Undiscovered Country/What I Saw When

I Was Dead
From the Daily Telegraph, 1988
A. J. Ayer
My first attack of pneumonia occurred in the United States. I was in hospital for ten days in New
York, after which the doctors said that I was well enough to leave. A final X-ray, however, which I
underwent on the last morning, revealed that one of my lungs was not yet free from infection. This
caused the most sympathetic of my doctors to suggest that it would be good for me to spend a few
more days in hospital. I respected his opinion but since I was already dressed and psychologically
disposed to put my illness behind me, I decided to take the risk. I spent the next few days in my
stepdaughter’s [Nigella Lawson] apartment, and then made arrangements to fly back to England.
When I arrived I believed myself to be cured and incontinently plunged into an even more hectic
social round than that to which I had become habituated before I went to America. Retribution struck
me on Sunday, May 30. I had gone out to lunch, had a great deal to eat and drink, and chattered
incessantly. That evening I had a relapse. I could eat almost none of the food that a friend had brought
to cook in my house.
On the next day, which was a bank holiday, I had a long-standing engagement to lunch at the Savoy
with a friend who was very eager for me to meet her son. I would have put them off if I could, but my
friend lives in Exeter and I had no idea how to reach her in London. So I took a taxi to the Savoy and
just managed to stagger into the lobby. I could eat hardly any of the delicious grilled sole that I
ordered but forced myself to keep up my end of the conversation. I left early and took a taxi home.
That evening I felt still worse. Once more I could eat almost none of the dinner another friend had
brought me. Indeed, she was so alarmed by my weakness that she stayed overnight. When I was no
better the next morning, she telephoned to my general practitioner and to my elder son, Julian. The
doctor did little more than promise to try to get in touch with the specialist, but Julian, who is
unobtrusively very efficient, immediately rang for an ambulance. The ambulance came quickly with
two strong attendants, and yet another friend, who had called opportunely to pick up a key,
accompanied it and me to University College Hospital.
I remember very little of what happened from then on. I was taken to a room in the private wing,
which had been reserved for me by the specialist, who had a consulting room on the same floor. After
being X-rayed and subjected to a number of tests, which proved beyond question that I was suffering
gravely from pneumonia, I was moved into intensive care in the main wing of the hospital.
Fortunately for me, the young doctor who was primarily responsible for me had been an
undergraduate at New College, Oxford, while I was a Fellow. This made him extremely anxious to
see that I recovered; almost too much so, in fact, for he was so much in awe of me that he forbade me
to be disturbed at night, even when the experienced sister and nurse believed it to be necessary.
Under his care and theirs I made such good progress that I expected to be moved out of intensive care
and back into the private wing within a week. My disappointment was my own fault. I did not attempt
to eat the hospital food. My family and friends supplied all the food I needed. I am particularly fond
of smoked salmon, and one evening I carelessly tossed a slice of it into my throat. It went down the
wrong way and almost immediately the graph recording my heartbeats plummeted. The ward sister
rushed to the rescue, but she was unable to prevent my heart from stopping. She and the doctor
subsequently told me that I died in this sense for four minutes, and I have had no reason to disbelieve
them.
The doctor alarmed my son Nicholas, who had flown from New York to be by my bedside, by saying
that it was not probable that I should recover, and moreover, that if I did recover physically it was not
probable that my mental powers would be restored. The nurses were more optimistic, and Nicholas
sensibly chose to believe them.
I have no recollection of anything that was done to me at that time. Friends have told me that I was
festooned with tubes, but I have never learned how many of them there were or, with one exception,
what purposes they served. I do not remember having a tube inserted in my throat to bring up the
quantity of phlegm which had lodged in my lungs. I was not even aware of my numerous visitors, so
many of them, in fact, that the sister had to set a quota. I know that the doctors and nurses were
surprised by the speed of my recovery and that when I started speaking, the specialist expressed
astonishment that anyone with so little oxygen in his lungs should be so lucid.
My first recorded utterance, which convinced those who heard it that I had not lost my wits, was the
exclamation: “You are all mad.” I am not sure how this should be interpreted. It is possible that I took
my audience to be Christians and was telling them that I had not discovered anything “on the other
side.” It is also possible that I took them to be skeptics and was implying that I had discovered
something. I think the former is more probable, as in the latter case I should more properly have
exclaimed, “We are all mad.” All the same, I cannot be sure.
The earliest remarks of which I have any cognizance, apart from my first exclamation, were made
several hours after my return to life. They were addressed to a Frenchwoman with whom I had been
friends for over 15 years. I woke to find her seated by my bedside and started talking to her in French
