The Hardwired Certainty of Immortality
Scientific American takes a look at one of the reasons it's hard to convince people to give an appropriate level of support to longevity research: "the only real mystery is why we're so convinced that when it comes to where we're going 'when the whole thing’s done,' we're dealing with a mystery at all. After all, the brain is like any other organ: a part of our physical body. And the mind is what the brain does - it's more a verb than it is a noun. Why do we wonder where our mind goes when the body is dead? Shouldn’t it be obvious that the mind is dead, too? And yet people in every culture believe in an afterlife of some kind or, at the very least, are unsure about what happens to the mind at death. My psychological research has led me to believe that these irrational beliefs, rather than resulting from religion or serving to protect us from the terror of inexistence, are an inevitable by-product of self-consciousness. Because we have never experienced a lack of consciousness, we cannot imagine what it will feel like to be dead. In fact, it won't feel like anything - and therein lies the problem. ... our ancestors suffered the unshakable illusion that their minds were immortal, and it's this hiccup of gross irrationality that we have unmistakably inherited from them. Individual human beings, by virtue of their evolved cognitive architecture, had trouble conceptualizing their own psychological inexistence from the start."
Link: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=never-say-die&print=true