Modern Wisdom - #240 - Sheldon Solomon - Does The Fear Of Death Drive Everything We Do?

Episode Date: November 2, 2020

Sheldon Solomon is a social psychologist at Skidmore College and an author. Humans are a unique animal in that we are aware of our own mortality. One day we will die, and we know it. This fact has a huge impact on how we live our lives, perhaps it's the most important fact we know. Expect to learn how Sheldon's experiments have proven that death anxiety is a crucial driver of behaviour, why we can hate somebody for the shape of their nose, how death anxiety causes people to be tribal, what would happen if a child grew up without any human contact and much more... Sponsor: Get a 21 Day Free Trial to a supercharged calendar at https://woven.com/podcast/wisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Buy The Worm At The Core - https://amzn.to/31VQtRn  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back. My guest today is Sheldon Solomon. I heard him on Lex Friedman's show and fell in love reached out to him any very graciously decided to join me today. We're talking about the denial of death, a seminal an awful lot that we do. Humans are a unique animal in that we are aware of our own mortality. One day we will die and we know it, and that fact has a huge impact on how we love our lives. Perhaps it's the most important fact that we know. So today, expect to learn how Sheldon's experiments have proven that death anxiety is a crucial driver of behaviour, why we can hate somebody for the shape of their nose, how death anxiety is a crucial driver of behavior. Why we can hate somebody for the shape of their nose? How death anxiety causes people to be tribal? What would happen if a child grew up

without any human contact and much more? Very calm, existential conversation today. Definitely a multiple listener. I adored this and I'm definitely getting a child and back on. We only scratch the surface of how deep and weird I think me and him can go today. But for now, it's time for the'm joined by Sheldon Solomon Sheldon. I'll keep it in the show. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here, Chris.

Really, really happy to have you on. Are we going to talk about death today? I believe that we will, hopefully not for the sake of death per se, but in the interest of enhancing life. How does death enhance life? Well, at our best, the existentialist tell us, since time andorial. It is necessary to come to terms with the most basic fact of human existence. And that is that we, like all living creatures, are of finite duration. And theologians, philosophers, you know, people just sitting on a rock back in antiquity have wrestled, frankly, with this idea. of finitude, but we necessarily are. And the claim very simply is that whether we're aware of it or not, death anxiety that pervades every aspect of our existence and malignant manifestations of death anxiety are arguably responsible directly or indirectly for a considerable proportion of human foibles.

And so the claim is that both for the benefit of ourselves as individuals to get the most out of life as well as for the benefit of society in general, it is necessary both individually and collectively to come to terms with our mortality. What are some of the manifestations of how they can militantly manifest? Yes, so great question. I'll back up a little bit just to give folks some detail. The work that we do is derived from a cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker, who in the 1970s want to pull its surprise for a book called The Denial of Death. And what Becker argued very simply is that humans are like all other living things. You know, Darwinian wise that we are biologically predisposed to want to survive in the interests

of self-preservation and for reproduction. And yet we're different than other creatures. And without being overly arrogant, the claim is that our huge forbrain gives us the capacity to think abstractly and symbolically to the point where we can even imagine stuff that doesn't get exist and then have the audacity to take our dreams and render them real. And that could not be more uplifting. To me, I like Otto Ronn, you know, Freud's boy who said humans make the unreal, real, and we don't want to lose track of the fact that all other creatures have to accept the world in the form in which they encounter it.

You know, I get it, spiders make webs, peavers make dams, bees make hives, and they've been doing it quite well for hundreds of millions of years. Yeah, but they don't imagine a flying machine like Da Vinci, you know, in the 1500s or 1400s, and then actually, you know, centuries later, we're flying around and what was originated in somebody's imagination. All right, all great so far and still great when Ernest Becker says, okay, let's now move to Kirchegard, the Danish existential philosopher who said,

people are so smart that we realize that we're here. And of course humans, we take this for granted. You wake up every day and you're like, And of course, humans, we take this for granted. You wake up every day and you're like, here I am, I woke up or you're walking down the street. I care I am walking down the street or it can get even crazier than that. Here I am walking down the street thinking about that I'm walking down the street.

So you could be, wow, now I'm thinking about that. I'm thinking about that. I'm thinking about that I'm walking down the street until you have to turn into the nearest pub to extricate yourself from this perseverating cycle of annoying self-focus. Well, so what, you know, Kierkegaard said, you know, if you're smart enough to know that you're here, which he insisted requires a sophisticated cognitive apparatus to render yourself the object of your own subjective inquiry, then you're going to experience two uniquely human emotions, awe and dread. And Kirchegard's like, wait a minute, it's awesome to be alive and to know it.

That's just great. That's why if you get to choose between being a person and a potato or a person on a potted plant, you make your own choice. But I want to be a person. And so like that, that is awesome. And I always want to emphasize just to share myself up and also to make an important point, all silliness aside. I don't think it is good for us or for humanity to lose track of the fact that in our finest moments, it is just the sheer joy of being alive, the spontaneous exuberance of wallowing in just the mystery of life that I think is what makes life most worthwhile. But, Kierkegaard says, yeah, but it's also dreadful to be alive and to know it. Because, unless you're a child or cognitively impaired, if you're smart enough to know that you're

here, you're also smart enough to know that like all living things, you too will someday die. And Ernest Becker's point is that that unwelcome realization, the warm at the core of the human experience, as William James put it, that that was the most significant psychodynamic event in the history of the human species. It was a quite unintended byproduct of consciousness, which is otherwise quite frankly, tremendously uplifting and adaptive, but it doesn't end there. So, psychological kick in the groin, Number one is you're going to die someday. Number two is that not only will you die someday,