as soon as I recognized her. My French is fluent and I spoke rapidly, approximately as follows: “Did
you know that I was dead? The first time that I tried to cross the river I was frustrated, but my second
attempt succeeded. It was most extraordinary. My thoughts became persons.”
The content of those remarks suggests that I have not wholly put my classical education behind me. In
Greek mythology the souls of the dead, now only shadowly embodied, were obliged to cross the river
Styx in order to reach Hades, after paying an obol to the ferryman, Charon. I may also have been
reminded of my favorite philosopher, David Hume, who, during his last illness, “a disorder of the
bowels,” imagined that Charon, growing impatient, was calling him “a lazy loitering rogue.” With his
usual politeness, Hume replied that he saw without regret his death approaching and that he was
making no effort to postpone it. This is one of the rare occasions on which I have failed to follow
Hume. Clearly I had made an effort to prolong my life.
The only memory that I have of an experience, closely encompassing my death, is very vivid. I was
confronted by a red light, exceedingly bright, and also very painful even when I turned away from it. I
was aware that this light was responsible for the government of the universe. Among its ministers
were two creatures who had been put in charge of space. These ministers periodically inspected space
and had recently carried out such an inspection. They had, however, failed to do their work properly,
with the result that space, like a badly fitting jigsaw puzzle, was slightly out of joint. A further
consequence was that the laws of nature had ceased to function as they should. I felt that it was up to
me to put things right. I also had the motive of finding a way to extinguish the painful light. I assumed
that it was signaling that space was awry and that it would switch itself off when order was restored.
Unfortunately, I had no idea where the guardians of space had gone and feared that even if I found
them I should not be able to communicate with them. It then occurred to me that whereas, until the
present century, physicists accepted the Newtonian severance of space and time, it had become
customary, since the vindication of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, to treat space-time as a
single whole. Accordingly, I thought that I could cure space by operating upon time. I was vaguely
aware that the ministers who had been given charge of time were in my neighborhood and I proceeded
to hail them. I was again frustrated. Either they did not hear me, or they chose to ignore me, or they
did not understand me. I then hit upon the expedient of walking up and down, waving my watch, in
the hope of drawing their attention not to my watch itself but to the time which it measured. This
elicited no response. I became more and more desperate, until the experience suddenly came to an
end.
This experience could well have been delusive. A slight indication that it might have been veridical
[objectively real] has been supplied by my French friend, or rather by her mother, who also underwent
a heart arrest many years ago. When her daughter asked her what it had been like, she replied that all
that she remembered was that she must stay close to the red light.
On the face of it, these experiences, on the assumption that the last one was veridical, are rather strong
evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness. Does it follow that there is a future life? Not
necessarily. The trouble is that there are different criteria for being dead, which are indeed logically
compatible but may not always be satisfied together.
In this instance, I am given to understand that the arrest of the heart does not entail, either logically or
causally, the arrest of the brain. In view of the very strong evidence in favour of the dependence of
thoughts upon the brain, the most probable hypothesis is that my brain continued to function although
my heart had stopped.
If I had acquired good reason to believe in a future life, it would have applied not only to myself.
Admittedly, the philosophical problem of justifying one’s confident belief in the existence and
contents of other minds has not yet been satisfactorily solved [‘the Problem of Other Minds’]. Even
so, with the possible exception of Fichte, who proclaimed that the world was his idea but may not
have meant it literally, no philosopher has acquiesced in solipsism. No philosopher has seriously
asserted that of all the objects in the universe, he alone was conscious. Moreover it is commonly taken
for granted, not only by philosophers, that the minds of others bear a sufficiently close analogy to
one’s own. Consequently, if I had been vouchsafed a reasonable expectation of a future life, other
human beings could expect one too.
Let us grant, for the sake of argument, that we could have future lives. What form could they take?
The easiest answer is that they would consist in the prolongation of our experiences, without any
physical attachment. This is the theory that should appeal to radical empiricists. It is, indeed,
consistent with the concept of personal identity which was adopted both by Hume and by William
James, according to which one’s identity consists, not in the possession of an enduring soul, but in the
sequence of one’s experiences, guaranteed by memory. They did not apply their theory to a future life,
in which Hume at any rate disbelieved.
For those who are attracted by this theory, as I am, the main problem, which Hume admitted that he
was unable to solve, is to discover the relation, or relations, which have to hold between experiences
