Their ostensible purpose is to apply principles of scientific reasoning, featuring "Mill's methods and modern epidemiological principles," to the choice between the dependence thesis , that "having a functioning brain is a necessary condition for having conscious experiences," and its denial, the independence thesis (203). The most extensive case for a negative verdict on the soul is made in the section's final piece, "The Dualist's Dilemma: The High Cost of Reconciling Neuroscience with a Soul," by Augustine and Yonatan I. The question is what this implies for the existence or non-existence of a soul. It is crystal clear that, in normal human life, mental function is dependent in an intimate and fine-grained way on brain function. Non-specialists will find new and interesting details here, but the overall picture will be familiar to those who have followed the progress of the brain sciences. Jamie Horder, in "The Brain that Doesn't Know Itself," points to instances of person with neurological defects who are oblivious to their deficiencies. Terence Hines points to the specialization of the brain for processing language again, once the brain dies there can be no more linguistic capabilities. Álvarez argues that emotions are the product of the brain and cannot exist without it. Gualtiero Piccinini and Sonya Bahar argue from the neural localization of mental functions that there can be no mental life after the brain has died. Fishman advocate that the argument from brain damage shows that the end of the brain means the end of a person's existence. David Weisman argues that the symptoms of the dying brain point to annihilation. Matt McCormick leads off with "Dead as a Doornail: Souls, Brains, and Survival." Jean Mercer compares soul theory with behavior genetics as a means for explaining personality. Part I is devoted to "Empirical Arguments for Annihilation." Here we are given a considerable variety of evidence showing in detail how various kinds of mental activity are dependent on brain functions. Nothing surprising in this, but one might wonder about the piece's placement it could well have been included in the concluding section, "Dubious Evidence for Survival." It is hard to avoid the impression that the purpose was to nip in the bud any tendency on the reader's part to suppose that there might be epistemically respectable reasons for belief in an afterlife. Belief in an afterlife, we learn, is a "selfish meme" it is comparable to cigarette smoking in that the belief gives little satisfaction but giving it up tends to involve considerable pain.
(We are told there are no pro-afterlife contributors because the majority of published writing on the subject is by believers in an afterlife thus the need to redress the balance.) The first item, before the preface and the editors' introduction, is "On the Origin of Afterlife Beliefs by Means of Memetic Selection," by Steve Stewart-Williams. Perhaps better, it is a sustained polemic on the contention expressed in the title. It is tempting to describe Michael Martin and Keith Augustine's book as an anti-survivalist tract, but "tract" may be the wrong word for a 700-page volume with 30 different contributors.
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