but you can die at any time for reasons that you could never anticipate or control. It'd be bad enough if I knew I was going to die. In some vaguely unspecified future moment with all of my friends and family, you know, linked arm and arm chanting, come by, y'all, into the afterlife. That will be maybe okay, but I know I can walk outside and get smoked by a comet or a pandemic. And then on top of that, a becker says, wow, humans, we don't welcome the idea that we're going

to die. And we certainly are discombobulated by the fact that death is always potentially imminent. And on top of all of that, borrowing from Freud, we chafeeth the idea that we're embodied animals, respiring pieces of defecating meat, no more significant or enduring than barnacles or armadillos. And all the Becker says is, look, if that's the only thing that you were thinking about, you know, I'm going to die someday, I can get hit by a comet, you know, I'm gonna die someday, I can get hit by a comet, you know, I'm breathing peace of me, you would not be able to stand up in the morning.

You would be crippled by overwhelming existential terror that according to Becker, human beings manage by embracing what he calls cultural world views, humanly constructed beliefs about reality, that we share with the people in our group that reduces death anxiety by giving us a sense that life has meaning and we have value.

And basically, that's the essence of backers way of thinking about things. We're smart enough to know that we're here. That makes us aware of the fact that we are finite and vulnerable embodied creatures. That raises the possibility of being flattened by debilitating terror that we manage by embracing a belief system that allows us to feel like life has meaning and we have value. And moreover, if you're lucky enough to believe that you're a person of value in a world of meaning, that's what Becker calls self-esteem. And then he says, well, whether we're aware of it or not, we spend most of our waking moments and perhaps many of our

dreaming ones trying to maintain confidence in our cultural worldviews and a sense that we are people of value in the context of them. All right, having said all of that, Chris, now back to your fine question, which is, okay, let's now think about the implications of that fact for non-optimal outcomes because what a lot of people said to Becker is well look so what you know let's say that you're right my beliefs about reality served to diminish death anxiety and it does so by making me feel like life has meaning and I have value well know, if it's not broke, don't fix it. You know, some people just said, well, maybe that's what's happening to which Becker replies, yes, that is what's happening. And we now need to consider some of the less than desirable outcomes as a result. And so, for example, where we got interested in these ideas, Chris,

my buddy, Jeff Greenberg and Tom Pazinsky and I, we spent almost the last 40 years where egghead experimental psychologists. And so, Becker writes this book, he gets a bullet surprise, he couldn't get a job when he was alive. And we couldn't get any of these ideas published when we first were attracted to them in the 1980s because people said there's no evidence for any of these ideas, nor is it possible to collect any evidence. And so we're like, okay, let's see if we can do that. And what we were interested in at the time was how come people can't get along with other

people who don't share their beliefs in reality. You know, why is it that since minute one, you know, you know, even the most benign look at human history reveals what I think is a grotesque and ugly picture. An ongoing succession of genocidal atrocities juxtaposed with the brutal subjugation of designated in-house inferior. And we are now at the point in human history where, of course, is cliche, but we possess the kind of weapons that could reduce the earth to rubble. And so this long standing problem, as Robert J. Liffton, a psycho-historian who I'm fond of in a book called Destroying the World to Save It. He's like, wow, we may be the first form of life to be responsible for our own extinction

because of our inability to get along with folks who are different than ourselves. And Becker's account is disarmingly simple. And he has two points. One is he says, well, disarmingly simple and he has two points. One is he says, well, if my beliefs about reality help me reduce death anxiety, then whenever I run into somebody who's different, I've got a problem whether I'm aware of it or not. If I believe God created the earth in six days and then I run into somebody in the Fulane tribe in Mali and they think that the earth was created out of a giant drop of milk. Well, if they're right, then I've got to be wrong. And so one point that Becker makes is that the mere existence of people with alternative

belief systems is fundamentally threatening. So that's point number one. I point number two in a book called Escape from Evil, which is after the denial of death. Becker says, here's the other problem. Our culturally constructed beliefs are very potent, but they're still symbolic, whereas death is a very real biological fact. And there's no symbol that is potent enough to completely eliminate death anxiety. Therefore in psychopath, there's residual anxiety that is repressed. And I love Becker's language. He says, look, there's going to be death anxiety.

There's going to be a panic rumbling beneath the surface of consciousness. And that panic is so unpleasant that what we do psychodynamically is we project it and we we basically lay it on to other people or groups of people that we just declared to be the all-encompassing repositories of evil. And so the point here is that even if there weren't people who were different around, we would create those differences. We would need to, Virginia Woolf in a room of Juan Zone. She just says, if necessary, we'll hate somebody for the shape of their nose and for the color of their shirt because we can't help it. We've got to have a way of offloading our insecurities. Right, either way, what Becker argues is that what we do when we bump into folks who are different

or declare people to be different, is we denigrate them, we badger them to abandon their beliefs and adopt ours instead, or we just kill them, thus demonstrating the superiority of our beliefs after all. And our experiments show that this is very much the case. So our studies are very simple. They involve reminding some people that they're gonna die. And other people are asked to think about something unpleasant but not fatal.

Like you're getting a root canal without anesthetic, you've been in a car accident and they have to chop off one of your legs, all painful, but beats being dead. And sometimes we remind people they're going to die by stopping them outdoors in front of a funeral parlor, as opposed to a hundred meters on either side. Yeah, that's a good one. And sometimes we bring people into the lab and we have them read stuff on the computer while we flash the word death for 48 milliseconds. So fast that you can't see anything. And so when we do that, what we find, for example, is that if you remind Christians that they're going to die, they love Christians more and they hate Jewish people. And it has nothing to do with Christianity.

