The Problem of Immortality: Terror Management Theory

for like a decade now. Yeah. Actually, I probably was one of the first people who was lining up to see that exhibit, sure that it would be gone within weeks and I would never have a chance to see these plastic sized cadavers frolicking around playing basketball. Yeah, we had no idea that we would see flyers and and posters for the Body's Exhibit for almost almost the next ten years. It's it feels like on like every surface imaginable on the Marta train, it just gets to where

your board with with it. You're just on your commute, you're you're reading a book. You look up, Oh, there's a flayed Chinese man. Yeah, although every once in a while it will sort of catch me off guard. Like if I come up an escalator and I saw I see this raw imagery of this physical body in front of me, I will be kind of shocked a bit because it's really I mean, it's the human body stripped

to its bare essence. It's a reminder that we die, that we are this material, and we're ephemeral beings that this material it rots, it leaves. But the question is is taking a cadaver, removing its skin, plasticizing it, and then rearranging it. Is this really a confrontation with death? Yeah? Because what goes through your mind when you confront this this image of this this flayed body that's been it's been essentially turned to plastic, but to retaining all of

its its features and surfaces. Uh, what are we thinking when we watch it play chess or play basketball or whatever the pose happens happens to be um, A lot of the personality is taken away when you remove the skin from it. It becomes more of an anatomical specimen than a person. If you have any any lingering concerns about who was this, this guy, this, this girl, you know in their former life and and this is something they wanted for themselves. Those tend that those thoughts that

tend to come later after you have left the facility. Yeah. According to Jane Desmond, she's a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois and an author on a paper on this very topic, she says, this process of subtraction that's taken away all the social markers in a sense, idealizes and universalizes these individuals so that symbolically they come to stand for undifferentiated humans, which allows us to look with impunity. Impunity because we're not really looking at the

person or an individual. And she says, in many ways, we don't see graphic images of death. We see fictionalized images of death. Yeah. And I would also add that that the bodies exhibit in the in the way that these these cadavers are are frozen in time like this, they're more symbols of life than death. You're seeing like this eternally living uh sample of physiology before you. You're

not seeing a rotting body. You're seeing this eternally fresh red uh, you know, just right off the meat counter body. That's I love the way you put that, because it really does show you the distance that we have put between ourselves and death. We think we're confronting it because we're seeing the human body which is no longer alive,

laid bare, but really we are immortalizing it. Yeah, and I imagine that's not what the Gunte von Hagens, the German physician and anatomist uh that created the body's exhibit, really wanted for us. Uh. Gunther On Haggins seems like a guy who's all about confronting death. He himself often talks about his inevitable demise from Parkinson's disease, so it's it's interesting that he's created something that distances us from death rather than brings us closer to our under standing

of it. Well, and in a sense too, he's immortalizing himself through this act right live on in history as the person who came up with this plastination technique which allowed people to really view cadavers in various ways, whether or not they were reconfigured to look like they were playing sports, or maybe one section of their body was cut up so much so that you could really see the tissues in a way that had never really been

displayed before. So I wanted to bring up this this idea by Burned Heinrich, and I'm reading a book by him right now called Everlasting Life, and it's about insect and animal death and it's really interesting, and he says that human death is becoming more and more divorced from nature. We pump are dead with polluting chemicals like formaldehyde. We put them into airtight boxes and then plant them in precious real estate that could be used for agriculture. We

think we're denying death that way. Yeah, it's ridiculous. I've I've thought this for some time. It's just look, go to these remarkable meanings to distance ourselves not only from the decay of the body, but but also from the act of dying. I mean, we have whole institutions in place so that we don't have to confront the realities of physical death, right so much so to the point that we're embalming ourselves and this hope that there's some

sort of immortality available to us. And that's what we're gonna talk about today, This idea of immortality, why it's problematic, and why we need this story of immortality yea, and arguably why immortality and the quest for immortality is at the heart of every human endeavor. Now we'll we'll put

