Making Sense with Sam Harris - #263 — The Paradox of Death

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

Sam Harris reflects on the subjective continuity of consciousness, the nature of identity, and the possibility that death isn’t the end of experience. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at 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 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.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.

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, etc. 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, though 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. 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. 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. 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. passion. 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. 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 seem 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. Any specific death still seems somehow anomalous to me. My first question is some incredulous version of what happened. 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 notice more and more that 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, 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. Now, I'm 54 at the time I'm recording this. How long will I live? Obviously, I have no idea. 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. Well, I know exactly what that's like. I have that experience more or less every day. what that's like. I have that experience more or less every day. There's something very strange about this time capsule effect, this one-way communication with the past. It's amazing that we have media that allows us to do this, to have this shock of recognition. 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. 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. 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. 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 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 so it's'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. 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. 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. 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. The question about

the status of consciousness in the natural world is often referred to as the mind-body problem. What is the relationship between mind and matter? Where does consciousness come from? Does it arise on the basis of information processing in the brain, or is it a more fundamental constituent of matter? Or is matter itself a mere appearance in consciousness, which would then be the true base layer of reality. There are rival metaphysical views here, specifically physicalism, panpsychism, and idealism. And however one resolves the mind-body problem, there remains the problem of personal identity. 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 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 suggest about the nature of personal identity? Now, I've discussed many of these riddles elsewhere without giving anything like final answers to them, 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. But before we get started here, there's one peculiar intuition, often held by religious people, that I think we should dispense with at the outset. And it's 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. 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.

to last forever. It's eternity or nothing. This is a surprisingly common point of view, as I said, especially among the religious. 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. 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. Just take a moment to contemplate the difference between these two futures. In the first, humanity has no future, because we fail to mitigate some specific existential risks. And in the other, our future is truly open-ended. We achieve a kind of escape velocity with respect to our survival. Now, of course, there are intermediate places on this landscape.

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 may be 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. 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, if anything, about that individual's life. And it certainly says nothing about the meaning of life itself. But there is 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. The philosopher Tom Clark has a wonderful essay, which you can read on his website, naturalism.org. And the essay is titled, Death, Nothingness, and Subjectivity. And I want to explore his argument here in some detail. 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. 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. 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. 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. The point is nothingness isn't something, and therefore it can't be a permanent condition of any being or mind. The second point that Clarke explores is the subjective continuity of consciousness. 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. 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. 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, it was just subjugated. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.