John asked:

I'm trying to track down any previous exponents of the following notion: One way to make sense of
the idea of survival after death is to posit that what survives is the "idea" or "thought" of the person, as
retained in the "mind of God." For this to work, you also have to posit that a person's identity
(understood as the seat of the conscious "I") is a non-physical thing that could exist as a thought. The
analogy might be to a piece of music: clearly, in some sense the Moonlight Sonata exists as an idea,
independent of any instantiation in performance or recording. So even if all physical/aural instances of
it are wiped out, as long as I or you remember it, it exists. Similarly, as long as God remembers us,
we exist after our physical "performance" is over. This notion has some problems, but I'm wondering if
you've run across it before.

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What you describe sounds very like the Pythagorean doctrine of reincarnation. In his dialogue
Phaedo,Plato refers to a theory — which sounds very much like a theory that would have been held
by the Pythagoreans — according to which the soul is an 'attunement', like the tuning of a lyre. In the
dialogue, the theory is put forward by Socrates' friends Simmias and Cebes. Socrates rejects the
theory, as an argument for immortality, on the grounds that if you destroy a lyre you destroy the
attunement which existed in thatparticular instrument. But clearly what the Pythagoreans had in mind
was that the sametuning can be instantiated in different lyres. The difference between a human
personality and a lyre (or guitar) tuning is that human personalities are, as a matter of fact, unique.

It follows from this theory that the Socrates' special attunement could come to be realized in another
living human body. It is only an accidental fact that we never come across the same human 'tuning'
twice.

There is a noticeable gap in this theory: Where does the Socrates tuning exist after the death of
Socrates' body and before it is realized in another body? I suppose this is where you would say the
'mind of God' comes in. The Pythagoreans, who first discovered the relation between number and
harmony, had an ultra-realist view of numbers. So they could have been happy to defend the view
that in between bodily realizations, the Socrates attunement exists as a real numerical value, with
causal powers sufficient to enable it to impress itself on a new body, without requiring anything to
exist in.

As an interpretation of the Pythagorean doctrine of reincarnation, this is to a certain extent
speculative. Apart from alleged reports of cases of reincarnation, such as that of Pythagoras himself,
the only Pythagorean-sounding argument to be found in the existing texts is the one which Plato
rubbishes in the Phaedo.

At this point, an acute reader may have noticed a remarkable coincidence with ideas from AI
research. If there is such a thing as a Geoffrey Klempner program,as some AI theorists believe, then,
in principle, when my body grows old, my program could be uploaded from my brain onto a computer
disc and downloaded into a new, young body, perhaps cloned from one of my own cells. What a great
idea! As Daniel Dennett notes in his book Consciousness Explainedit promises a much better
chance of immortality than having your head chopped off after your death and put into a freezer in the
hope that future medical science might be able to get your brain working again. (In the USA, there is
— or was — a company that does this for a fee.)

So there is a possibility that I might survive the death of my present body. But there's a catch, the
same catch as there is with the Pythagorean theory, and with your theory of a person as a 'thought' in
the mind of God. Being quite adept at problem solving, the GK program is too good to wasted on just
one body. So, without myknowledge, pirated copies are downloaded into several more bodies. Then
one day we meet up. — I'll leave you to write the rest of this scenario. (If you're stuck for ideas, check
out my science fiction storyThe Insurance Policy.)

Geoffrey Klempner