If you remind Israelis that they're going to die, they love Israelis and they hate Arabs. And did all over the world, but it's not only about attitudes. Germans reminded that they're going to die. They sit closer to people who look German, further away from people who look like immigrants. You remind Iranians that they're going to die and they become more willing to blow themselves up. They become more willing to become suicide bombers. You remind Americans they're going to die and they become more willing to become suicide bombers. You remind Americans

they're going to die and they become more supportive of using biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons against countries who pose no direct threat to us. So one malignant manifestation of death anxiety is that it increases, it amplifies the hostility and disdain that we have towards people who are different. And if I can remember it, I always love George Bernard Shaw on your side of the pond a century ago and a heartbreak house, one of my favorite plays. He says, when the angel of death sounds his trumpet, the pretenses of civilization are blown from men's heads into the mud like hats and a gust of wind.

So that's one possibility. I can babble about a few more, I will, and then you shut me off. But anyway, another thing that we are really interested in, and I think is very pertinent right now both here and on your side of the world is the extent to which existential anxieties impel us to embrace certain kinds of political leaders. Max Weber, a dead German sociologist at the beginning of the 20th century, he said in times of historical upheaval,

when existential uncertainties are apt to prevail, that people are prone to become attached to and supportive of a particular kind of leader. He coined the term charismatic, that we're now all familiar with seemingly larger than life individuals that are often believed to be divinely ordained to rid the world of evil. And Becker uses a Weber's analysis to understand how Hitler came to power in Germany.

The Germans had been humiliated after World War I. The economy was decimated. And here comes Hitler saying, I can make Germany great again. Only I can do it. And he gave the Germans. It was a tremendously uplifting psychological vote of confidence to restore up meaning and value in a very psychologically tenuous time. And I'm not saying that this ended well.

The, in fact, the point is that it rarely does. We became interested in this in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when President George W. Bush in a three-week period went from having the lowest support in the history of presidential polling to three weeks after 9-11. He had the highest. And we're like, wow, maybe intimations of mortality had something to do with it. Maybe September 11th was like a giant death reminder. Of course it was. You had the people dying and jumping off the World Trade Center, terrorists or evil,

but they choose their targets wisely. They didn't target random buildings. They targeted the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. That's right. And they did it with airplanes from American and United Airlines or USA. They knew what they were doing. And so we did a lot of studies prior to the 2004 election, where we showed that reminding people of death, increase their support for President Bush. And in fact, in the absence of a death reminder, our participants like Senator John Kerry, who was the Democratic challenger in that election, much more than President Bush.

All right, so fast forward to 2015. We got Donald Trump saying, oh, I'm gonna make America great again. I am the only one that can keep you safe from the rapists and the drug dealers, the Negratinus Horde storming the borders, the terrorists that are parachuting into America to rape our daughters and eat our chicken and wings and the Chinese that are threatening our economy and it worked. And so President Trump now, President Trump, despite the fact that in the eyes of more than 60 million Americans, they're like, wait a minute. It's really a bad idea to have a vulgar, sadistic, vindictive pathologically narcissistic, sociopathic, racist, xenophobic, misogynistic, homophobic, functionally illiterate, Twittering, Mussolini,

pussy grabbing, cheese, doodle impersonator. That would be a bad idea to have someone like that in office. And moreover, psychiatrist and psychologist said, it's really a bad idea that the now president Trump has a unique combination of toxic psychological disorders, that being malignant narcissism, sociopathy, lack of empathy, touch of paranoia. When you have somebody with a massive ego who is congenitally incapable of ever admitting that they're wrong, that's going to be a problem, particularly if any crisis arises, because there's no way a person with that particular set of affectations will be capable of acting in anyone's interest

but their own. All right, be that as it may. We then did studies that demonstrated the same thing, specifically, that in America, support for President Trump is magnified by intimations of mortality. In a controlled condition, Americans liked Hillary Clinton more than they did Donald Trump. But if they were reminded of their mortality first, they now like Donald Trump a lot more. So that's another area where death anxiety has potent effects that I believe to have serious implications for the future of democracy. And this is not only on the US side of things.

I think a lot of the things that are happening in the UK, to be silly and at the risk of annoying people, we have Orange Hitler over here. You've got Yellow Hitler and there's a bunch of other Hitler's right wing populist movements that parlay death anxiety into support. it is well known a woman I like Hannah Arrent in a book called The Origin of Totalitarianism. After written in the 1950s, she just points out that, you know, it's pretty much the same playbook. Another guy I like a lot,

Eric Hoffa wrote a book called The True Believer, and what all these kind of leaders do. They're like alchemists of hate. They are very good at a keto and existential anxieties. They convert fear into hate because they take the internal anxiety, and they tell their followers who it is that they're supposed to hate. Anyway, that doesn't vote well for democracy. Another area of inquiry is just studies that show that death anxiety makes us uncomfortable with the fact that we're embodied animals makes us uncomfortable with nature, makes us more likely to engage in behaviors vis-a-vis nature that undermine the preservation of non-renewable resources.

