Tomorrow, Today - Death is Common in Every Species with Dr. Susana Monso

Episode Date: March 7, 2022

In this episode, we discuss the concept of death and how it is understood differently across the animal kingdom. If we turn towards the natural world, we can see that the minimal cognitive requirements for a Concept of Death are in fact met by many nonhuman species and there are multiple learning pathways and opportunities for animals in the wild to develop a Concept of Death. We explore this further and what this means for the way we live today and moving into the future. Check out Dr. Monso’s work: https://susanamonso.com/ Andy IG: @theandyciccone IG @poorprolesalmanac www.poorproles.com Nash: Twitter: @Itsnashflynn Twitter: @DeathandFriends

Welcome to Tomorrow Today, a podcast where we talk about what the future looks like. But right now. Today. My name is Nashville, and I'm a comedian and a historian, and I'm here with my co-host. Andy. Who doesn't have a last name? It's very convenient for all of us. Yeah, I was brought up by dinosaurs.

I don't have last names. The only Andy on the earth. It's very convenient and somewhat confusing. Maybe I'll go with Farmer. I can be Andy Farmer since I farm. That seems like a good reason to have a. second name is to use it to define something about you to separate you from other people. And definitely you'd be the only Andy Farmer on the earth right now.

Maybe. We should Google it. All right. All right. So what are we talking about? Today we are talking about death. Da-da-da-da-un. The Great Beyond.

One of my favorite subjects on the earth. Da-dan. She was like waiting for that and then. And then it didn't have it. And it didn't happen, so then I had to make it happen. And that's what I do. I make it happen. That's why they call me Andy Farmer, grows big turnips.

That's the full name. That's quite a name. How are you going to pass that on to your children? They don't need my last name, whatever they're good at. Oh, I see. So we're creating sort of a new subculture in which we just reassign ourselves surnames based on things we're good at. Yeah, why should we be tied to the people that are dead,

which brings us right back to what we're talking about. I want to talk about that, like, Maybe not with mics in front of us because that was not what I expected you to say at all. But okay, yes, let's talk about death. Let's get into it. So I had the opportunity to chat with Dr. Susanna Monsso. She is a doctor at the Spanish National University. And she focuses on animal ethics.

But in the last few years of her research, she's really delved into this idea of the concept of death. So establishing what animals understand is death and that it's not necessarily how humans think about death. And forcing that on the animal kingdom, how humans understand death, is actually detrimental to animal ethics and understanding death as a topic. So I've been studying death since pretty much the moment

I realized I was alive and self-aware, which is not a long time, actually. I'm not very smart. But what I love about studying death is that either you get people who are also interested in death as a subject, or the subject changes immediately and you're not quite sure how it changed that fast.

And what I'm finding is that people are really uncomfortable with it. I'm uncomfortable. No, I'm just kidding. I'm kidding. No, I was thinking about like the very dumb platitudes people say when you're talking about death. And then I think about like my own grandfather died and my dad was making jokes about how my grandfather couldn't keep his hands off my grandmother like at the wake. And that's just like, and that's a huge cultural thing around Italians.

I think in general that their relationship with death is very, I don't want to say unique, because I think it's very common outside of like mainstream white America, but it's just like one of those things that stands out to me. And it's one of the stories I've told people. And I just see like the look of like shame on their face for me as though I should be like ashamed of this. But it's like actually like really comforting in a lot of ways that like that ability to engage with the subject of death in like a very practical way.

And I mean, your grandfather existed and he definitely fucked because that's how you got here. So something to be celebrated for some people. He fucks. Granddad used to fuck. It was a thing. We have proof. It's here. It's here in us.

All of our grandparents have fucked. And your parents, they're probably still fucking. Maybe your great grandparents. I don't know. They're not fucking. No, that's too far back. Well, I guess they could. Okay.

Everyone fucks. Yes. Okay, so that's what we're telling you. Your entire family still having sex to this day, as long as they're still alive, if they're not, hopefully they are not still having sex, or I think the law has to get involved. Anyway, let's not get into necrophilia on this podcast. Not yet. Just yet.

Fucking Christ, should have done this project alone. Nope. So we started talking in this episode, in this interview, about the concept of death in animals. And it's not something that never really occurred to me before. now, which is... Is that much like how you don't think about how, like, animals fuck? Well, again, a lot of epiphanies in this episode for me. Just a lot of...

