Monday, Oct 18, 2021 • 18min
#263 — The Paradox of Death
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In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris reflects on the subjective continuity of consciousness, the nature of identity, and the possibility that death isn’t the end of experience. SUBSCRIBE to listen to the rest of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast at samharris.org/subscribehttp://samharris.org/subscribe . Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up http://wakingup.com/ app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
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Sam Harris
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Sam Harris
00:04
Welcome to the "Making Sense" podcast. This is
Sam Harris
.Share
Break
Sam Harris
00:48
I recently ran an opinion poll online asking people how often they think seriously about
death
, about its inevitability, about their priorities in light of it, et cetera.Share
01:03
And I gave the choices "many times a day", "perhaps once a day", "I can go days without thinking about it", "I can go weeks without thinking about it". And I'm not sure what results I was expecting. But the distribution did surprise me. Obviously, this isn't a scientific sample. It was mostly a sample of the kind of people who follow me on Twitter.
Share
01:28
So I think the poll did spread somewhat beyond my audience. I got over 40,000 responses. Anyway, the largest cohort were those who don't think about
death
very often. 32% said they can go weeks without doing so. 27% can go days without it. 28% think about death
perhaps once a day. And only 13% were people like me, who think about it many times each day.Share
02:02
So judging from these results, I probably think about
death
more in the average day than most people think about it in many months or even a year. I generally don't think about it in a way that I would consider morbid.Share
02:20
My thoughts tend to be more in line with the
memento mori
reflections that are widely recommended by Buddhists
and stoics.
And which you can find echoed in several places in Waking Up
, reflecting on the preciousness of life, on the non-renewable character of time, on the reality that you simply don't know how much time you have, but you definitely have one less day today and every day.Share
02:47
Thoughts of this kind need not make a person depressed. Though, perhaps, they make some people depressed. Rather, they can and should inspire us to wisdom and compassion. Do that most important thing - now. Express your love - now. Relinquish those hang ups - now. Bury the hatchet - now. Recognize the nature of mind - now. Live fully - now, for one day you will die. But it does seem that many people don't reflect in this way and do their best to avoid thinking about
death
altogether.Share
03:35
And even those of us who think about it a lot still suffer from various forms of
death
denial. For instance, even though the reality and inevitability of death
seemed very well established in my mind, more often than not, I'm still shocked to learn that any specific person has died, unless that person was in his or her 90s.Share
03:59
Any specific
death
still seems somehow anomalous to me. My first question is some incredulous version of "What happened?"Share
04:10
So I do detect in myself some form of
death
denial, even though I think about the reality of death
a lot. And the reality of it is everywhere. I noticed more and more than many of the people I admire, people who I read or listen to with pleasure, actors who I enjoy watching in films, people whose thoughts and personalities I can summon in an instant by picking up a book or typing their names into YouTube
.Share
04:41
I notice more and more that many of these people are dead. And some died at an age that I've already surpassed. And I'm also occasionally aware that I'm likely going to occupy this role for other people. I don't think it's totally grandiose of me to imagine that some people will listen to my voice or read my books after I'm dead.
Share
05:06
Now I'm 54 at the time I'm recording this. How long will I live? Obviously, I have no idea.
Share
05:15
But what will it be like for someone who cares about the life I've lived, And who finds some value in my view of the world? What will it be like for you to listen to this audio after I'm gone? To know that I lived as fully as you do now, but to know that I no longer do.
Share
05:39
Well, I know exactly what that's like. I have that experience more or less every day. There's something very strange about this
time tapsule effect
This one way communication with the past. It's amazing that we have media that allows us to do this, to have the shock of recognition.Share
06:03
You can summon
Carl Sagan
or Marlon Brando
from beyond the grave and fully recognize that they were once as alive as you are now. And we know the precise day that they died. And we also know that the world went on without them.Share
06:25
When we think about
death
, there are different facets of it that we can focus on. We can think about our own deaths, or we can think about the deaths of other people, in particular those closest to us. And these are very different problems.Share
06:40
When I think about the deaths of the people I love, the focus is much more on my own bereavement than it is on the fact of
death
itself. Even though it's true that when I die, I will lose everyone. I won't be alive to experience that loss. So bereavement doesn't really enter into it.Share
07:02
It seems to me that the pure reflection on
death
itself is really best focused on our own case. However, even here it's possible to get distracted by other things. For instance, we can worry about the process of dying, whether it's going to be sudden or after a long illness. Will it be painful or in some other way chaotic? Or will we go peacefully in our sleep?Share
07:28
Thinking about the process of dying is really thinking about the specific experiences one will have at the end of one's life. To think about
death
itself is to think about what happens after that, or about what doesn't happen after that.Share
07:45
So it's not the dying, it's the being dead part that interests me here. So today, I'm going to say a few things about what it might mean to be dead. And I want to explore certain
paradoxes
that seem to surround this phenomenon.Share
08:01
So we can leave the process of dying aside. It's going to be whatever it will be. And whatever it is, it will be a finite experience. Which is to say that however painful it might be, in the case of any one of us, there will come a time when it ceases to be painful. Even if one suffers a long illness and a blizzard of medical interventions, there will be a moment when all of that ends.
Share
08:31
So dying will be like anything else in life - it will be temporary. The part that seems like it might not be temporary is the condition of being dead.