that to you the end of the episode. If you believe that that the quest for immortality is in fact such a vital part of who we are as humans, or if there's a little more to us right like on a day to day basis, could it be affecting our decisions? Yeah, we shall see. Now, I feel like we should before we go further, we should discuss our own takes on this. I feel like I probably think about death a lot, and I feel like I've always

kind of thought about death. Um Like, I can't remember a time when when I when I didn't think about it, and and and it's not not like I was encountering death at an early stage in life. You know, my life was was comfortably death free for for the longest period of time. But it seems like there's always been a kind of confrontation of it, at least in the media that I've consumed throughout my life. So it seems

like I've I've always been there with it. Yeah. I I have said before that this podcast has had me thinking about it quite a bit um since we began. Although I am difficult to work with right, right, I'll just bring me death, no, but more and from the route of consciousness, because I equate you know, non consciousness, not so much sleep or or even coma with death.

But you know, basically, when you start thinking about consciousness and life and you begin to try to center where all this is coming from, inevitably you will land on the death card and start to think about that. So when we struck upon this talk by Stephen Cave who has a book out about immortality and and he discusses these various ways in which we approach immortality, it really struck me because he says that we can't help it. We humans have several different ways that we create this

narrative of immortality. And he says, really there are four different types of it. One really well known. In fact, it's a pretty historical one. I think everybody is familiar with resurrection, this idea that you might come back to life after dying, and this is a belief that is found in various religions. We're talking about a literal resurrection of the body, but also a heavenly resurrection or a recycling of the soul into a new body and time,

which leads to different ideas about what this resurrection could be. Yeah, this one's pretty pretty fabulous because again it's part of the three major Judaeo Christian religions, I mean Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And it's the idea that resurrection life after death involves you being born again in this body or perhaps in another body just like this one, and we it's it's often, it's often something that you end up

skimming over within those faiths. You end up being told, all right, yeah, you know there's a bodily resurrection, but you really end up buying into other ideas of resurrection that we'll discuss um. Because there are so many complications. You get into questions of well, which version of me, which which body is going to come back? And my coming back is this this rotting body of this uh,

this preserved body. What happens if something happens to the body of the body is not not not prepared properly for burial, but it's not buried the right way of it's lost. You get into all these concerns, and then you get into all these additional theological concerns, Well, what happens to my soul when it's not in a body,

is there an intermediate place that it goes to? And we touched on some of the additional issues in our our episode on Hell and the problem with Hell when you start figuring out, well, where does the soul go when it goes to Hell, because a lot of these interpretations of hell also require you to have a physical body again in order for it to work, and then

in some cases your soul is destroyed. It's logistical nightmare because yes, you, like you said, you know, if the body didn't come back exactly as it was, what about the soul? Do they match up? And this is really interesting.

Stephen Cave had pointed this out in his talk that Romans would get so annoyed with early Christians about this idea of resurrection that they would say, Okay, you think this guy's coming back, We'll let me chop him up to bits and pieces and bury him in various locations throughout these lands, and we'll see if he gets resurrected bodily, you know, resurrect that. It was kind of mean spirited by the Romans, you have to admit though they were trying to prove a point, But yes, it was um

any anytimes you're anytime you're chopping up a corpse. Just despite your seria, it's you're you're in a weird area and you need to rethink where you are. But but to your point, uh, it does. It's just one slice of the cake when you're looking at the problems and trying to square away, um, how bodily resurlection resurrection would work. And then you've got that soul, the idea that this soul might persist. Yeah, this now, the idea that there is this um, this part of us that is spirit.

That's of course, and it's a very ancient idea. You look back to the the ancient Egyptians, you look back to even more primitive models, uh, and you will see this idea that there's something in us that lives on. Now, they're sort of cave focuses on just one version of this, but they're they're according to some other experts, they're they're kind of two. One is the idea of an astral body. Now, that's the idea that when we're alive, we're just kind

of this conjoined thing. We have two bodies. We have a physical body and an astral body living is one. And then when that physical body dies this astral body lives on to U two, mourn for our own death too, maybe haunt somewhere, to say goodbye to loved ones, to go off wandering through the universe, what have you? Uh. But and it's and it's worth on. This is the idea, this is the the immortality, this is the life after death that is most commonly encountered in works of fiction.