So, basically, death anxiety has demonstrably negative effects on environmental concerns. It has the opposite effect on our seeming insatiable desire for money and stuff. So on the one hand, when death is on our minds, it really makes us distance ourselves from nature. On the other hand, when death is on our minds, it makes us run to the television, to the pub, to the shopping mall. And this is an idea that also goes back quite a bit. In fact,

who's at John Locke and his second treatise on government? That was at 1690, he said, look, anything that really matters, anything that is real, there's an upper limit to how much you can want. And so, and he explained that, he said, that's because anything in nature is of finite duration. So if you like apples, well, that's great. But after like 10 apples, you're like, oh, I've had enough. But, and if you like pizza, all right, I've had a whole pizza that's enough. I like beer after eight points. No, maybe 10, that's enough. You know, just fill in the blank. Well, but what's the one thing that people can't get enough of? Well, there's never enough money

and there's never enough stupid shit if you'll pardon the expression. A consumer society would collapse in a matter of hours if people bought only what they genuinely needed. So anyway, what Becker says is, look, whenever there's insatiable desires, you can assume that death anxiety underlies them. And sure enough, if we remind people they're going to die, they say they need more money to feel wealthy. They're more eager to buy

things that are luxury items. They'll even pay more money to have a star named after them in the galaxy. And then I'll say one more thing and then back to you, Chris, and I appreciate that I'm just to belt these out because I do think that one of the things that is I find compelling about these ideas is how pervasive they apply to a range of superficially disparate human affections. The idea that death anxiety influences who you hate, who you voted for, how you feel about being outside and so on, whether or not you like a certain kind of car. I find that quite astonishing.

But the last thing that I would note is just that death anxiety amplifies all existing forms of psychological disorders. And so if you're depressed and you're reminded of death, you become more depressed. If you're afraid of spiders, you become more afraid of spiders and and and and so on and so forth. And so yeah, the basic argument here, you know, and it sounds kind of corny, but when we write about this, we use a phrase from a guy, a British author, I like Thomas Hardy, a novelist who says, if a way to the better, there be, it comes from taking a close look at the worst.

And, you know, that is raping the earth in our effort to maximize the accumulation, you know, of money and stuff and a perpetual, you know, alcohol, pill-infused Facebook, Twittering, and so that's not great, of course. But it doesn't follow from that, you know, just getting back to where we started the conversation. It doesn't follow from that that we can't use these same ideas more productively. Because I think what we have to note is that everything that I've talked about so far is in response to really subtle, even unconscious, reminders of death.

So when you ask me when we began to talk a half an hour ago, when you said, all right, why is it so important that we come to terms with death? I like Albert Camus, come to terms with death thereafter. Anything is possible. This is really a plea to not leave our death anxiety buried under the psychological bushes. You know, where it comes back to bear bitter fruit fruit. This is rather a plea, you know, not to wallow in concerns about mortality.

That's not the point. If you want to do that, you start a goth punk rock band, and that might be pretty good. But rather, you know, to courageously and, you know, with diligence to embrace the lifelong task of coming to terms with the reality of death in a very self-conscious way, because that can produce outcomes that are of a distinctly more favorable kind. Dude, I love that. I absolutely love that. I've got a million different doorways to hell open in my mind at the moment, so I'm gonna try and close a couple of them. One of the questions I had was you mentioned that the denial of death is innate

and is essentially fixed by culture or one of the particular tools we use to try and dampen that down is culture. Presumably, evolutionarily, our current brain manifestation and the awareness of death would have arisen before we had culture to be able to deal with it. What do you think ancient man would have done? Yeah, wow. All right, Chris, I'm sorry, we lost our videos. I can't smile at you.

That's an awesome question. And if I could answer that, you know, I'd be chugging rum in a coconut with my Nobel prize on the beach, no, that because as a lot of folks have noted, as we have pondered for quite some time, the apes and the chimps from which we presumably evolved are unaware of death and don't appear there by to deny it, we most assuredly are and you're raising an important question which is phylogenetically how did that happen.

And the argument that we make and this is necessarily speculative of course but there are other scholars who have independently come up with similar ones, the argument is that humans were almost certainly back in the day engaged in ritualistic behavior of a religious nature. And this is long before the awareness of death arose, even if it was vague, and it's long before even God's arose. So a Milt Dirkheim, a French sociologist, he points out, David Sloan Wilson, who's an evolutionary biologist, they argue that religion arose basically as social glue, a way to foster social cohesion and coordination between law. What's the, sorry to interject there, Sean, what's the Latin word for religion? Is it reg, reg, reg, or reg off?

I, you know, I, I should have looked that up. Yeah, it means to bind. To bind. Yeah, it means to buy it. To buy it. Yeah, that's it. To tie. Yes. And I think social glue is a very apt term for it. Yeah.

No, thanks, Chris. And please jump in here, because I do think that this is important. The idea is that, you know, we are Uber social creatures. And for Dirkheim, there is an emotional component to this binding. He just said that there is something tremendously uplifting about being in the company of our fellow humans moments that can only be described as, you know, just ones that are, are, are, they are described. There's moments of like transcendental joy. Um, where, you know, you're back in the day, it's a beautiful day. The hunt has gone well. Life is good. Everybody's hanging around. And there's just this collective effervescence, which for Durkheim has a lot to do with

what underlies the appeal of religion. But anyway, back to our story, the argument is that there already was a primitive in the non-projard of science, early forms of ritualistic behavior that served a religious function. And this is before the origin of the mythical narratives that eventually came to correspond to the behavior. And so the argument is that the rituals came first, and then the narrative account of why we're engaged in them came subsequently. And one possibility is that all of this is happening while human beings are reaching

a threshold of self-awareness, both Nietzsche as well as Otto Ronk, probably based on Nietzsche. They hypothesized that self-awareness just kind of gradually increased, but then it gets to a point where there's kind of a tipping point where you become explicitly aware of the prospect of mortality. At which point, the argument is that different, there were probably different mythological accounts of the world that existed at the time.

