JESSE BERING is Reader in the School of History and Anthropology and Director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture. His work has focused on the psychological foundations of supernatural belief.

Bering’s experimental research program provides some of the first evidence for the ‘naturalness’ of belief in the afterlife. His simulation constraint hypothesis holds that a delimiting phenomenological boundary prevents people from experiencing the absence of certain categories of mental states, such as emotions, desires, and various episteme (the most “ethereal” qualia). Because we can never know what it feels like to be without such states, these natural representational borders encourage afterlife beliefs; when we attempt to reason about what it will be “like” after death—and what it is “like” for those who have already died—we inevitably get ensnared by simulation constraints and reason in terms of a continued consciousness.

Beyond Edge: Jesse Bering's Home Page