Jacob Marley's ghost that is essentially an astral body. It's really convenient, yeah, because your your body dies and then there's this sort of see through you that looks just like you. It's it's a Hamlet's ghost. And it's also a kind of version of life after death that we often end up buying into, at least a little bit, you know now and again, despite what we believe, uh, you know, based on our faith, based on our science,

based on our reason as we discussed in our Hell episode. Uh, it's it's rare for someone to really have one solid idea of what they think the soul is and what the the the afterlife may or may not consist of. We're we're likely to dabble, as humans were likely to entertain certain ideas or believe in things on one level, while we don't believe in them in the other, and the astral body is one of them. Now, from the astral body, we get into the idea of the immaterial soul. Well, now,

what's the difference. The difference is that the astral body is like, my body dies, and here's this version of me, that spirit that looks just like me. But the immaterial soul doesn't necessarily look like a body. It's just like it's an energy. It's it can't be perceived by the senses, and and it and it doesn't need the body to exist. Right, And that idea dates back at least in a formal form to Plato. So again, im material soul, astral body.

It's a great literary device, right, because you can really call into that presence. But there's this idea that we all have that there's this core to ourselves, you know, that perhaps could persist beyond us, that what makes me me certainly couldn't die with my physical body. Yeah, and Plato is really into it based on two core arguments. One was the cycle of opposites. This is the idea that that that everything in the natural world hasn't has

an opposite, And these opposites are often interlocked. So death comes from life, and therefore life must come from death and uh, and the other the other argumenting makes is is reminiscence. And this is the idea that that the view of learning is really the process of remembering knowledge from past lives, which, you know, you could take that

in different interpretations. You could just go on with the straight up um um, you know, hippie dippie past lives kind of view, where you know, I've been an Egyptian king in my past life, or you can maybe even look at that from a sort of a genetic counterpoint.

That's one of the interesting things when you start looking at at some of these ideas of immortality, like what, uh, you know, what is reminiscence, but but epigenetic or genetic influence on who you are, you can sort of go wild with sort of breaking these down and trying to apply Yeah, you're not going to have your grandmother's um sort of our great grandmother's ghostly experiences, but as you say, you might have epigenetic markers of her physical experience manifest

themselves in you later in physical ways in which genetics get turned on and off. So that's very interesting. The third way that Cave says that we are chasing immortality is that we're trying to solve death. And he says, this has been going on for time immemorial, and you've got alchemy and now you have all sorts of different technologies. Today you have nanotechnology, you have different ways of delivering drugs.

This is and we've talked about this with Aubrey de Gray who says that the first person UH to live to five hundred years old has already been born today because we have these sort of technologies that can maintain our bodies like a classic car. And you start to think about this, You think our ancestors lived to be forty years old. We now have a life expectancy of

eighty years old currently right now. Um, is this a kind of Moore's law of life expectancy that is emerging the you know, the Moore's law of the idea that computer processing can be doubled every two years. So in the same way, you know, every x amount of decades is human life extending by twenty years. Yeah. He makes an impressive argument and uh, and he also takes the war against death, which is that's the whole topic in itself, I mentioned, but he breaks it down into into core

arguably winnable battles like this is what death is. This is what is happening on a physical level to the body. And here are the areas where we can we could fight it. We figured, you know, and we discussed in the past, past episode, So I'll refer you back to that for all the details are degree in its ways to vanquish death. Yeah. So the fourth type of immortality that Stephen Cave says we we are after is narrative. And this is what we were sort of alluding to

with the body's exhibit. Here we have this kind of narrative unfolding that will ensure some sort of immortality of the story of the bodies that are displayed of the

person who created this plascination technique. Yeah, it's the idea that even though everything that we are is going to cease to exist at some point, the things that we created, the things that we influenced, are going to live on, um, you know, not forever, but at least for a while, right, and are close enough to forever for the you know, for that brief life that we have. Yeah. Again, this idea that through achievement by becoming so famous that your