And that just through the process of natural selection, that the ones that tended to offer existential comfort in the form of promises of either literal or symbolic immortality were probably those that were most appealing and therefore persisted over time. So I don't know if that makes any sense, but that's the absolutely, absolutely does. Do you think, God, man, I've got about 50 questions

that I need to ask at the same time. First one, is that tipping point or stepping out of the bicameral mind and into something above that? Yes. Right, that's what I wanted to know. Absolutely, so you know the Julian Jane stuff? No, please tell us. So you said bic. Absolutely. And this is it. So you know, the Julian Jane stuff. No, please tell us. So you said by caramel mine, this is awesome. I'm enjoying this immensely.

I'll let it solve for sure. It's not about me being entertained, Chris. But there's a guy in 1975, you're too young, Julian Jane's, the origin of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind. And so to answer your question, and that's one of my favorite books and how I got interested in this, because James' point is that for much of human history, we were kind of automatons and that it's only recently that we've gotten into full death denial mode. And that is a reflection of the breakdown of the bicameral mind, leaving us starkly aware of the reality of our condition. That's why Nietzsche said that consciousness is the most calamitous stupidity, but which we shall someday perish or perish someday. That's a beautiful quote. Yeah, you it's really interesting to think about what it would have been like to not know that you

I mean, you're technically not your own thoughts, but you're at least aware that they're coming from somewhere within you as opposed to being bestowed on you by a God, someone who's essentially speaking words in your ear yet. Yeah, whoever the first human was that decided to cross whatever threshold of consciousness it is, that's a very uncomfortable frontier to be the first person to get to sit. No, absolutely, Chris And I wish I had the skills to like do science fiction because, you know, the argument and I think it's quite plausible is it might have happened a shit ton of times over history. You know, so imagine you're the one self-aware person, you know, in antiquity. It must have been quite a ride. Yeah, definitely would have been. No one else would have been able to understand you.

That's correct. Right. Next question is, what, actually, I'm going to diverge again and just open up another branch. What is your view? I know you're not an evolutionary psychologist, an evolutionary biologist, but I'm going to ask you it anyway. What is your view of the reason why consciousness exists? Wow. Yeah, again, another no-but prize winning one.

Or just small questions today, shall just is it a simple one? So the real easy ones for you. Yeah. I'm happy to talk again. If you want to save the trivial pursuits to next time. You know, always depends on who you ask. You know, and you know, so Stephen Panker, you know, always depends on who you ask, you know, and, you know, so Stephen Panker, you know, Harvard, smart guy, he said the problem of consciousness is the central issue of, you know, psychological discourse for the 21st century.

And he's probably right. And so as you know, there's some people who think that consciousness is epiphenominal. It's just really like an ethereal mist given off as an irrelevant afterthought. It's just a byproduct of other processes. And, um, I find that extraordinarily unconvincing for a variety of reasons. And even folks like, oh, selfish Jean Richard Dawkins, he writes in the 1970s that he finds it inconceivable that consciousness has no functional value. Nicholas Humphrey, who's a British guy, he wrote a book called Consciousness Regained, I think in the 1980s.

And I favor his view, which is that consciousness may have evolved in social settings, that it's not actually an individual psychological attribute, but rather that in a complex setting, knowing how you're feeling was probably a good way to figure out how other people are feeling and being able to know that, that's like theory of mind in psychopath makes it so much easier to negotiate your relationships with fellow human beings. And so one possibility is that consciousness arose in order to facilitate social interaction. Isn't it interesting that one of the common threads that we've gone through today, and this ties really nicely back to a question to do with death that's been lurking in the back of my head since you started talking,

death is inherently an individual phenomenon. I know that we're all going to die, but the fear of death is something that we all, a burden that we all bear on our own. And yet, for some reason, our favorite antidote to this particular fear of death is to tribalize, is to somehow use other people that are the us and other people also that are the them to try and fix a problem which is inherently individualistic. And what have we found again here? There's a couple of other interesting theories of consciousnesses reason for being here that I've stumbled upon recently that I really enjoy, but that one, the one that you've just proposed there which you think you've got a fair bit of support for, which again is that humans have this conscious process so that we can better understand what other people are thinking.

It means we can either deceive or cooperate or do a million other things with them more accurately. It's right. I find it so interesting, perhaps particularly thing which underlies, which you're proposing, underlies all of our behaviour, and the thing which facilitates that underlying being made conscious. Both of those things have an inherently social aspect to them. Yes. Again, I really well put and really in my estimation important and also in my estimation, Chris, accounts for a lot of the difficulties that I find we're now having I find we're now having in the world in terms of just political difficulties. But I don't mean this as a political diet tribe, but it's ironic, is it not that the US and the UK are the most individualistic cultures in the history of earth, where the richest and most technologically

adroit for the moment. And in part, because we've got this John Locke idea that there's no such thing as society, that there's just individuals. And that's quite psychotic. It's never been true. And yet we carry on as if it is. But when in fact, as you noted, our entire evolutionary past is based on our ubers, social nature, ultimately in the service of fostering cooperation. I can see in a modern society that's hyper-convenient and where we feel incredibly

detached from our own animal nature and from the natural world at large, I can see, I'm a red-blooded, meritocracy-loving, capitalist through and through as much as it can get. And me too. And yet, I can also, I understand why people don't have this sense of connectedness to wider. And I also mentioned that I said, only child, which gives you a particularly unique view on solitude, I think. So yeah, I get it. You know, I see why the meritocratic it. You know, I see why the meritocratic 21st century hyper convenient detached from the natural world world view, that viewpoint. I understand how it can create that. Yes. But just to put in a caveat, I share your view, I, in principle, I believe in meritocracy and individual initiative embedded in a communal setting with the stipulation

that in principle there's enough to go around so that anybody who exerted sufficient effort would have a reasonable chance of there being a decent outcome. And that's where the proverbial devils in the details but anyway yes very good point. Cool. Next thing I'm still closing doors to help. Oh by the way Sean, if you got, when's your next appointment or what else have you got on today? Oh it's 2.15 and again I'm happy to talk again if you find it. I don't know what time it is for you. What time is it now? 10 to 1. Oh, I'm at 151. I've got let's say 20 minutes or so.