for them to belong to one and the same self. William James thought that he had found the answers
with his relations of the felt togetherness and continuity of our thoughts and sensations, coupled with
memory, in order to unite experiences that are separated in time. But while memory is undoubtedly
necessary, it can be shown that it is not wholly sufficient.
I myself carried out a thorough examination and development of the theory in my book, The Origins
of Pragmatism. I was reluctantly forced to conclude that I could not account for personal identity
without falling back on the identity, through time, of one or more bodies that the person might
successively occupy. Even then, I was unable to give a satisfactory account of the way in which a
series of experiences is tied to a particular body at any given time.
The admission that personal identity through time requires the identity of a body is a surprising
feature of Christianity. I call it surprising because it seems to me that Christians are apt to forget that
the resurrection of the body is an element in their creed. The question of how bodily identity is
sustained over intervals of time is not so difficult. The answer might consist in postulating a reunion
of the same atoms, perhaps in there being no more than a strong physical resemblance, possibly
fortified by a similarity of behaviour.
A prevalent fallacy is the assumption that a proof of an afterlife would also be a proof of the existence
of a deity. This is far from being the case. If, as I hold, there is no good reason to believe that a god
either created or presides over this world, there is equally no good reason to believe that a god created
or presides over the next world, on the unlikely supposition that such a thing exists. It is conceivable
that one’s experiences in the next world, if there are any, will supply evidence of a god’s existence,
but we have no right to presume on such evidence, when we have not had the relevant experiences.
It is worth remarking, in this connection, that the two important Cambridge philosophers in this
century, J. E. McTaggart and C. D. Broad, who have believed—in McTaggart’s case that he would
certainly survive his death, in Broad’s that there was about a 50 percent probability that he would—
were both of them atheists. McTaggart derived his certainty from his metaphysics, which implied that
what we confusedly perceive as material objects, in some cases housing minds, are really souls,
eternally viewing one another with something of the order of love.
The less fanciful Broad was impressed by the findings of psychical research. He was certainly too
intelligent to think that the superior performances of a few persons in the game of guessing unseen
cards, which he painstakingly proved to be statistically significant, had any bearing upon the
likelihood of a future life. He must therefore have been persuaded by the testimony of mediums. He
was surely aware that most mediums have been shown to be frauds, but he was convinced that some
have not been. Not that this made him optimistic. He took the view that this world was very nasty and
that there was a fair chance that the next world, if it existed, was even nastier. Consequently, he had
no compelling desire to survive. He just thought that there was an even chance of his doing so. One of
his better epigrams was that if one went by the reports of mediums, life in the next world was like a
perpetual bump supper at a Welsh university.
If Broad was an atheist, my friend Dr. Alfred Ewing was not. Ewing, who considered Broad to be a
better philosopher than Wittgenstein, was naive, unworldly even by academic standards, intellectually
shrewd, unswervingly honest, and a devout Christian. Once, to tease him, I said: “Tell me, Alfred,
what do you most look forward to in the next world?” He replied immediately: “God will tell me
whether there are a priori propositions.” It is a wry comment on the strange character of our subject
that this answer should be so funny.
My excuse for repeating this story is that such philosophical problems as the question whether the
propositions of logic and pure mathematics are deductively analytic or factually synthetic, and, if they
are analytic, whether they are true by convention, are not to be solved by acquiring more information.
What is needed is that we succeed in obtaining a clearer view of what the problems involve. One
might hope to achieve this in a future life, but really we have no good reason to believe that our
intellects will be any sharper in the next world, if there is one, than they are in this. A god, if one
exists, might make them so, but this is not something that even the most enthusiastic deist can count
on.
The only philosophical problem that our finding ourselves landed on a future life might clarify would
be that of the relation between mind and body, if our future lives consisted, not in the resurrection of
our bodies, but in the prolongation of the series of our present experiences. We should then be
witnessing the triumph of dualism, though not the dualism which Descartes thought that he had
established. If our lives consisted in an extended series of experiences, we should still have no good
reason to regard ourselves as spiritual substances.
So there it is. My recent experiences have slightly weakened my conviction that my genuine death,
which is due fairly soon, will be the end of me, though I continue to hope that it will be. They have
not weakened my conviction that there is no god. I trust that my remaining an atheist will allay the
anxieties of my fellow supporters of the British Humanist Association, the Rationalist Press
Association and the South Place Ethical Society.

