Look into making sense pot Cast SAM Harris, just a note to say that if your hearing this, you are not currently honour, subscriber feed and only be here in the first part of this conversation in order to access full episodes of making sense packaged you'll need to subscribe. Sam Aristotle work there you'll find a private our says we need to add to your favorite pot catcher, along with other subscriber, only content. We don't run ads on the past and therefore its made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers, so few enjoy. What we're doing here, please consider becoming one. A recent ran an opinion poll online asking people how often they think seriously about death

about, is never the bility about their priorities in light of it excetera, and I gave them voices many times a day, perhaps once a day, I can go to days without thinking about it. I can go weeks without thinking about it.

And I'm not sure what results I was expecting, but the distribution did surprise me. Obviously this isn't. A scientific sample was mostly a sample of the kind of people who follow me on Twitter, though I think the Paul did spread somewhat beyond my audience. I got over forty thousand responses and where the largest cohort were those who don't think about death, very often thirty, two percent said then go weeks. Without doing so, twenty seven percent can go days without it. Twenty eight percent think about death, perhaps once a day, and only thirteen percent were people like me Who think about it many times each day? So, judging from these results, I probably think about death more in the average day than most people think about it in many months or even a year.

I generally don't think about it in a way that I would consider morbid My thoughts and to be more in line with the money until Morey reflections at her widely recommended by Buddhists and stoics, and what you can find echoed in several places in waken up reflecting on the preciousness of life. On the non renewable character of time on a reality Simply don't know how much time you have beautiful and one last day today and every day, thought of this kind need not make a person depressed, though perhaps they make some people depressed. Rather, they can and should inspire us. to wisdom and compassion. Do that most important thing now express your love now relinquish. Those hang ups. Now bury the hatch it now.

Recognize the nature of mind now live fully now For one day you will die, but seen that many people don't reflect in this way and do their best. avoid thinking about death altogether and even though Those who think about it a lot still suffer from various forms of death, denial prices, even though the reality and inevitability of death seem very well established. In my mind,. More often than not, I'm still shocked to learn that any specific person has died. Unless a person was in his or her nineties, any specific death still seemed somehow anomalous to me. My first question is some incredulous version of what happened, so I do detected myself some form of debt

denial, even though I think about the reality of death. A lot. And the reality of it is everywhere. I notice More and more that many, the people I admire. People who I read or listen to with pleasure actors I enjoy watching and films, people whose thoughts and person these can summon in an instant by picking up a book or Typing their names into Youtube. Notice more and more, that many of these people are dead. And some died at an age that I've already surpassed in Warsaw occasionally aware that I am likely going to occupy this role for other people think it's totally grandiose of me to imagine that some people will listen to my voice or read my books after I'm dead. Now, I'm fifty four at the time

I'm recordings. How long will I live, obviously have no idea, but what will it be like for someone who cares about the life. I've lived in a fine some value. In my view of the world What will it be like for you to listen to this audio after I'm gone, To know that I lived as fully as, you do now, but no- that I no longer do well. I know exactly what that's like. I have experienced more or less every day, there's something very strange about this time, capsule effect. This one way: communication with the past. amazing that we have media that allows us to do this to have the shock of recognition me. You can summon car,

Say again, nor Marlon Brando from below the grave and fully reckoning There were once as alive as you are now- and we no the precise day that they died. and we also know that the world, went on without them when we think about death through different facets of it, that we can focus on We can think about our own deaths, organised by the deaths of other people, in particular those closest to us, and these are very different problems when I think about the deaths of the poor, I love the focus is much more on my own bereavement. Then it is on the fact of death itself either It's true that when I die, I will lose everyone.

I won't be alive to experience that laws, so bereavement doesnt really enter into. It seems to me that the pure reflection on death itself is really best focused, On our own case, however, even here is possible to get distracted by other things process. We can worry about the process of dine weathers. Went to be sudden or after a long illness, Willoughby painful. some other way chaotic, or will we go peacefully in our sleep thing about the process of dying is really thinking about the specific expiring. This is one we have at the end of one's life. To think about death itself. Is the thing about what happens after that or about what doesn't happen after that? So something dying is the being dead part that

interests me here so dynamic a few things about what am I mean to be dead, and I want to explore certain paradoxes. The seem to surround this phenomenon, so we can leave the process of dying It's going to be whatever it will be and whatever it is. It will be a finite experience which is decided, however painful it might be in the case of any one of us there will come a time when it ceases to be painful. Even if one suffered a long illness and a belligerent of medical interventions, the will be a moment when all of that, and so do I- and will be like anything else in life, it will be temper. The power this seems like it might not be temporary. Is the condition being dead now what we think about death in particular about what happens to each of us after our body?