your name lives on or infamous. Right. You know, if you can't give the fame, go for the infamy. It's generally easier to achieve, which, as we will discuss in a little bit, could be tied up with the ways that we behave. All right, before we go into that, in this idea of being terrified of death and something

called terror management theory, let's take a quick break. All right, we are back, and before we get into terror management theory, we have to talk about someone named Ernest Becker, Yes, Ernest Becker, and he is the author of the book The Denial of Death, and this is where we get the idea of Terror management theory or t MT. That's right, he was anthropologies. I actually want to polish a prize

for that work. It's in nineteen seventy three work and among other things Becker Becker proposed that in times of crisis, when fears of death are aroused, people are more likely to embrace leaders who provide psychological security by making their citizens feel like they are valued contributors to a great mission to eradicate evil. And that is what this terror

management theory is built on. It was proposed by social psychologists in nineteen eighties six Jeff Greenberg, Tom Paczynski, and Sheldon Solomon, and it was initiated by two really simple questions. The first one was why do people have such a great need to feel good about themselves? And too, why do people have so much trouble getting along with those

people who have different ideas from them. Yeah, this is a fascinating theory and one that really really drives home a lot of what you end up seeing in the world around you, especially as far as fearmongering, because when political voices, when media voices start beating the wards ms start mongering up all of that fear, they're playing into

t MT, that's right. Sheldon Solomon, who is one of the authors of Terror Management Theory, in an interview with John oh Lair for Scientific Americans, said, quote, although self awareness gives rise to unbridled awe and joy, it can also lead to the potentially overwhelming dread engendered by the realization that, wait for this, it's so brutal, that death is inevitable, that it can occur for reasons that can never be anticipated or controlled, and that humans are corporeal

creatures breathing pieces of defecating meat no more significant or enduring than porcupines of peaches. But he says that humans as ingenious as we are have actually unconsciously solved this existential dilemma by developing cultural world views. This has been our savior when we are met with this kind of terror. Yeah, and the world view doesn't. We're not just talking about views on what happening to the state of the soul in the afterlife, but also views about what is important

in life? What is uh, you know, what are the values I hold to? What what is the the US group that I'm a part of, and what are the other groups outside of my world view outside of this this sphere that I've built for myself with ideas, this fortress of ideas. Uh. This this whole TMT issue um terror management theory really brings to mind a scene from

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Willie want them, you know, the scene where they drink the fizzy lifting uh liquid for fizzy liquid juice or soda or whatever it's it's called. They're in this huge cylindrical room, right, they drink this uh this stuff and they start floating and they're floating them in the bubbles, and it's all fun and games until they realize that there is a big circular fan at the top of the room, and then if they

keep floating up, they're gonna be chopped to pieces. So as they float up and up, they suddenly become aware. You know, at first, it's just all dreams and giggles. Though I'm floating around. It's wonderful. But then they realize they're going to die, and then so what do they start doing? Then they start figuring out how am I going to stop? How am I gonna what am I gonna do? And so what do you what are you doing?

That state the only thing you can do is reach out and try and grab the structures around you in these In this case, the structures are these worldviews that we've built for ourselves, things that that that seem or we've certainly built up to be solid, something to to give us some grounding about our place in the universe, about what's important, why it's important, and and and and

and why life itself is important. Yeah, Solomon says that we manage this, this potentially paralyzing terror resulting from this awareness of death, that fan, that we're being sucked into and that cultures provide three things, one meaning by offering an account of the origin of the universe to a blueprint for acceptable conduct on Earth right. Three a promise

of immortality symbolically um. And it could be by a creation of say a large monument, great works of art or science, fortunes having children, and literally literally through various kinds of afterlives that are central peace of organized religions.