Postscript to a Post-mortem
From The Spectator, 15 October, 1988

A. J. Ayer 'died' for four minutes but has second thoughts about what that meant

MY purpose in writing a postscript to the article about my 'death', which I contributed to the 28
August issue of the Sunday Telegraph, is not primarily to retract any- thing that I wrote or to
express my regret that my Shakespearian title for the article, 'That undiscovered country', was
not retained, but to correct a misunderstanding to which the article appears to have given rise.

I say 'not primarily to retract' because one of my sentences was written so carelessly that it is
literally, false as it stands. In the final paragraph, I wrote, 'My recent experiences have slightly
weakened my conviction that my genuine death . . . will be the end of me.' They have not and
never did weaken that conviction. What I should have said and would have said, had I not been
anxious to appear undogmatic, is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is
no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief. Previously my interest in the
question was purely polemical. I wished to expose the defects in the positions of those who
believed that they would survive. My experiences caused me to think that it was worth examining
various possibilities of survival for their own sakes. I did not intend to imply that the result of my
enquiry had been to increase the low probability of any one of them, even if it were granted that
they had any probability at all.

My motive for writing the original article was twofold. I thought that my experiences had been
sufficiently remarkable to be worth recording, and I wished to rebut the incoherent statement,
which had been attributed to me, that I had discovered nothing 'on the other side'. Evidently, my
having discovered something on the other side was a precondition of my having completed the
journey. It follows that if I had discovered nothing, I had not been there; I had no right to imply
that there was a 'there' to go to. Conversely, if there was evidence that I had had some strange
experiences, nothing followed about their being 'another side'. In particular, it did not follow
either that I had visited such a 'David Mellor thinks we're all getting complacent about Aids.'
place, or that I had not.

I said in my article that the most probable explanation of my experiences was that my brain had
not ceased to function during the four minutes of my heart arrest. I have since been told, rightly
or wrongly, that it would not have functioned on its own for any longer period without being
damaged. I thought it so obvious that the persistence of my brain was the most probable
explanation that I did not bother to stress it. I stress it now. No other hypothesis comes anywhere
near to superseding it.

Descartes has few contemporary disciples. Not many philosophers of whatever persuasion believe
that we are spiritual substances. Those who so far depart from present fashion as not to take a
materialistic view of our identities are most likely to equate persons with the series of their
experiences. There is no reason in principle why such a series should not continue beyond the
point where the experiences are associated with a particular body. Unfortunately, as I pointed out
in my article, nobody has yet succeeded in specifying the relations which would have to hold
between the members of such a series for them to constitute a person. There is a more serious
objection. Whatever these relations were, they would be contingent; they might not have
obtained. But this allows for the possibility of there being experiences which do not belong to
any- body; experiences which exist on their own. It is not obvious to me that this supposition is
contradictory; but it might well be regarded as an irreparable defect in the theory.

If theories of this type are excluded, one might try to fall back on the Christian doctrine of the
resurrection of the body. But, notoriously, this too encounters a mass of difficulties. I shall
mention only one or two of them. For instance, one may ask in what form our bodies will be
returned to us. As they were when we died, or when we were in our prime? Would they still be
vulnerable to pain and disease? What are the prospects for infants, cripples, schizophrenics, and
amnesiacs? In what manner will they survive?

