Why Must Consciousness Continue? The Aporia of Experiential Persistence and the Post-Mortem Guarantor
Sidário Rodrigues Malheiros-junior
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) August 29, 2026 DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.22162078 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that three propositions about mortality and afterlife belief—desire for more embodied life, representation of the experiential subject as continuing after death, and assignment of that continuation to a greater consciousness or "post-mortem guarantor"—are frequently conflated, and that existing cognitive and philosophical accounts explain components of these representations but do not logically derive the transitions between them. Proposes "value-weighted experience" as a biological bridge for why continued life is represented as the condition for further valued states, while preserving the residual aporia of why embodied consciousness represents its subject as continuing beyond known conditions and places that continuation in another consciousness. |
Abstract
This conceptual article isolates an unresolved transition in the cognitive and philosophical study of mortality and afterlife belief. It distinguishes three propositions that are frequently conflated: the desire for more embodied life, the representation of the experiential subject as continuing after biological death, and the assignment of that continuation to a consciousness or agency of greater scope—the post-mortem guarantor. Reward learning, attachment, future prediction, terror management, intuitive dualism, simulation constraints, agency cognition, and cultural transmission explain important components of these representations, but none logically derives the passage from wanting more life to post-mortem subjecthood, or from post-mortem subjecthood to a greater guarantor. The paper proposes value-weighted experience as a biological bridge explaining why continued life is represented as the condition for further valued states, while preserving the residual aporia: why does biologically embodied consciousness represent its experiential subject as continuing beyond the conditions under which consciousness is known, and why does it place that continuation in another consciousness? Neuroscience can test mechanisms of belief formation without adjudicating the metaphysical reality of the believed object.