And so the testable idea here is, if you confront someone with death, are you going to can you actually observe them reaching out and clinging to that structure, clinging to those worldviews that they might have, you know, otherwise otherwise drift a comfortable distance away from And is this immortality narrative is it on some level destructive? Yeah? And then the hidden question, and that is our most world views, in their in their more little interpretation, destructive. But I'll

leave that to to our listeners to consider. Yeah. I mean, because again we're talking about conceiving of death and very abstract terms. Um. So when we fly too close to that son of death, you know, we we we do get singed by it, and we recoil and back into ourselves and back into that immortality narrative. And the thing that makes us fly too close that son of death

is something called mortality salience. Yeah, and that's just straight up that moment when you realize, hey, I'm gonna die, the closer you are to the reality uh and the the well, maybe not acceptance of death, but at least the confrontation of death. Now. Solomon says that there's a huge body of evidence that shows that's just that momentarily, uh, thinking about death typically by asking people to think about themselves. Dying intensifies as people strivings to protect and bolster the

aspects of the world views that they coddle and hold dear. Yeah, I mean it's we all encounter little bits of this in our own life. You know, something, something bad happens in the world. Are you hear you hear a story about someone else in in your city or your neighborhood dying or suffering, uh, some sort of bad bit of luck. And then suddenly you're a little more like, well, maybe I should, uh you know, maybe I should go home and check on the house. Maybe I should uh you know,

upgrade the security systems. Maybe I should do this to the other Suddenly the threats in life become a little more real and it's changed your behavior. Right, you go out and you get in his security systems. There have been three hundred independent studies about mortality salience in whether or not effects our behavior and in twenty different countries that has lent support to this idea of terror management theory.

But perhaps one of the first studies is the most startling in its ability to show people doubling down on their beliefs when they think that they've been violated and they're reminded at death at the same time. And Solomon

in his team pursued this with a group of judges. Yes, this took place in Tucson, Arizona, and uh and involved it involved actually recruited court judges because they wanted people who whose job it is in theory to make unbiased decisions about about issues of well, if not mortality, than at least ethics and law rational thinkers. Yeah, so, so

what do they confront them with? A nice sort of a nice gray area, a nice a nice mortal quandary for anyone to to chew over prostitution of course, Okay, we're talking about twenty two municipal court judges, and they were told that in the study that the team was studying the relation between personality traits, attitudes and bond decisions. Bond decisions, of course, being that sum of money that judges will assign that a defendant pays prior to trial

so that they can be released from prison. So what did they do Well. They gave judges a set of questionnaires that consisted of the standard personality assessment instruments, but they also squeaked in a couple of those mortality salience in there. And they did it by asking um them to say, please briefly describe the emotions that the thought of your own death arouses in you. And the second one was jotted down as specifically as you can what you think will happen to you as you physically die

and once you're physically dead. Now, only half of those twenty two judges were given these sort of doctored personality questions that had that mortality mortality salience in them. So they each of the judges review the brief. They they review this case of this individual brought in on a prostitution charge, and they have to decide where they're going to set the bond, right, how much money is the is the is the individual going to have to pay

in order to walk the streets? Again, that's right. Judges in the control conditions set an average bond of fifty dollars. These are the people who did not have the reminders of death, and that's a typical charge for this kind of case. But the judges who thought about their death set an average bond of four hundred and fifty five dollars. Yes, so I'd like to like for you can imagine that that room in the Willy Wonka movie, and here are

the judges. He's flow here, she is floating free am in the bubbles, you know, and and they they're thinking, oh, well, prostitution, it's a it's a great it's a very complicated issue. Uh. You know, a nice low bond is a is an acceptable place, uh from to to to to decide on this particular topic. Then there made to look up. They see the fan, they think about in imminent death, and

what do they do. They reach out. They hold onto that structure that that that worldview structure that's made out of morals and uh and ethics and ideas about what's wrong and right in life. Maybe some of these ideas are things that they have they've drifted away from a lot in their life, you know, they they've drift away from in their professional career. But just thinking about death makes them clinging back to that, uh, that skeleton of ideas and then make this, uh, this, this rougher call