Share
08:43
Now, what we think about
death,
in particular about what happens to each of us after our bodies die, depends on what we believe about two fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind
: the nature of consciousness
and the nature of identity
.Share
08:59
The question about the status of
consciousness
in the natural world is often referred to as the mind-body problem
.Share
09:07
What is the relationship between
mind
and matter
? Where does consciousness
come from? Does it arise on the basis of information process in the brain? Or is it more fundamental constituent of matter
? Or is matter
itself a mere appearance in consciousness
, which would then be the true base layer of reality? The arrival of metaphysical
views here, specifically physicalism
, panpsychism
and idealism,
and how everyone resolves the mind-body problem
.Share
09:40
There remains the problem of personal
identity
. For instance, in what sense am I the same person, or self, or consciousness,
that I was yesterday? What could be the basis of any claim to identity
? Is it just a matter of psychological continuity through time? What's the significance of such continuity?Share
10:03
When we think about replacing parts of ourselves, even parts of our brains. Or stranger still, when we think about the prospect of copying our minds onto some other substrate. What would it mean to create minds that have perfect copies of our memories and desires? Perhaps, better copies than we maintain normally, while living. What would any of this suggests about the nature of personal
identity
?Share
10:31
Now, I've discussed many of these riddles elsewhere without giving anything like final answers to them.
Share
10:37
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 person who has died. And of course this will be each of us, ultimately, unless we get to a time where we're actually duplicating ourselves, or otherwise perfectly resisting biological decay. Each of us will one day be counted among the dead by those who outlive us.Share
11:05
But before we get started here, this one peculiar
intuition
, often held by religious people, but I think we should dispense with at the outset. As the intuition
that if death
really is the end of us, if it's synonymous with the end of experience, well, then that finality robs life of any conceivable purpose, or meaning, or significance.Share
11:30
The idea seems to be that the only way for love, or knowledge, or beauty, or happiness to matter is for these states of mind and states of the world to last forever. It's eternity or nothing. This is a surprisingly common point of view, as I said, especially among the religious.
Share
11:52
But if you think about it, it is a strange idea. And it's also strange that no one seems to apply it to specific experiences. I never hear someone say that if a play, or a dance, or a piece of music, or a conversation, or a hug, or a meal, or a sunset, or anything else doesn't last forever, well then it was pointless. Rather, I think one could easily argue it's the transiency of everything that magnifies the beauty of everything.
Share
12:28
I would also point out that the decisions we make while alive, the culture we create, the ideas we invent and spread - all of this directly affects the minds of the people who will outlive us. And the effect we have on these people could well make the difference between humanity, petering out over the course of the next century, or spreading itself through the Galaxy for millions or even billions of years.
Share
12:55
Just take a moment to contemplate the difference between these two futures. In the first, humanity has no future, because we failed to mitigate some specific
existential
risks. And in the other, our future is truly open-ended, which heave a kind of escape velocity with respect to our survival. Of course there are intermediate places on this landscape.Share
13:21
If we don't play our cards quite right, we might persist for a very long time under conditions that are not only not desirable, but maybe quite terrible, based on our failure to cooperate intelligently, generation after generation. But how each of us lives now will help determine our trajectory here. So what we think and say - now - matters, even if we're not around to experience the consequences.
Share
13:51
So, I won't go into it further here, but I just wanted to indicate that I don't think the finality of
death
in the case of each individual says much of anything about that individual's life. And it certainly says nothing about the meaning of life itself.Share
14:06
But there's also something paradoxical about the very idea of
death
as a condition in which every individual life and mind terminates. And my purpose now is to explore that paradox
.Share
14:21
The philosopher Tom Clark has a wonderful essay, which you can read on his website naturalism. org, and the essays titled "Death, Nothingness And Subjectivity". And I want to explore his argument here in some detail.
Share
14:37
Of course, other philosophers and scientists have said many things on this point. For instance, we have the famous quotation from
Epicurus,
as we encounter him in Lucretius's
poem "On The Nature Of Things
", quote, "Death
is nothing to us. When we exist, death
is not, and when death
exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness
ends with death
, and therefore, in death
there is neither pleasure nor pain." End quote.Share
15:08
So, this idea of nothingness, of oblivion, of a dark abyss, of a kind of positive absence, of an endless deprivation of experience is misleading if we're simply talking about the end of experience.
Share
15:26
You didn't experience your absence before you were born. And if
death
is truly the end of experience, you won't experience your absence after you die. So, this reification of death
as eternal nothingness is fundamentally misleading. And Clark starts his essay there.Share
15:49
The philosopher
Wittgenstein
made a similar point in disparaging Freud's
notion of the unconscious, he said, quote, "Imagine a language in which instead of saying,'I found nobody in the room', one said,'I found Mr Nobody in the room'. Imagine the philosophical problems that would arise out of such a convention", end quote. That's from the Blue Book
.Share
16:15
The point, is nothingness isn't something, and therefore, it can't be a permanent condition of any being or
mind
.Share
16:25
The second point that Clark explores is the subjective
continuity
of consciousness
.Share
16:32
From the point of view of
consciousness
, there can be no experience of before or after with respect to birth and death
. So there is something almost eternal about it, from its own point of view.Share
16:48
Of course, we think we experience interruptions of
consciousness
while alive - in sleep or under anesthesia
- but that's not quite true. It's true that we experience changes in the character of our experience that is in the contents of consciousness
. It feels like something to wake up groggy from sleep, say.Share
17:10
But from the point of view of
consciousness
we just experience one moment after the next. Even if some moments indicate that there were periods of time that we can't account for or did not experience at all. From the point of view of consciousness
...Share
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