Axis: After death — Does something of us survive death?
The person ends with the body: consciousness, born of organized matter, comes undone with it. What remains is not the person: works, children, a memory in others, traces that last as long as someone carries them. The only eternity available is that of things done, not of the one who did them.
Foundations and implications
↑ What grounds it↓ What it implies
↑ What grounds it
Nature of reality
If everything is matter, consciousness comes undone with the body that carries it: materialism grounds annihilation, as in Lucretius, where the soul, made of fine atoms, scatters at death. The link is not absolute: van Inwagen defends a materialist resurrection through divine re-creation.
↓ What it implies
Death
Epicurus' argument rests entirely on annihilation: if death is complete dissolution, it is nothing to us, and the fear dissolves with it. Were something to survive, death would become something again: it is the belief that nothing survives that grounds the liberation from fear.
The mind is born, matures, and fails with the body, is befuddled by its wine, goes out under a blow: do these bonds prove that thought dies with the flesh, or only that the instrument conditions the playing without being the musician?
Works, children, and memory prolong a name, not a consciousness: does this immortality by proxy deserve the word survival, or is it a consolation that changes the subject?