#263 — The Paradox of Death
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Summary
In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, I talk about the time capsule effect, a phenomenon that allows us to recall memories of people who have died before us. It's a phenomenon I think about a lot, but not in a morbid way. In this episode, I explore the concept of the "Time Capsule Effect" and how we can use it to reflect on our own deaths, and the stories of others who have already passed on. I also talk about what it means to be bereaved of a loved one, and how to deal with the grief that comes with the loss of someone you care deeply about. To access full episodes of Making Sense, you'll need to become a member of the mailing list mentioned in the episode, where you'll get access to all new episodes of the podcast, as well as access to special ad-free episodes throughout the week. To become a patron of the Misericordinator, you can support the project by becoming a patron patron of The Making Sense Foundation, where I'll get 20% off the entire monthly membership offer, plus I'll receive a free copy of the final issue of my book, "Making Sense: A Guide to Life After Death," which is available in Kindle, iBook, Paperback, Hardcover, and Audio Book format. I'll be giving you access to the book for a limited time only, and a limited edition hardcover edition of the book, available only in hardcover only in the U.S. available for purchase at $99.00. You can also get a copy of my new book, I'm giving you a year-only $99, which includes a hardcover of my first edition of The Memento Mori Moriarity, The One Less Day I'm Dying Is My Name? and two hardcover hardcover editions of my second edition, I hope you'll also get the book I'm also giving you an ad-only edition of my third edition of My Life Guide to Death, which is also available for free on my website, which will be available on amazon, I'm hoping you'll be able to receive a digital edition, I'll have an autographed copy of this book I'll send to you in the next week, and I'll also be making you get an ebook of the second edition the book will be out in January by making sense of all of these books I'm working on in the coming months.
Transcript
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welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris just a note to say that if you're hearing
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i recently ran an opinion poll online asking people how often they think seriously about
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death about its inevitability about their priorities in light of it etc and i gave the choices many times
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a day perhaps once a day i can go days without thinking about it i can go weeks without thinking
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about it and i'm not sure what results i was expecting but the distribution did surprise me
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obviously this isn't a scientific sample it was mostly a sample of the kind of people who follow me on
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twitter though i think the poll did spread somewhat beyond my audience i got over 40 000 responses anyway
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the largest cohort were those who don't think about death very often 32 percent said they can go weeks
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without doing so 27 percent can go days without it 28 percent think about death perhaps once a day
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and only 13 percent were people like me who think about it many times each day
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so judging from these results i probably think about death more in the average day than most people
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think about it in many months or even a year i generally don't think about it in a way that i would
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consider morbid my thoughts tend to be more in line with the memento mori reflections that are widely
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recommended by buddhists and stoics and which you can find echoed in several places in waking up
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reflecting on the preciousness of life on the non-renewable character of time on the reality
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that you simply don't know how much time you have but you definitely have one less day today and every
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day thoughts of this kind need not make a person depressed though perhaps they make some people depressed
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rather they can and should inspire us to wisdom and compassion do that most important thing now
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express your love now relinquish those hang-ups now bury the hatchet now recognize the nature of mind now
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live fully now live fully now for one day you will die but it does seem that many people don't reflect
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in this way and do their best to avoid thinking about death altogether and even those of us who think
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about it a lot still suffer from various forms of death denial for instance even though the reality
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and inevitability and inevitability of death seem very well established in my mind more often than not
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i'm still shocked to learn that any specific person has died unless that person was in his or her 90s
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any specific death still seems somehow anomalous to me my first question is some incredulous version of
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what happened so i do detect in myself some form of death denial even though i think about the reality
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of death a lot and the reality of it is everywhere i notice more and more that many of the people i admire
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people who i read or listen to with pleasure actors who i enjoy watching in films people whose thoughts
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and personalities i can summon in an instant by picking up a book or typing their names into youtube
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i notice more and more that many of these people are dead and some died at an age that i've already
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surpassed and i'm also occasionally aware that i'm likely going to occupy this role for other people
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i don't think it's totally grandiose of me to imagine that some people will listen to my voice
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or read my books after i'm dead now i'm 54 at the time i'm recording this how long will i live
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obviously i have no idea but what will it be like for someone who cares about the life i've lived
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and who finds some value in my view of the world what will it be like for you to listen to this audio
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after i'm gone to know that i lived as fully as you do now but to know that i no longer do
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well i know exactly what that's like i have that experience more or less every day there's something
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very strange about this time capsule effect this one-way communication with the past it's amazing
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that we have media that allows us to do this to have this shock of recognition you can summon
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carl sagan or marlon brando from beyond the grave and fully recognize that they were once as alive
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as you are now and we know the precise day that they died and we also know that the world went on
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without them when we think about death there are different facets of it that we can focus on
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we can think about our own deaths or we can think about the deaths of other people in particular those
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closest to us and these are very different problems when i think about the deaths of the people i love
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the focus is much more on my own bereavement than it is on the fact of death itself even though it's true
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that when i die i will lose everyone i won't be alive to experience that loss so bereavement doesn't really
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enter into it it seems to me that the pure reflection on death itself is really best focused on our own
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case however even here is possible to get distracted by other things for instance we can worry about the
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process of dying whether it's going to be sudden or after a long illness will it be painful or in some
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other way chaotic or will we go peacefully in our sleep thinking about the process of dying is really
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thinking about the specific experiences one will have at the end of one's life to think about death
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itself is to think about what happens after that or about what doesn't happen after that so it's not
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the dying it's the being dead part that interests me here so today i'm going to say a few things about
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what it might mean to be dead and i want to explore certain paradoxes that seem to surround
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this phenomenon so we can leave the process of dying aside it's going to be whatever it will be
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and whatever it is it will be a finite experience which is to say that however painful it might be
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in the case of any one of us there will come a time when it ceases to be painful