Cool, right. I am going to, I'm going to move on. What do you think happens if we defeat death one day? Have you considered that? I had David Pierce, one of the foremost thinkers behind the transhumanism movement on. He's talking about extending life, whether we have full brain emulation, integrating with machines, we use

pharmaceuticals to extend our life. We do all sorts of other different things. What happens if we defeat death one day? Yeah, great. Again, another great question. It's one that goes back to antiquity. You know, in ancient Greeks, the gods were immortal, and their lives were miserable and banal. And one philosophical notion is that it would be a terrible to live in a world of where one existed in perpetuity. I like a American philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, who just points out if there was no such thing as death and the very meaning of something being meaningful

becomes meaningless. There's nothing consequential. What does it mean to say somebody has courage or somebody's generous if like a video game, you know, if something bad happens, you just re-up your avatar and hit the trail again. So that's one possibility, is that it would be boring to a degree that would make most legal tomes seem uplifting by comparison. Another possibility is that, and this is one that Ernest Becker considers in the denial of death, is that rather counterintuitively, it might make us more anxious. His argument is, by example, he just says, well, let's say that you're climbing up a mountain,

you're 10 years old and your life expectancy is 80 years, and you fall into the bottom of the Grand Canyon and you die. Well, that's a downer because you just lost 70 years of life. Now, let's say you're climbing up mountain and you expect to live half a million years or forever, and you fall down the mountain. And his point is, is you can banish death, but you can never banish chance. You don't know that you might get smoked by a comet and your body might be vaporized. You don't know that maybe you've abandoned your body and you put yourself on a cloud somewhere.

Yeah, but when the power goes down, there's not gonna be any cloud. In other words, you can banish stuff, but you can't banish chance. And therefore, Becker argues that death anxiety might increase, and our defensive reactions, therefore, or thereafter, might also increase commensurately. And that would be an awful side effect. Right, guys, we can live forever, but we're all going to be so unbelievably afraid that we're not prepared to do anything because the potential downside of it going wrong, that

the asymmetry starts to lean. I suppose that, the nice thing about only living 80 years is if you you know, die before you've reached middle age, it kind of 35. Well, I nearly got 50% of the way there. Like, it's not that long. So yeah, bizarrely our short lives actually assuage the fear of death to some, somewhere or another, which is, which is very interesting. What insight about our minds do you wish more people knew? Oh, wow. I wanted this armingly. Great question.

Sheldon, you just continue with the flattery today. In fact, if I can bring you on to just flatter me during other episodes with, you know, if it gets to being difficult and you can just say something nice about me, that would be fun. Yeah, no, you know, I mean this sincerely and you can edit it out, Chris, I'm not any a world famous entity and I do talk to a lot of people

and it's often excruciating, and this has been just delightful. Honestly, so back to the mind. One insight, I wish that one one insight would be to please abandon your affection for whether you're aware of it or not. The Cartesian dualism that pervades Western society that sees the mind and the body as separate and dissociated, either in principle or in practice. So I would urge people to put the mind back in their brain and back in their body. And to view ourselves more holistically, not as minds that happen to be situated in a physical carcass, but rather to view ourselves as physical carcasses that happen to be lucky enough to be imbued with a kind of mind-itness that is a fantastic opportunity to have a great life

and even make the world a bit better in the process of living it. So that would be one thing. the world a bit better in the process of living it. So that would be one thing. I would say some of these things, Chris, to remind myself. And another thing I would say at the risk of maybe sounding a little silly is that people, no, this is not silly. I mean this earnestly. There's a wide body of research that suggests that a lot of people see a phenomenon associated with mind as essential in the sense that you're born with a mind. You have certain capacities, and that's all there is to it. And the fact of the matter is, is that even viewing our minds that way lobotomizes us.

We should view the mind more as a muscle that can be used in a variety of ways and can be developed over time vis-a-vis effort. This doesn't mean we can all be Einstein or Beethoven, but we can all be Einstein or Beethoven, but we can all be a lot more who we are destined to become than we give ourselves credit for. And my last piece of advice is that you don't have to be great at everything. So I put in a plea for the average and the mundane. You know, we, I think we tend to think, oh, I have a mind. So I got to write a novel. I got to get a Nobel Prize. Um, and those things are good, but so is being a decent human, enjoying the fact that you happen to be alive on a beautiful day when you've had enough to eat in a place to stay. And so I think the mind can be deployed for a much wider variety of essential functions tied to intellect, emotion and intuition than we often give it credit for.

