, memories, habits from a 10 year old to an adult.
It might be most accurate scientifically to imagine our "selves" kind of abstractly as ongoing ever-changing processes, not as changeless physical (or non-physical) substances that take on a succession of changing qualities.
In Buddhist philosophy there's a theory of "two truths", of conventional truth and ultimate truth, that's applicable here. (The no-self idea was a Buddhist thing.) This theory recognizes that we speak of ourselves all the time. We use words like "I", "me" and "you" meaningfully in our speech. So the words clearly possess a conventional meaning and we use the words to express many true propositions in everyday life.
But if we are talking about ontology, about what really exists, then these philosophers would argue that we have to recognize that these words don't really keep the same precise referrent from moment to moment. What "I" or "you" refer to (in this ultimate sense) is constantly changing and always in the process of becoming something different. What "I" refers to right now isn't the same thing that it referred to a moment ago or that it will refer to a moment from now. There isn't any thing, any
stuff, any substance or essence of one's self, that's persisting through time from moment to moment to moment. There's just the chain of causation, what the Buddhist call 'dependent origination'.
Given the speculating without evidence in the other thread, I will now speculate that the reason atheists believe in the continuous self is that they are afraid of the implicit termination - if analogic - in their own world-view. One that comes by degrees much faster than the termination of what is essentially a not at all exact copy in old age.
This is a kind of belief in souls.
I don't think that all atheists believe in souls or philosophical soul-analogues. Some do and some don't. The suggestion that atheists hold such beliefs because they fear the termination of atheism doesn't make very much sense.
But sure, many atheists probably are afraid of death just like theists are. Fear of death is equal opportunity. Many atheists doubtless fear the cessation of their own subjectivity, and they would welcome some justification for believing that death isn't going to be the end. I think that we can find examples of that motivation playing out in the contemporary philosophy of mind.
But having said that, I'm sure that there are other arguments for belief in an afterlife as well, even if I don't think that they are very convincing. It's not all fear of death, that's just one part of it.