on what the bond should be said at. And the problem is that it can really cloud your thinking, right, and it can actually like this is the real problem, It can cause a person to be easily manipulated. And this is where Becker's early work really comes into play concerning fear and politics, and it's something that Solomon actually followed up on with experiments in which participants were told to review statements from and vote for one of three

political cool candidates. Okay, and they had different leadership styles. We're talking about charismatic, task oriented in relationship oriented. The participants then selected the candidate that they would vote for. Now, in the control condition, those people who didn't get the death reminders, only four of participants voted for the charismatic candidate. Now, for those people who were given the the death reminder, there was an almost eight hundred percent increase in votes

for the charismatic leader. And Solomon again followed up with several other studies concerning President Bush the Second and John Kerry and found again and again that when those death reminders were sublime early or overtly inserted, bushes support levels sword the charismatic candidate. So again we're reminded of death, we end up clinging to these worldviews. It's it's it's fascinating and frightening to think about, because it really breaks down what's happening in the world around is I'm I'm

both a large and a small level. Certainly when we see the media or a politician, uh, you know, mongering up those feelings of insecurity and fear, but but also like the smaller moments in life, like when you see some sort of really severe attitude on something suddenly come out of a person that and you didn't expect it by For instant example, this I was I was, I was hearing about somebody talking about encountering this guy who

suddenly out of nowhere. Um mentioned that he didn't think that his his son should wear pink, just in case it would have some sort of a negative influence on his character. For for an infant to wear the color pink. Uh and and the the individual who said this was somebody that when they would normally look at them and think, oh, this this is just a normal dude. This guy doesn't have any weird hang ups. But but now that after I've you know, really read about this, this t M

T about t MT and its effects. Honest, you can easily imagine, uh, this this being a guy who maybe grew up with that kind of severe worldview in his in the backbone of his of his his views on life, he's drifted away from him. And then something like having a child, uh bring him a little closer to that mortality, make him have to think about that and therefore force him to cling to some of these, uh, these ideas

and notions that he normally would have drifted away from. Yeah, and you can look at heteronorms really that the basis of that is being um motivated from fear, fear of the other. So and by the way, pink used to be a color that men war like back in the day. I think Josh Clark usually has an article on that. Uh. So to delightful color. I wish, you know, I wish everyone would be cool with it. Yeah, except for that pepptal bismol one. Yeah, that and that just reminds you

of throwing up. Yeah, and that's a shade that's often found in hospitals, to which I find really disconcerting. But anyway, that's for another day. Yea color color theory. That's that would be a whole other episode that we should probably do someday. We probably should. Um. But the thing is is that we can't help but cling to these immortality myths,

these narratives. And his piece for The New York Times, Cave actually wrote this opinion opinion piece that looks at the BBC show Torchwood, which examines immortality and death and says, what would happen to all our death defying systems? If there were no more death, we would have no need for progress or our faith or fame. Suddenly we would have nothing to do. Yet, in the greatest of ironies, we would have endless eons in which to do it. Action would lose its purpose, in time, its value. This

is the true awfulness of immortality. Yeah, this is this is where we get into the really deep far future gazing stuff where for for a while that there's been that idea. Okay, if we can live forever, we just get bored. What would we do now? On one hand, I definitely buy that because I I like to think of of books. For instance, Uh, we've all read a

book that's that really strikes a chord with us. We're really digging, and on some level we think, Man, I wish this book would never end because I'm enjoying it that much. But of course books follow a certain pattern. There's a narrative arc, there's a there's a story that has to be told, their pinpoints that have to be hit. There's rising action, there's following action, there's a climax, uh, etcetera. And and so it has to follow that basic pattern

in order to be effective. And that's why you're loving it so much, because because it is obeying a form and function. If it went on forever, then it would lose that form and function, and then it would lose its effect to to to entertain you. So and I feel like life is sort of like that. You know, there has to be a short amount of time in which to accomplish things. There has to be um uh, the rising action and following action for it all to