I love that. I love that. So I'm going to give you a thought experiment to do. Have you seen the film mother? I have not, although it's on my list. Cool, do you know the premise? No, I don't. Okay, so a baby is born inside of a factory where it is raised by a robot and then later on some complications happen, I won't spoil it for you. My end goal question is, is there a me outside of my cultural influence? And the thought experiment is a baby is born, we have managed to come up with a very, very clever way to program a robot to be able to keep said human alive, whilst not or whilst minimizing or if possible giving zero cultural influences, what would that person be like? Wow awesome. Yeah go get

you nobba prize for question asking. All right depends who you ask. So again, at agnostic on this, these are like the questions of my youth when we dabbled far too often in hallucinogens I love thinking about. Because you know, so you got to, you got like the Nietzsche or even John Locke blank slate, which is that you would be not much different than a aspiring pin cushion under those conditions. So that's one possibility. The alternative is that there's gotta be, this goes back again to the ancient Greeks, but it's also Piaget.

A lot of folks thought, no, there's got to be something because you can't, in order to understand Piaget claimed anything, you have to be able to connect it to something that you quote already know. So if there's not at least some implicit knowledge, including knowledge of ourselves. Then there be nothing upon which to construct a self or phenomenal logical view of the world. So I'm dodging your question. Very diplomatic answer. No, yeah, because I think I could see it both ways. And some of the people that I've been struggling with, like philosophers, like I've been trying to understand Martin Heidegger for the past couple of years.

And I think these guys do a great job better than me of obfuscating and dodging of those questions. With thousand page books, not just two minutes of verbal gymnastics. No, that is actually one of the finest questions. I would say though, just based on some of the things that I've been reading lately.

There's a book by a famous guy. He's a primatologist, Michael Thomas-Sellow at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. It's called the coming human. And I think that a human being raised under those conditions would be pretty much like a great ape. And that is that would be able to learn from experience and might even be able to learn

from observing somebody else doing something. But the way that Thomas Sallow puts it is that in the absence of the capacity to have joint attention with another human, which the robot couldn't do, that you can't get to the next step, which he claims is the prerequisite for the kind of awareness that ultimately distinguishes us as human? So the denial of death, the awareness of death, as you said at the beginning, I love that kind of spectrum that we had of awe at one end and dread. The other I didn't realize until this conversation that that was the way it works, but it totally is. The ability for us to see beauty, to look at the night sky, feel insignificant,

you know, go on a walk and pick up a leaf and sort of marvel at its beauty, is matched only by our ability to be completely terrified at the fact that one day it's all going to end. That's that the poet Rilke walking with, who is he walking with and he starts crying? I will, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I will. I death or the awareness of death is inbuilt into us as humans. And yet, if I was baby with robot, and I never saw anyone die, would I know that I could die? Would I be fearful of death? Yeah, no. So that, you be in different in the only situation one might claim would be in the immediate proximity to mortal danger in which case you'd have the same fight and flight reaction of an antelope being attacked by a lion.

So there's some there's some things that are so hardwired into us, but So there's some things that are so hardwired into us, but what we're talking about here, especially with death, is the ability to consciously rearrange that innate sympathetic response, and then create persona and narrative and all of the ridiculous extra curious stuff that we do that we don't that we totally don't need. That's it you got it. Oh my goodness. Okay, I do. We're gonna have to do this again some time, mate, because I've just got a million different things and the audience is gonna have them as well. Before we finish up, a couple of quick, quick of fire ones, what does tranquilize yourself

with the trivial mean? I love that. So that's a Kierkegaard phrase that Heidegger also picks up on. And his point is that the average individual and Heidegger is quite clear when he says that this is not meant progatively, even though it sounds like it, because the argument is that we all do this sometimes. But what Heidegger said is that in response to death anxiety, most people just unconsciously and unself-reflectively,

just unconsciously and self-reflective. They just literally desperately embrace the social role that is afforded to them in the context of their culture, and they essentially become culturally constructed meat puppets who live their lives as caricatures of a stereotype of their particular social role. And Kierkegaard's point is that when you do that, you just tranquilize yourself with the trivial, the most popular event in the United States every year is the Super Bowl. And so, you know, watching football, the stupid kind of football, and eating chicken wings and shopping, more people go shopping in the US after Thanksgiving, the day after Thanksgiving,

then, who vote in presidential elections. And so it's crazy. It's crazy. And so shocking. And so that's why Frank Zappa, dead musician, he says the average American treats intelligent behaviors if it was some kind of hideous physical deformity. He's right. And so, and then Heidegger comes along and he's like, yeah, okay, that's one kind of tranquilizing.

You know, where you're sitting at home, you know, just pounding beer and watching the telly. But there's another kind of tranquilization and that's just frenetic activity where you just keep yourself so busy superficially engaged in the vagaries of life that you appear to be there's a veneer of things going well. But you're actually an empty husk, desperately keeping busy, so you don't sit still long enough to think about the fact that you might not be fully satisfied. Do you know Woody Allen's film, Annie Hall?

No. Okay, so you're too young, and so I won't go there because there's a scene that makes reference to the denial of death that illustrates that point. But so those are the two kinds of being tranquilized, you know, just being passive, you know, and being surrounded by trivia and stuff, or you know, being active in once pursuit of the uninspired and unimportant? I think I've been playing around with these ideas for a little while. One thing I've noticed

and I'm a massive advocate for people being as weird as they can possibly be, i.e. compromising as little of themselves for society as is possible because I think what that leads to is you not actually being able to work out what your own truth is. I wonder whether or not the fact that most people, the Broad Cross section of society, prefers people that they can fit into easily defined archetypal roles is because those people don't force them to step out of that particular, that's the geek, that's the nerd, that's the maid, and that's the redeem, that's the villain, that's the whatever. I wonder whether that plays into what you're talking about. And I also think that the current self-development movement, this kind of, I'm contributing to it, although I hope that I'm doing it

in a slightly more virtuous way. But the motivational speaker, you can become anything you want movement at the moment. I think also is the 21st century, much more cerebral manifestation of just what would have been the industry of religious speakers back in the day, that this is you being able to transcend what is going on, but it's repurposed and repackaged into words that have a parasycientific, a peri-scientific sort of tinged to them, which removes the criticism, the easy sort of low-hanging fruit criticism and the ickiness that religion has had and the theology has kind of gotten now in a scientific society, but still serves exactly the same reason that you can become anything you want.