Just having a moment. I... Having a Nash moment. Can we put up the technical difficulties music? I feel like I'm going to be saying anyway a lot every time you and I are in the studio. You're not uncomfortable talking about death at all, clearly. I mean, I'm uncomfortable because the subject keeps changing and I have to keep bringing it back. So for humans, we think of ourselves as being very unique in that we are one of the only things that we know of, the only creatures on Earth, that from a very early age, understand that we're going to die.

And that understanding obviously comes at different levels. But when we're children, you know, it's our family pet. It's our goldfish. It's our grandfather. Somebody dies and we start to understand and break down the permanence of it. And we think we're alone in that. And maybe we are in our extent to how we understand death, how we grieve it, if we do grieve it. But Dr. Monsso's research is really fascinating because it's showing that we can establish a concept of death that isn't unique to humans and why that's important.

And why is that important? Well, we get to that. I don't want to spoil the ending for you. Sorry, I'm just so excited. You have to like listen. We did the work. There's a thing. Yeah.

There's a thing. Yeah. I'm holding after this. Okay, so yeah, there's this interesting concept of how we reconfigure how death exists or manifests or our relationship with it manifests throughout like, you know, for humans, it's throughout like our age and our ability to like, our brains to change and evolve and to understand death as this very permanent thing and how we relate to it through the people who die and how far that death. seems from our existence. And that's obviously more of a first world problem or situation, I guess you might want to say, than many other parts of the world because death has been like very sanitized in order to, you know, commodify it, make it a part of our existence, something that happens.

We mourn along with it. But in that process, we're able to extrapolate like a lot of like identity and meaning through the purchases of the nice casket, the gravestone, however, whatever eulogy exists for those people, the memorials that may exist for them. And in that process, we don't really grieve so much as we like, we basically buy the things that we feel are important to reflect on our lives. In a way, we're basically re-commodifying our lives or the lives of the people we love because the people that have died usually don't have a lot of say in that process. And it raises a really interesting question about how much are we really engaging with the death itself? Or are we just putting these layers

almost like the way an onion like puts its own layers as it grows? Are we just doing that to the actual experience of death itself and not really wrestling and engaging with that permanence outside of the fact that we don't see those people anymore? Right. So is our own concept of death sort of ebbing and flowing based on the fact that we don't actually deal with dead bodies that much. And the people that do deal with dead bodies, we tend to be really weird around, you know? If somebody comes up to you, they're like, yeah, I'm a mortician. You're like, okay, I'm not going to shake your hand today, sir, because who knows what you've touched. But all in all, you can thank the Victorians for that. Yay. Yay. History. You know, in Victorian England, the funerary culture sort of explodes. And it becomes

this like very, you know, momentum-borne associated class structure. And you see a lot during that time frame of like all of these, like, how much can you afford? And that affording often went hand-in-hand with how much you loved them and how much they were respected in their community. And at the same time, you sort of see this, you know, rise in popper stance for, you know, they were buried farther out, like, away from the churches. And you see a lot of sort of their rebellion in very, very small ways, you know, what they could afford to do. But everybody's heard of that gravestone that's like, here I lie from the chapel door, here I lie, like, as warm as they, basically.

Meaning like, yeah, I'm really far from the church, but we're all still dead, which is fun. And so as the years went on, they commodified it more. We started dealing less with the actual physicality of death. And I think that has been somewhat to our detriment, because now we can't even, as Dr. Munsoe puts out, we can't even listen to grandma tell us what she wants. her body to look like, you know what she wants her funeral to look like. And I think that for me was one of those moments where you really understand that the animal kingdom sort of understands death maybe better than us in some ways. I think that story is basically something everyone's heard.