make sense. But then on the other hand, when when mortals say, oh, immortality probably sucks because you probably would get bored, it does sort of sound like um like us non celebrity us, non you know, super rich people thinking oh, well those rich people, they're they're just all miserable. Anyway, we're in deep down. We we like to think. But if I had it, if I had that money, if I had an immortality, well, I could probably do something

proper with it. Yeah, the lottery might destroy the average person because it's just too much money and and just totally destroys their lives. But me, I think I might be able to pull it off because I'm I'm a little more grounded, and I feel like we we all have those feelings. That is, it's the fantasy. It's again the immortality fantasy that we all have that if we

could just reach it, we would do something worthwhile with it. Now, in the meantime, we have mortality to deal with, and so the question becomes, is there a better way to deal with our own mortality rather than play into fear. I mean, narratives of immortality are great, but is there a way to be rational about death and not disince ourselves from it, really examine it and be okay with it. Well, I think what you're talking about here is simply and

we talk about it. Can we have conversations about death? And can we you know, if not actually dragged the bodies out into the open and um, you know, and pull them apart. Can we at least drag the topic out in the open and pull it apart? Yeah? No. Um. Becker of The Denial of Death, which was written at teen seventy three, said, stripping away the destructions of death quote, with the right intensity and scope of shock, we might even ask ourselves what are we to do with our lives?

We might then begin to think of how again to give to people a secure feeling that their lives count, that there is a heroic human condition contribution to be made to cosmic life. In a dialogue with the community of Once Fellows, that was very nice. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, in a way, it's it's about taking the punch out of death, you know, because in all this distancing ourselves from it, which we've done just throughout human history, we

end up giving it so much more power. We i mean, the very active personifying death of creating this kind of like grim reaper image that either exist as an actual symbol or listen on abstract symbol in the human psyche. It comes from from this point in our time where we we get away from the idea that death is something that our body does, and rather it's something external. Death is something that happens to it's death is something

that's done to us. It's an enemy that can be thought and can be defeated and should be feared rather than a natural part of the ark. You can actually meet up at something called a death cafe if you wanted to discuss this, and if you go to death dot com you will be met with the message. At death cafes, people drink tea, eat cake and discuss death. Our aim is to increase awareness of death to help people make the most of their finite lives. You can

find meetups in your city. I would hope we all listen, we all wear black and listen to eyesters into New Button as well. Like it seems like that would be a good, good vibe. I'm getting a very German vibe from all of this. I don't know, I'm getting some like some red hat society people. Yeah, yeah, why not cheerful discussions? Yeah, instead of going to nonsense and um, celebrating, you know, with your passage into menopause, why not go to the death cafe. That may be something that I

do instead of doing the red hat thing. Yeah, yeah, I'm planning ahead. Well, you know, you should definitely check one of these out and then report back. I mean, our listeners should do the same. I was thinking about that. Actually, you know. The one thing I always come back to is a is something my dad told him, and he said, and he was talking about death at some point, and he said, well, you know, everybody does it, so it couldn't be that big of a deal. And uh and

and certainly that's the case. Everybody dies. And I don't even necessarily buy into this idea that there there's anyone alive today that's going to live to see six years old, or much less that six thousand year point. That actuaries have have figured out that if you could live forever like six thousand, it's pretty much the maximum you get to without dying in a car wreck or something. Um. Yeah, I saw that, but then I don't know, there's so

many problems I have with that. Um, it's the other way of looking at it, in a more sort of cosmic way to think about it is you have existence and you have non existence, and throughout human history, each of us has not existed, and then for just an instant we've existed, and then we're gonna not exist again. We have so much experience that not existing that we were gonna be able to handle it just fine. This is not gonna be really a new state for any

of us. It's gonna be returned to the status quo. Uh. And and then another way to look at it, too is to think about the nature of time. Uh. And you know when we talk about oh, living forever, uh, that we want to be something that that lasts in this universe. But as we've discussed before, if you if you, if you look at time and space and you you take away the human perspective, uh, in time and space are one, and there's no moment that has been or will be or is right now that has any uh