Sty depends on what we believe about two fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind: the nature of consciousness and the nature of identity. The question about the status of consciousness in natural world is often referred to as the mind body problem. What is the real, shit between mind and matter where it is consciousness, come from Does it arise on the basis of information processing in the brain, or is it more fundamental, constituent of matter or is matter itself a mere appearance in consciousness?. Which would then be the true base layer of reality, their arrival metaphysical views here, specifically physical, ism, pansy chasm and ideas, and, however, one resolves the mind body problem. There remains

the problem of personal identity presence in what sense, and by the same person or self or consciousness, that I was yesterday. What could be the basis of any claim To identity is just a matter of psychological continuity through time was the significance of such continuity. When we think about replacing parts of ourselves, even parts of our brains were stranger, still when we think about the prospect of copying our minds on to some other substrate, mean to create mines that have perfect copies of our memories and desires. Pray. Better copies and we maintain normally while living? What would any of this suggest about the nature of personal identity now have discussed many, these riddles

swear without giving anything like final answers to them. But here I want to focus on the question of death, as viewed from the inside from the point of view of the experience of any person who has died and, of course this will be. Each of us ultimately, unless we get to a time where were actually duplicating ourselves or otherwise perfectly resisting biological decay? Each of us will one day be counted among the dead by those who outlive us, but before we get started here, this one peculiar intuition, often held by religious people- that I think we should dispense with at the outset. As the intuition tat. If death really is the end of us, if its synonymous with the end of experience will then that fund our duty life of any conceivable purpose or meaning or significance

Yes, he to be the only way for love or knowledge or beauty or happiness to matter is for these state of mind and state of the world to last forever its eternity or nothing. This is a surprisingly common. The view, as I said, especially among the religious, but if you think about it, it is a strange idea as also strange that no one seems to apply it to specific experiences. I never hear someone say that if a play or a dance or a piece of music or a conversation or a hug or a meal or a sunset or anything else, doesnt last forever will then was pointless rather think one could easily argue. Is this transiency of everything that magnifies the beauty of everything.

I would also point out that the decisions we make while alive the culture we create the ideas we invent and spread. All this directly affects the minds of the people Who allow leave and the effect we have on these people could well make the difference between humanity petering out over the course of the next century or spreading itself through the guy. Let's see from millions or even billions of years. We just take a moment to contemplate the difference between these two futures in the first humanity has no sure, because we fail to mitigate some specific existential risks. And in the other, our future is truly open, ended which have a kind of escape philosophy with respect to survive, Of course, there are intermediate places on this landscape. We play our cards quite right, we might

says for a very long time under conditions that are not only not desirable but may be quite terrible, based on our failure to cooperate intelligently generation after generation, but how each of us lives now will help determine our trajectory here. So what we think and say now matters, even if we're not around to experience the consequences. So I won't go into it further here. But I just wanted to indicate that I don't Finality of death in the case of each individual says much of anything about that individuals, life and it certainly, nothing about the meaning of life itself, but there is also something paradoxical about the very idea of death

condition in which every individual life and mind terminates in my purpose now is to explore that paradox. The philosopher Tom Clark has a wonderful s. I wish you can read on his website: naturalism dot, Org, an essay, titled, death, nothingness and subjectivity, and I want to explore his argument here in some detail. Of course, other philosophers and scientists have said many things on this point for us, as we have the famous quotation from Epicure us as we encounter him in Lucretius poem on the nature of things quote, death is nothing to us. When we exist death is not, and when death exists, we are not,

All sensation unconsciousness ends with death and therefore in death. There is neither pleasure more pain. End quote so this idea of nothingness, of oblivion, of a dark abyss of a kind of positive absence of an endless deprivation of experience is misleading. If were simply talking about the end of experience, you didn't experience your ass Hence before you were born and if death is truly the end of experience, you won't experience your absence after you die. So this reallocation of death of death, as eternal nothingness, is fundamentally misleading and Clark starts as essay there, the philosopher that contain made a similar point in disparaging Freud's notion of the unconscious he said quote.

Imagine a language in which, instead of saying I found nobody in the room. One said I found me stir. Nobody in the room, imagine the philosophical problems that will arise out of such a convention. End quote: that's from the blue book The point is, nothingness, isn't something and therefore cannot be a permanent condition of any being more mind. The second point, the Clark explores, is the subject of continuity of consciousness.

From the point of view of consciousness? There can be no experience of before or after with respect to birth and death, so there is something almost eternal about it from its own point of view. Of course, we think we experience interruptions of consciousness while alive in sleep or under anesthesia, but that's not quite true is true that we experienced changes in the character of our experience, that is in the contents of consciousness. It feels like something to wake up groggy from sleep say, but from the point of view of consciousness,. We just experienced one moment after the next, even if some moments indicate that there were periods of time that we can't account or did not

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