Is This Your Only Life?

About this lecture

Could we come to have embodiments other than our present embodiments, so that this life is not our only life? Many people think that the answer to this question is settled, though they starkly disagree about what the answer is. For me, the answer remains open. Without relying on an appeal to mystical revelation, out of body experiences or religious conviction this lecture will examine how we should think of persons and their embodiments given the failures of functionalism, reductive materialism, non-reductive materialism and strong emergence.

In an old Ohai “dialog” on reincarnation, Jiddu Krishnamurti asked an important prior question, namely “What is incarnation?” or as I shall put it “What is embodiment?” Roughly, Krishnamurti intimated that it consists in the capture of the open field of awareness by the turmoil-generating illusion of a separate self or ego. In this lecture, I set aside answers to our question drawn from Advaita Vedanta and psychological reductionist Buddhist traditions because they occlude the importance of the will. The details of evolutionary history strongly suggest that animals, including human animals, are embodied wills characteristically adapted to actively and effectively function in their habitats. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere (Johnston 2025), the objective basis of moral status—i.e. possessing the special worth that demands moral respect—is being a will, i.e. conscious valuer of species-relative values which can act to secure those values disclosed to it by evolved affective modes of presentation, which generically indicate what is good for the kind of animal will in question.

The separate superlative self may be an illusion. But the will is not an illusion. It is at the center of evolved animal life, in which perception in particular and awareness in general serves the active will. If I am to have another life, this will—my will—must be capable of an embodiment that is not my present embodiment. And perhaps, over many embodiments my will might come to valorize the good over its own good.

About Mark Johnston

Mark Johnston, Henry Putnam University Professor at Princeton University is the author of Saving God (Princeton University Press, 2010) and Surviving Death (Princeton University Press, 2011) Known for his many influential and widely reprinted articles in the fields of Ontology, Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Religion, Epistemology and Value Theory, Johnston has been in recent years the Gareth Evans Memorial Lecturer at Oxford University, the Gifford Lecturer at St Andrews, the Townsend Lecturer at Berkeley, The Stanton Lecturer at Cambridge University, and the Romanell Lecturer at the American Philosophical Association.

Relevant Publications

Brian O’Shaughnessy

The Will: A Dual Aspect Theory, Volume II (Cambridge University, 2008).

Mark Johnston

“Remnant Persons: Animalism Undone” in Stephan Blatti and Paul Snowdon, eds. Essays on Animalism (Oxford University Press, 2015).

“The Personite Problem: Should Practical Reason be Tabled?” NOUS 50, 2016.

“Is Hope for An Afterlife Rational?” in Paul Draper ed. Current Controversies in Philosophy of Religion (Routledge, 2019).

“Surviving Death, Again” THEOLOGICA, Volume 7, 2023.

“Ontological Reduction, Ontological Trash, Emergence, and the Embodiment of Mind” Proceedings of The American Philosophical Association, Volume 96, 2024.

“The Objective Prescriptive Core of Morality” in Paul Boghossian and Christopher Peacocke eds. Normative Objectivity (Oxford University Press, 2025).