Theories about life after death all concern whether or not there is a part of the human body which survives the death, specifically the soul, and if it does where or when it goes post death. Embodied existence is the idea that we can in a physical sense, survive death and live on as physical matter, rather than an aspect of us, such as our soul living a spiritual, disembodied existence after death. Dualism is the theory that our body is distinctly separate from our soul, that as humans we consist of two separate entities. Plato, a famous dualist believed that the soul is eternal, and that our embodied life as a human is just a small part of existence. Descartes also expressed the idea of dualism when he famously said “I think therefore I am”, suggesting that because we can think independently of our bodies, our mind is a separate entity all together. Alternatively monists argue that we are a single entity, where our soul and our body are intrinsically linked, as one and cannot be separated. Both philosophical and scientific thinking have contributed to the seemingly never ending debate on whether or not it’s possible to survive death.
Plato was a dualist and so asserted that embodied existence is incoherent, as he described the soul as being immortal, and the body as mortal. Unlike science, he argued that the soul is inseparable and wholly reliant on the physical body. He suggested the soul as being “imprisoned” in the body, as the body merely serves to encase and protect the soul, which will eventually be freed from the restraints of the physical body at the point of death. According to Plato’s theory of the Forms the soul already has knowledge of the real world, and with training can recollect experiences of the Forms from its previous existence in the real world before it was incarnated into a physical body on this world. Plato presented the argument from