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even if one suffers a long illness and a blizzard of medical interventions there will be a moment
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when all of that ends so dying will be like anything else in life it will be temporary the part that
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seems like it might not be temporary is the condition of being dead now what we think about death in
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particular about what happens to each of us after our bodies die depends on what we believe about two
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fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind the nature of consciousness and the nature of identity
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the question about the status of consciousness in the natural world is often referred to as the mind
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body problem what is the relationship between mind and matter where does consciousness come from does it arise
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on the basis of information processing in the brain or is it a more fundamental constituent of matter
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or is matter itself a mere appearance in consciousness which would then be the true
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base layer of reality there are rival metaphysical views here specifically physicalism panpsychism
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and idealism and however one resolves the mind body problem there remains the problem of personal identity
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for instance in what sense am i the same person or self or consciousness that i was yesterday
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what could be the basis of any claim to identity is it just a matter of psychological continuity through
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time what's the significance of such continuity when we think about replacing parts of ourselves
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even parts of our brains or stranger still when we think about the prospect of copying our minds onto some other
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substrate what would it mean to create minds that have perfect copies of our memories and desires
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perhaps better copies than we maintain normally while living what would any of this suggest about the nature of
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personal identity now i've discussed many of these riddles elsewhere without giving anything like final answers to them
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but here i want to focus on the question of death as viewed from the inside from the point of view of the experience of any
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person who has died and of course this will be each of us ultimately unless we get to a time where we're
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actually duplicating ourselves or otherwise perfectly resisting biological decay each of us will one day
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be counted among the dead by those who outlive us but before we get started here there's one peculiar
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intuition often held by religious people that i think we should dispense with at the outset and
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it's the intuition that if death really is the end of us if it's synonymous with the end of experience
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well then that finality robs life of any conceivable purpose or meaning or significance the idea seems to
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be that the only way for love or knowledge or beauty or happiness to matter is for these states of mind and
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states of the world to last forever it's eternity or nothing this is a surprisingly common point of view
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as i said especially among the religious but if you think about it it is a strange idea and it's also
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strange that no one seems to apply it to specific experiences i never hear someone say that if a play
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or a dance or a piece of music or a conversation or a hug or a meal or a sunset or anything else
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doesn't last forever well then it was pointless rather i think one could easily argue it's the
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transiency of everything that magnifies the beauty of everything i would also point out that the
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decisions we make while alive the culture we create the ideas we invent and spread all of this directly
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affects the minds of the people who will outlive us and the effect we have on these people could well
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make the difference between humanity petering out over the course of the next century
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or spreading itself through the galaxy for millions or even billions of years
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just take a moment to contemplate the difference between these two futures in the first humanity has no
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future because we fail to mitigate some specific existential risks and in the other our future is truly
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open-ended we achieve a kind of escape velocity with respect to our survival now of course there are
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intermediate places on this landscape if we don't play our cards quite right we might persist for a
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very long time under conditions that are not only not desirable but may be quite terrible based on our
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failure to cooperate intelligently generation after generation but how each of us lives now will help
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determine our trajectory here so what we think and say now matters even if we're not around to
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experience the consequences so i won't go into it further here but i just wanted to indicate that
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i don't think the finality of death in the case of each individual says much of anything about that
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individual's life and it certainly says nothing about the meaning of life itself but there is also something
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paradoxical about the very idea of death as a condition in which every individual life and mind
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terminates and my purpose now is to explore that paradox the philosopher tom clark has a wonderful
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essay which you can read on his website naturalism.org and the essay is titled death nothingness and
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subjectivity and i want to explore his argument here in some detail of course other philosophers and
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scientists have said many things on this point for instance we have the famous quotation from epicurus
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as we encounter him in lucretius's poem on the nature of things quote death is nothing to us when we
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exist death is not and when death exists we are not all sensation and consciousness ends with death and
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therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain end quote so this idea of nothingness of oblivion of a
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dark abyss of a kind of positive absence of an endless deprivation of experience is misleading
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if we're simply talking about the end of experience you didn't experience your absence before you were born
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and if death is truly the end of experience you won't experience your absence after you die
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so this reification of death as eternal nothingness is fundamentally misleading
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and clark starts his essay there the philosopher wittgenstein made a similar point in disparaging
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freud's notion of the unconscious he said quote imagine a language in which instead of saying i found
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nobody in the room one said i found mr nobody in the room imagine the philosophical problems that would
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arise out of such a convention end quote that's from the blue book the point is nothingness isn't
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something and therefore it can't be a permanent condition of any being or mind the second point
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that clark explores is the subjective continuity of consciousness from the point of view of consciousness
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there can be no experience of before or after with respect to birth and death so there is something
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almost eternal about it from its own point of view of course we think we experience interruptions of
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consciousness while alive in sleep or under anesthesia but that's not quite true it's true that we experience
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changes in the character of our experience that is in the contents of consciousness it feels like
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something to wake up groggy from sleep say but from the point of view of consciousness we just experience
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one moment after the next even if some moments indicate that there were periods of time that we can't
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account for or did not experience at all from the point of view of consciousness
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