And I think we also see this become really evident when unexpected death happens. I think we've become so accustomed to the fact that everyone's supposed to live until they're 75 or 80 or whatever, that if somebody dies younger, it becomes this lifetime of sorrow that's attached to that because we don't have the tools to really deal and, you know, accept that reality. The fact that people don't traditionally die before that age is a relatively new concept. I have a hard time. Of course, we can't go back in time and, like, talk to people, but I really struggle with the idea that this is how people have always existed on the earth and the way they engage with

death or understand it like in an intimate way when only a couple generations ago it wasn't uncommon to lose multiple children before they were fully grown. And today if somebody loses someone at 40, it's like they can't wrestle with that or deal with that for 30 years or 40 years, which I think speaks to a fundamental failure in the way that we engage with death. I agree. And I think partially that's something that history and archaeology is attempting to sort of curve a little bit because they did deal with it more often. But we still, you know, the grief and the funerary rights were still there. Did they deal with the better? I'm not sure. But, you know, one of the things that people point to for like understanding death. And you talked

about the death of multiple children is they always say that the Puritans, especially in New England, sort of just like were very, very cold. They didn't really care. But a lot of the primary source material, you know, indicate for us that, you know, even though they were losing all of these children, It was still detrimental every single time it happened. You know, they didn't get, you know, accustomed to losing children and young people just because it happened more frequently. And now when it happens, you know, especially if it's if it's unexpected or if it's depression driven, it tends to be something that we don't ever even talk about again. Like you can't even mention that person at a family event because it's upsetting. And I think, you know, we've gotten to a point now where we're starting to have a range.

our own concept of death, if we can't actually have conversations about the only thing that unites us now. You know, the planet is sort of trying to get rid of us. And I think it's one of those things that we really just have to grapple with.

You know, that's a bold claim. Yeah. Well, you know. Suggest that death is the only thing and not taxes. Well, that depends if you're paying your taxes. Nashville is never ever logged on to turbo tax. That's all I'm going to say about that.

All you're going to say? All I'm going to say. All right. That's all I'm going to say. I don't want to wax poetic too long on it. But I think one of the things that became really, really clear in this conversation, well, two things, is A, that Bailey, my dog cannot wait to eat me. And B, two, shit, I got distracted by my dog. Oh.

Classic white woman. She's so cute. So evil. We tend to think of humans as not participating in the animal kingdom any longer. But we did and we do. We still very much exist in the animal kingdom. And we should engage. Right, exactly.

And so the fact that we have to identify and catalog the concept of death for animal ethics and exclude human or what we're calling human exceptionalism out of that really seems to me a very apt metaphor for how we view our engagement with nature. And it's sort of terrible. Yeah, it's not a good look for humanity, and it probably doesn't point to like any signs of us building better relationships with nature. If we're continuing to kind of follow this path further and further away where we're basically trying to pretend that death doesn't need to be natural, like, you know, the way the people are obsessed with this idea of living forever 50s, the new 30 and, you know, robots and all that cool stuff that I don't know anything about. So if I say anything more complicated than robots, I'll just probably be talking about an outdated technology and people just make fun of me. So I'm just going to leave it there. I think we should. I think we should.

Yeah. So the interview is after this. It's very, very great. And shit. Wow, that was a great cell. You know? It's really, really great. It is really, really good.

It's a fascinating conversation. And I spent the entire time being like, oh, my God, this is so fascinating. Like, I can hear myself get more and more hyped as we're talking. And then I had to be like, you know, at the end, I was like, thank you so much for coming. I have to go find something to do with all this adrenaline now that I didn't expect to develop over like a 40 minute conversation about animals concept of death. But here we are. He talks a lot about whales. Interested in growing food?

No, I mean really growing food. Building systems with your ecology and creating sustainability beyond typical stories of permaculture. If you're interested in this as well as. traditional practices around land management and stewardship. Tune into the Port Prolls Almanac, a podcast that's focused on history, ecology, and of course, growing food, available wherever you get your podcasts or at Porprols.com. You talk a little bit about how you got into this field, like what interests you about death and dying, non-humans?

Yeah. So first of all, thank you so much for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here, and it's always cool to talk about this research. So it's funny that the way I got into this work, because everyone always asks me, how did you get into this topic? Which is not, I think it's not such a common question when people are working on other topics, but somehow people are always curious to hear why I'm working on death. And I think like there are sort of two answers that I usually give. and one is kind of more personal, which is the fact that I started working on this topic when I was about to turn 30. And I think it had something to do with, you know, that moment of my life. I think a lot of people when they turn 30 or when they turn 40, one of these big birthdays, we start to think about death a lot.

