Dead-Survivors, the Living Dead, and Concepts of Death

Abstract

The author introduces and critically analyzes two recent, curious findings and their accompanying explanations regarding how the folk intuits the capabilities of the dead and those in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). The dead are intuited to survive death, whereas PVS patients are intuited as more dead than the dead. Current explanations of these curious findings rely on how the folk is said to conceive of death and the dead: either as the annihilation of the person (via the secular conception of death), or that person's continuation as a disembodied being (via folk dualism). The author argues that these two conceptions are incompatible and inconsistent with each other and the evidence. Contrariwise, the author argues that the folk intuition about dead-survivors and the living dead are more easily explained by appealing to cross-culturally established concepts: the folk biological concept of death the existential (metaphorical) concept of death, and the concept of social death.