Human nature has instilled in people an innate ability to question the interactions between their living forms and the world that encompasses them. This ability to reason has paved roads leading to infinite numbers of arguments concerning the physical and abstract qualities of life. It is inevitable that these roads have led to problems concerning our own bodies and souls and the nature of their existence. These problems become personal when they turn to the possible limitations of this existence and it is not without an uneasy disposition that we may begin to question our own mortality. For it is true that everyone, at some point in their lives, will acknowledge their own physical death. Whether they choose to view bodily death in conjunction with conscious death, or instead ascribe to a sort of survival of the conscious in a life after death, it is a decision to be made based upon personal outlooks of faith and knowledge.
             Many choose to believe in their own survival of physical death because it is what seems most natural. The fact is that each person has been alive and conscious at all times he can remember and so being alive and conscious has therefore become in humans an ingrained habit. This habit leads to expectations and beliefs about what will occur, just as the fact that every breath taken will lead to the expectation that future breaths will also find air to breath. As J.B. Pratt has said, "The child takes the continuity of life for granted. It is the fact of death that has to be taught him. But when he has learned it, and the idea of a future life is then put explicitly before his mind, it seems to him the most natural thing in the world" (Ducasse 8). This accounts for the psychological origin of the widespread belief that one's life does not end at death.
             Those who believe in their survival usually attest to the existence of a soul, which for their purposes is defined as the spiritual and immortal par...