I've heard this happening to other people. And I think it did happen to me. And though it wasn't really at the forefront of my mind, I think at some kind of unconscious level, it was probably having some influence on me. But the second, I would say the more conscious reason why I got into this topic is that while I work on animal minds, my training was in animal ethics. And I consider myself to be an ethicist at heart. And I always, whenever I work in animal minds, I always have ethics as kind of a backer

drop and as my aim with my research is to help ethicists and to have some sort of influence on ethical debates surrounding animals. And so this has meant that the capacities that I've always been interested in studying have to do with those that we refer to when we tell ourselves how special humans are, right? The sorts of capacities that we build these. narratives around and that allow us to ground this idea of human superiority over the other species. So I did my PhD on animal morality and then I've been working on the concept of death because these are two capacities that we think of in these terms. For sure, for sure. So actually, that's a great segue into my next question. So in the paper that we're talking about, death is common. And so

is understanding it, you and your co-authors sort of identify a couple categories that define the process of what you're calling concept of death. Can you, can you walk us through those categories and how you establish them? Yeah. So, um, you mean that the notions of non-functionality and irreversibility, right? Yeah. Yeah. So the idea is, um, what we are working with in this paper is the notion of what I call the minimal concept of death. Um, and this is kind of, um, sort of a philosophical notion. It's, It's a theoretical construct that allows us to determine when we can start to speak of an understanding of death in other animals. So to put this in lay terms, when we ask the question of whether animals can understand death, the first thing that we need to answer in order to address this question is, well, what does it mean to understand death?

Because there are very different ways in which we can understand this notion. And under some conceptions, understanding death can be seen as something very intellectually demanding. Right. So if we think, for instance, about the human adult concept of death, it's a concept of death that's very, very sophisticated, very complex, that comes with all these additional notions and like emotional hues and all these rituals that we attach to death. So there's a lot that we built into, that we build into the concept of death. But I think that that starting the question, like trying to address the question of whether animals understand death from the perspective, like starting from this very complex notion that human adults usually have, is, I think, a misguided way of addressing the question

because it's simply not very fair to put it in these terms. So the idea is, the idea that that drives my research here is that the concept of death is not actually something binary, something that you either have or you don't, but rather it's better to understand it as a spectrum. So something that admits of higher or lower degrees of complexity. And we can think of this very clearly. We think about how human children acquire the concept of death,

they usually don't acquire it overnight, but rather it takes them several years to develop it. And usually developmental psychologists speak of children needing 10 years to develop a full-blown concept of death. But I always use this example. If we think about what it's like to play video games such as Super Mario with a 7-year-old, you can easily see that they have some notion of death. Or if you're watching, I don't know, the Lion King with them or something, they can grasp something about what happens to Mofasa, right? So there are concepts of death that are less complex

and that presumably fall within the reach of less cognitively sophisticated individuals. But of course, not everything counts as a concept of death. So it was important for me to start by determining what exactly needs to be in place in order for us to be able to say of an individual that they understand death. What's the bare minimum that the individual needs to understand? So the concept of death, the full-blown concept of death is understood to have various sub-components, which are, they're up to seven. They are non-functionality, irreversibility, universality, causality, personal mortality, inevitability, and unpredictability. So these are

all like sort of the main characteristics of what it means to die, right? The idea that individuals don't do things, that this is a permanent state, that it applies to all living beings, that it's caused by a breakdown in the bodily functions, that it will apply to ourselves, that it's inevitable and that it's unpredictable. And what I argue in my research is that out of all these seven subcomponents, the two that you actually only really need are non-functionality and irreversibility. So in order for us to say of an animal that they understand death, what we need is for the animal to understand that dead individuals don't do things, in specific, that they don't do

the sorts of things that living beings typically do, and that this is a permanent state, meaning that once they are dead, you don't expect these functions any longer. Sorry, that was a really long as. No, no, no, that's a really great answer. And I, you know, as I was reading your paper, I started thinking about how humans have developed this process, because it really isn't just a switch you turn on one day when you're like, I'm a human being. Now I understand the concept of death because I turned six and somebody has died in my life. It really, it is a process. And so understanding that we've denied that to everyone else because we think we believe in this human exceptionalism, it's not something I ever really thought through. But as soon as you started saying it, I was like, why have I never had this thought before? But we really do think, of humans as being separate entirely because we are capable of this intellectualization of saying not everybody participates in ritualization and emotional factors of death like we do because we have language and we have societies. And so I think, you know, one of the pieces of your

paper I found really fascinating was the discussion about the whale, the whale mother who carried her calf for like a bunch of miles across the ocean. And everyone just, you know, when we think about that in terms of humans, we're like, oh, she's sad. or she didn't understand death. But you took issue with both of those things saying that she could have easily understood death and it would have been just as important if she had left the calf at the bottom of the sea