'Oh, how glorious and resplendent, fragile body, shalt thou be!' This body? Why should one give
unnecessary hostages to fortune? Let it be granted that I must reappear as an embodied person, if
I am to reappear at all. It does not follow that the body which is going to be mine must be the
same body as the one that is mine now; it need not be even a replica of my present body. The
most that is required is that it be generically the same; that is, a human body of some sort, let us
say a standard male model not especially strong or beautiful, not diseased, but still subject to the
ills that flesh is heir to. I am not sure whether one can allow oneself a choice with respect to age
and sex. The preservation or renewal of one's personal identity will be secured, in this picture, by
a continuity of one's mental states, with memory a necessary, but still not a sufficient, factor. I am
assuming now that these mental states cannot exist on their own; hence, the need for a material
body to sustain them.

I am far from claiming that such a scenario is plausible. Nevertheless it does have two merits. The
first is that we are no longer required to make sense of the hypothesis that one's body will be
reconstructed sometime after it has perished. The second is that it does not force us to postulate
the existence of a future world. One can live again in a future state of the world that one lives in
now.

At this point it becomes clear that the idea of the resurrection of the body had better be
discarded. It is to be replaced by the idea of re-incarnation. The two are not so very distinct. What
gives the idea of re-incarnation the advantage is that it clearly implies both that persons undergo
a change of bodies and that they return to the same world that they inhabited before.

The idea of re-incarnation is popular in the East. In the West it has been more generally
ridiculed. Indeed, I myself have frequently made fun of it. Even now, I am not suggesting that it is
or ever will be a reality. Not even that it could be. Our concept of a person is such that it is
actually contradictory to suppose that once-dead persons return to earth after what may be a
considerable lapse of time.

But our concepts are not sacrosanct. They can be modified if they cease to be well adapted to our
experience. In the present instance, the change which would supply us with a motive for altering
our concept of a person in such a way as to admit the possibility of reincarnation would not be
very great. All that would be required is that there be good evidence that many persons are able
to furnish information about previous lives of such a character and such an abundance that it
would seem they could not possess the information unless they themselves had lived the lives in
question.

This condition is indispensable. There is no sense in someone's claiming to have been Antony,
say, or Cleopatra, if he, or she knows less about Antony or Cleopatra than a good Shakespearian
scholar and much less than a competent ancient histor- ian. Forgetfulness in this context is
literally death.

I should remark that even if this condi- tion were satisfied, our motive for chang- ing our concept
of a person would not be irresistible. Harmony could also be res- tored by our changing our
concept of memory. We could introduce the ruling that it is possible to remember experiences
that one never had; not just to remember them in the way that one remembers facts of one sort or
another, but to remember these experiences in the way that one remember one's own.

Which of these decisions would lead us to the truth? This is a senseless question. In a case of this
kind, there is, as Professor Quine would put it, no fact of the matter which we can seek to
discover. There would indeed be a fact to which we should be trying to adjust our language; the
fact that people did exhibit this surprising capacity. But what adjustment we made, whether we
modified our concept of a person, or our concept of memory, or followed some other course,
would be a matter for choice. The most that could be claimed for the idea of re-incarnation is that
it would in these circumstances be an attractive option.

This time let me make my position fully clear. I am not saying that these ostensible feats of
memory have ever yet been abun- dantly performed, or indeed performed at all, or that they ever
will be performed. I am saying only that there would be nothing in logic to prevent their being
performed in such abundance as to give us a motive for licensing re-incarnation; and a motive for
admitting it as a possibility would also be a motive for admitting it as a fact.

The consequence of such an admission would be fairly radical, though not so radical as the
standbys of science fiction such as brain transplants and teleportation. Less radical too than the
speculations of mathematical physicists. These specula- tions titillate rather than alarm the
reading public. Professor Hawking's book A Brief History of Tune is a best-seller. Perhaps the
reading public has not clearly under- stood what his speculations imply. We are told, for example,
that there may be a reversal in the direction of the arrow of time. This would provide for much
stran- ger possibilities than that of a re-birth following one's death. It would entail that in any
given life a person's death preceded his birth. That would indeed be a shock to common sense.