You can be more productive, do more in your day. Well, why do you want to do more in your day? Well, if I do more in my day, I get more life before it, inevitably ends. There you go. There's an African proverb that I like. It just give us life, life, more life. I love how you put it. And I also love the distinction that you just made between trying to help people make the most of themselves in a virtuous sense, which you surely are, and becoming a 21st century, essentially guru of sorts, who is no different than a charismatic political leader to the extent that you're exploiting people's anxieties and insecurities for your own personal gain.

It's weaponizing it, isn't it? And commanding it. It is. That's the reason for it. It is. So I think we, for what it's worth, I think what you, and like minded compatriots are doing, is honestly the way of the world. I'm an Aminag Head researcher. I'm proud of the work that I do. I've written books. I write journal articles

that are non-pharmacological interventions for insomnia. You know, we write stuff and maybe 12 people on earth are partake of it. You said that you learned of my ideas from talking to Lex and I enjoyed talking to him immensely. There have been more people who I have exchanged ideas with in the last six weeks that I have in the last six years. For two reasons. One is that this is a much more effective medium for the dissemination of ideas. And the second is this is we are Uber social creatures who come to know ourselves in the context of sincere conversations with others. That's one of the things that I like about Heidegger even though he was a Nazi, is that he emphasized the incredibly important role of language and discourse.

And if there's a hope for humankind, the way I see it, it's gonna be a proliferation of people that are doing what you're doing in the various manifestations or incarnations, I think it gives me great hope. Yeah, me too. I think that what's interesting is, a lot of people I think are drawn to these sort of longer form reflective, introspective conversations because maybe they're hungry for the mouse

wear. They can't talk to their brother or sister or friends about it because that doesn't feel very natural. And the bizarre thing is that upon us now having a platform and a communications network, which permits us to do this globally, you realize that the solitude and the weirdness that you thought was a personal affliction your whole life is actually very commonplace and you're an incredibly good company. There you go, but again, you just made a, you made an earth shattering point. The guy named C. Wright Mills in a book called The Power Elite, written in the 1950s.

He made the same point, and that's that most of us, and Hana Arent, made this point in her book about fascism, and that is that what makes a society ripe for fascism is that if everybody feels isolated and has a sense that nobody shares their problems, and there's nothing more uplifting even if it's painful than to recognize that what you might have been attributed to yourself as your own personal melody is a more common than you think and B may not be due to your own weaknesses as an individual, but rather as the inevitable result of structural inequalities built into macro institutional systems. And so I think there's a lot to be gained from these kinds of pursuits.

Absolutely. And the other thing as well is that weirdness and uniqueness is your competitive advantage. Even if I need to say it again to the people who are listening, it might not feel like it, but you should view the particular quirks that you have as competitive advantages. In the same way as

as soon as you can flip a workout from when it hurts this is bad to when it hurts I lean is it discomfort because that's what I'm here for. If you view your weirdness, your uniqueness, the particular peculiar is that you have the list, the slight the the offset hips, the pain in your back, the you know the good looks, the bad looks, the traumas your back, the, you know, the good looks, the bad looks, the traumas, all of that stuff. If you purpose them toward, okay, that makes me more interesting. That makes me more unique. That makes me less of the archetypal stereotypical caricature that I could be if I decide to nerf the edges and round off the corners of

my life. That's not the way it is. And I can say from person experience that upon embracing all of the weird and wonderful elements of my life that I have, my life has got linearly or exponentially better from then until now. And Sheldon, I know that you have to dash off me. I feel like we could go on for much longer and I really keen to get you back.

If people want to find out more about yourself, where should they go? They should go to the internet and look me up at Skidmore College, which is in Saratoga Springs, New York, or just email me, sSolomon, s-s-o-l-o-o-m--O-N at skidmore.edu. So I'm kind of third world. I don't have a website or Twitter. But I do answer email and I welcome questions and love exchanging ideas. And I do appreciate all of this, Chris. And so I sincerely hope that this

is the beginning of an ongoing exchange of ideas. I thought this was great. Thank you. Me too. Final, final, final question. Let's say someone wants to get into some of the stuff that we've spoken about today. You must have namedrop 20 plus authors. Who is an accessible, what is an accessible book that someone can get into?

Well, at the risk of being self-promoting? Get it out there. Sean, get it out there. I would say that Ernest Becker's the denial of death or another book called the birth and death of meaning are where we got our ideas from, but a lot of folks find that to be difficult. We wrote a book called The Worm at the Core on the role of death in life, and it was our desire to present these ideas in a conversational manner. And so anybody that might want to just get introduced to these notions. I would suggest that, and I don't like selling things.

If you happen to go buy our book, that's fine. If five more people buy it, I'll be able to buy shoes. Anybody that wants to see our book, if you just email me, I'd be happy to send you a PDF file of the book. So I don't want to appear to be shelling for any of the people that are listening. If they've enjoyed today, the Amazon link to Worming the Call will be in the show notes below. Go and check it out. Let us say, Sheldon, I'm really, really excited to get you back on. Hopefully this is the beginning of a of a burgeoning friendship between us. But for now, mate, thank you so much. Very much so for me too, and thanks Chris, and we'll talk again soon.

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