in terms of defining the concept of death. Yeah. So the idea, by the way, it wasn't just a bunch of miles. It was a thousand miles in over 17 days. So, you know, a long time and a long way to carry a calf, especially when you don't have hands. I mean, it's really amazing the case of that, of that whale. In fact, the biologists who were monitoring her, they were really afraid for her survival because she was barely eating anything. She was really obsessed with carrying this calf of hers. This case has received a lot of attention. And what we, what we mentioned in this paper is, you know, we take issue with another paper by Jennifer. for Bonk and Sarah Brosnan, where they say, well, you know, how many mothers actually let their

babies sink to the bottom of the ocean and this receives no attention? You know, maybe we're just focusing on this, but it was just a strange case. And our point when discussing this is that actually letting your infant, your baby sink to the bottom of the ocean can also demonstrate that you understand that the baby is dead. So our main idea is that there is what we call an emotional anthropocentrism that's very present in the study of animals' reactions to death. And the idea behind this emotional anthropocentrism is that the reactions of animals towards the dying and the dead are only interesting if they resemble human reactions. This is kind of an implicit assumption and sometimes made pretty explicit in a lot of these

studies. And what we argue is that actually grief and the concept of death are two different things. So it's two different questions, how an animal emotionally reacts to death and whether the animal understands death. And we argue that these questions, they're both interesting, but they should be treated as separate questions. So it's definitely interesting whether animals can grieve, but the presence of grief doesn't necessarily signal a concept of death. And also animals who don't grieve might still be able to understand death and might still have very interesting behaviors that evidence and understanding of death. So if we focus excessively on grief. What we're doing it, what's going to happen is we're going to miss

out on a lot of opportunities to learn about how animals relate to death. And also the fact that animals may not grieve in necessarily human-like ways. You know, the case of this whale, Taliqua was her name. The case of Taliqua is kind of very, very hypnotic for us. It's very amazing because we can really identify with her. We think of the This is a case that kind of evidences human-like emotion, but animals may manifest their grief in many different ways, and they don't necessarily have to be human-like. So an example that is kind of interesting for me, that's not necessarily an example of grief in animals, but it's definitely an interesting one to consider, is the example of pets who feed on their

dead owners, which is a very common behavior. It's disturbing. commonly common. And, you know, it's especially, I think it's especially disturbing or puzzling or fascinating if you ask me when it comes from dogs, because I think we can, I think we can kind of expect this from cats, but dogs do it too. A lot of dogs do it. And we don't have any doubts that dogs love us. We have, in fact, a lot of scientific studies that show that they do love us. But there have been many cases of dogs eating their owners with a bowl full of food and like 45 minutes after the owner died. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it's kind of, it's, it's kind of amazing. And it's also very interesting how this behavior happens because dogs, they're scavengers as well as predators.

And if they feed on a corpse that they find in the woods or whatever, they would start from the abdomen. that's where they usually feed from because it has all the organs and it's very nutrient rich or they might go for the limbs. But in cases of dogs feeding on their owners, most of the bites are on the face, which is interesting because the face is the center of emotion and it's what dogs mostly pay attention to when it comes to observing their owner's behavior and trying to understand what the owner expects from them. So it's quite likely that this behavior, starts as an attempt to get some sort of reaction from the owner, from the emotional center of the owner. And then after a while, maybe they get frustrated. They start biting or licking,

and at some point they draw blood, and then they start eating. And so it's kind of an interesting behavior, I think, but it receives no attention in the empirical literature on animals' reactions to death. You can only find reports on this in like forensic journals, not in animal behavior, once, and it's not mentioned by the main scientists working on this topic. And I think it has to do with this emotional anthropocentrism. Like, it's a behavior that we find kind of puzzling. Also, I think partly from a weird perspective, you know, from the perspective of Western societies where mortuary cannibalism is really not a thing. So we're just puzzled by this behavior of eating someone that you love when they die. Right. I mean, it feels like rule breaking for us, right? Yeah,

exactly. Exactly. It's like it's puzzling. If they love us, why would they eat us? It's very difficult for us to understand. I think if we had that kind of ritual in our societies, which we do in some human societies, then maybe we wouldn't find in such a puzzling behavior. Maybe we would find it one of these human-like reactions to death. Sure. I mean, I have a golden retriever, and I have to tell you I'm going to be watching her a little bit more closely now. She'll eat anything. So, you know, I better not lay on the ground too long, is what I'm saying. So in thinking about Bailey and also other animals, why is it important that we open these borders up for concept of death to include non-humans? I think it's important. Well, I, for one, find it interesting as a question in itself.