any any special privilege in the time space continuum. So in a sense, everything is currently uh nothing really was or will be. So everything is immortal. I mean, it's all part of the fabric of the universe. I always think about this way. You think that Oprah is sort of an immortal being right, everybody knows her, all corners of the earth, perhaps Bill Gates even maybe there uh, these sort of iconic images will laugh for five hundred years,

a thousand, maybe ten thousand, doubt it. But you know, all of this, even this, even these immortality narratives that we come up with our finite except for Gilgamesh, because that one, which is, you know, one of the like the oldest story about the quest for immortality, it sticks with us. But otherwise the Osmandiez principle definitely applies to everybody. No matter how awesome you are, no matter how much of an impact you make on this life, you're probably

gonna be forgotten eventually. Now, if anybody's interested in that six thousand year figure that we dropped, the actuaries are saying, hey, that's a possibility. I believe that's from the Economist article that features Stephen Cave. I'm sorry, I don't have the title with me right now, but if you want to check that out, you can just go to Economist dot com.

All right, so we have presented you with a lot of food for thought about immortality, about the nature of the human soul, about our about how terror management theory um effects us? I mean, does the fear of death and the quest for immortality really influence us at such a deep and impressive level? Uh, it's it's certainly a strong argument. Um. Also, what would happen if we if we could live forever? That's a wonderful question to explore. Do you think that we would get bored? Uh? And

uh and and just lose interest? Do you think that we'd find enough stuff to occupy our minds for three hundred years, six thousand years? Or what have you? Do you believe you follow the philosophy of Emmanuel? Can't that who who stated that if that without a belief in God and a belief in the immortal nature of the soul, that there would there'd be no virtue in the world at all. That it's ultimately that that fear of of what will happened to us and what will happen to

us long term, that it that informs human morality? Or is there a kinder way for for humans to organize themselves? Also, would you want to live forever? I would love to see what the results are from you guys on that one. Well, on that note, let's call over the robot because I have a related bit of listener mail to share here. This coming to us through Facebook. Alec writes in and says, Hi, my name is Alec. I love your podcast so much that I've been going back and listening to all the

old ones. I recently listened to the death on Ice podcast and this brought up so many what if scenarios. One I thought of is what if someone is signed up to be put on ice, you know, crime frozen, but committed a horrible crime and are put to death by the state. Will they be allowed to be frozen afterwards? Does that count is serving their sentence even if revived later.

The other interesting scenario I thought of, UH could make a good future drama or sitcom where the guy's wife dies and his frozen, then he marries again and him and his current wife or frozen later and all three year brought back at the same time. That'd be crazy, and that would indeed be for make for an awesome

futuristic sitcom. But indeed, when we start talking about the idea of living forever or uh coming back to life in some sort of scientific sense and all with all of its complications, then does life after death and or resurrection and or immortality. Do these things become basic human

rights or these just privileges for the elite? Yeah, we talked about this before that there's a service called Virtual Eternity which will actually give people different levels of access to your history and maybe even personal messages you want to give to people in your life after you are gone. And it brings up this whole idea of how you'll be represented in this other way once you are gone. Not to mention even just the ability one day to try to download memories or you know, the synaptic uh

flashes that format. And if you want to see a really cool fictional examination of that scenario, check out the Black Mirror episode. I'll be right back, really top notch. But in the meantime, you want to check out all sorts of podcasts that we've done, all the videos, the blog post, what have you, links to our various social media accounts including Facebook, Twitter and all that. You need to go to stuff to blow your mind. Dot com Uh,

that's where you find everything. That's the mothership. Oh and I want to add real quick to if you're a long term listener or a new listener, uh, and you dig our show and you're an iTunes user, go to iTunes and give us a positive rating because the show has been around for a long time and uh, and there's their views on there from our very early days when we had a different title, different set up and

we were just learning the ropes. Uh, So we could use a little boost in the algorithm there every now and then. So, so check us out, indeed, and if you'd like to send us a note, you can do so at Blow the Mind at Discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does It How Stuff Works dot com MHM