So I find it fascinating the question of how animals might acquire a concept of death and what degrees of complexity can this concept have. Because I think what fascinates me about this is on the one hand, the fact that they can't learn through oral means like humans do. So the way we learn is we don't really interact with corpses much, usually, most humans. but we learn from our parents from watching certain movies or reading certain books or, you know, our grandparents dying and our parents explaining to us what this means and so on. That's how we usually learn, whereas animals learn at least insofar as they're non-linguistic beings, which maybe some might not be. But as far as we know, we are the only humans capable of communicating linguistically about death.

So assuming that other animals would have to learn through their own exploration of corpses and their own life experiences surrounding death. So I find that very interesting. I also find it very interesting to think about how the concept of death of animals might differ from our own. What kind of like sensory or semantic dimensions might this concept have that are different from our own concept of death? Some might be interested in this question because of what it tells us about the evolution of human cognition surrounding death. I'm not particularly interested in that question, but I know that a lot of people are. So they might be interested in this because of that. And I also think that there are ethical reasons for being concerned about this question.

One of these ethical reasons has to do with what I already mentioned regarding this notion of humans as the superior species, which of course we used to justify our boundless exploitation of nature, right? So any project that can serve to bring this into question, I think, is an interesting and worthwhile project. But learning about what animals understand of death can also maybe tell us something about what we owe to animals. It might tell us something about the wrongness of killing animals or the wrongness of killing animals who are bonded to other animals. and it might tell us something about our end-of-life management practices in zoos or in households. It might tell us something about whether we owe animals a chance to grieve when their loved one dies, et cetera. So I think there are all these questions that come from reflecting on how animals understand death.

And I think they're important questions to ask. I agree. And, you know, we talked a little bit before we started. jumping into this conversation. So I have a background in historical deathways, but that only as that pertains to humans. And I think what started striking me most about how you're measuring concept of death in animals is that we sort of have this understanding that humans understand death the most, because we can communicate about it. We live in societies where we had to establish all these rituals in order to grieve and deal with it. But in reality, I think the animal kingdom

deals with the experience of death way more than humans do, especially modern humans where I don't remember the last time I saw just a corpse lying around that I just ignored. Yeah, exactly, exactly. So this is something that we take issue with

in the paper where we argue against those authors who have construed death primarily as an absence. And this is very common in the philosophical literature on death as well, thinking of death as an abstract concept, as the absence of a person. And I think that's a very, again, weird way of thinking about this. So weird stands for Western educated, industrialized, rich in democratic societies in case someone doesn't know this acronym.

So it's a weird way of thinking about death. That's definitely not going to be present in all human societies. But it's especially not going to be the case for animals. So in nature, a corpse is not something that just disappears, unless they're eaten by a predator. Of course, this can also happen. But very often the corpse stays there and starts decomposing. Or maybe, you know, we know many cases of primate mothers who carry the remains of their infants for days, weeks, even months. So the baby stops moving.

It stops making noises. it stops being warm to the touch, it stops responding to touch, but the mother continues carrying it. And it's not a full-blown absence like it would be in our case. It's like certain functions are no longer there, but the corpse is still very tangible. It's very present.

So I think that allows for a different kind of way of experiencing death and learning about it, right? I think it's just a very different experience. And this is where the title of our paper comes from. Death is common, so is understanding it, right? There's this idea that death is everywhere in nature. There are many, many ways to die. Depends a bit on the animal community in question,

but in certain communities, mortality rates are super high. So if you live in nature as an animal, you're going to encounter death many, many times. and in the end, understanding what death is in minimal terms is not that big a deal. This is what we're trying to argue, that it doesn't require very sophisticated cognition. The kind of cognition that it requires is pretty widespread. We can expect it to be pretty widespread. So it's quite likely that at least the minimal concept of death is going to be present in many animal species.

Right. And I, you know, as I'm thinking about it, I, I'm struck by the fact that that humanity has managed to remove itself from this, this intimacy of conversation. And I wonder if we could measure humans concepts of death, you know, taking a look at some of the societies right now against some of these, you know, less human-centered concepts of death, if we would still manage to hit all the marks of understanding its permanence in its absence when we sort of glorify things and pump corphing. is full of fluid and, you know, either leave them on display in the case of Lenin who's still just not buried just in Russia or, you know, to literally bury them and move on or to mummify them. Over the course of history, I wonder if humanity would still meet all of those bare minimum concepts as we go on. Yeah, I think it does kind of affect our concept of death, the way we deal with it. And one example that I like to think about is the notion of

inevitability, the inevitability of death. You know, this is a fairly complex notion that I think is probably restricted to linguistic beings, simply for the reason that you can't develop a notion of the inevitability of death solely on the basis of your own personal experiences. Because you know, for death to be inevitable, this means that for everything that is alive now, there is going to be a moment when they die. But of course, this is all going to happen in the future, a big chunk of this. So you can't develop this notion on the basis of your own experiences. And the way that humans learn about the inevitability of death is because we tell each other. And then generation to generation, we've told one another, everyone dies. Because

we've been seeing everyone die for, you know, centuries and millennia. And so we know that everyone will die because we've seen everyone die and it's inevitable. So we kind of know it at a very intellectual level, but then most of us or many, many of us, go through lives as though we weren't going to die, right? I think that the inevitability of death is not very much present in our own lived experience of death. And it's very often the case that people don't really reflect on this until, you know, something happens, they either turn 30 or they, you know, or they have a near-death experience or something,

you know, a bad diagnosis or something like that. But we very often live or go through life as though we were going to live forever. And also we hide death. We make lots of efforts to hide death. And death is very much taboo. So in my book on this topic, which is, only published in Spanish, but I'm hoping it will get translated soon. In my book, I talk about this a little bit in the final chapter. And I talk about how, you know, it's not well seen to talk publicly about a miscarriage you had, for instance. Or, you know, if someone is diagnosed with a fatal illness, you know, it's taboo. It's something that we only talk about, kind of. of whispering and not really in front of that person.

We become extremely uncomfortable if they tell us something like that or if we think about, I don't know, our granny at 90 something telling us about what's going to happen when she leaves and when she dies. We're always like, oh, come on, don't talk about these things. Don't be, you know, we, it's like we are so uncomfortable talking about death. And the whole thing makes us super uncomfortable. And the way we deal with it is by hiding it. We hide our grief as well.

It's not well seen to show it in public. And I just think it's not very healthy. I think it's making it worse for all of us. It's making it more difficult to cope with it. It amounts to us not really being okay with our own mortality. I like to think of my own. work is kind of trying to help us reconcile with our own animal natures and by way of that, maybe also with our own mortality. Yeah. So I think that's something we need to work on.

Right. I agree. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, even over the course of human history, we've, we've developed all of these processes of not dealing with it. You know, we've got all these religions to say you don't actually really even die. You just become something else. And so even the permanence of it, I think we've denied to a lot of our participants. So in thinking about, you know, where we go from here, what does the future of this conversation look like? Do you think that there's there's a benefit for human exceptionalism in this regard? I'm calling it exceptionalism, even though I think you and I both sort of just walked through how it's not really exceptional. And so like what do you want to see the conversation become for this topic?

Yeah, I think that would be a great outcome if we came to realize that we are another animal, we are just another animal. And so we don't have the right to use the resources on this planet as though they were only ours. I would like for my work to help us really see that we are animals, we're just another animal. And as such, we have to be much more respectful of this planet and of, the other species. Yeah, that's what I would hope. I hope it too. I want my grandmother to be able to talk about her inevitable death and peace. Yeah. Go on, Granny. So if our listeners are looking for more of you, want to read your papers and study your work, can you tell us where they could find you, what the name of your book is also? Yeah, so my book is called La Tarryuella de Schrodinger,

which means Schrodinger's possum. Hopefully it will come out in English at some point in the near future. I would love that. Yeah, me too. My Spanish is not great. Not good enough for that. And they can find me on my website, which is susanamonso.com, and I'm also on Twitter at Susana underscore Monceau. Awesome, awesome.

Well, thank you so much. This has been so fascinated. Any of the else you want to add before we sign off? No, just thank you for listening. Absolutely. Thank you so much.