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I have a question:
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who here remembers when they first realized
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they were going to die?
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I do. I was a young boy,
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and my grandfather had just died,
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and I remember a few days later lying in bed at night
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trying to make sense of what had happened.
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What did it mean that he was dead?
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Where had he gone?
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It was like a hole in reality had opened up
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and swallowed him.
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But then the really shocking
question occurred to me:
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if he could die, could it happen to me too?
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Could that hole in reality open up and swallow me?
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Would it open up beneath my bed
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and swallow me as I slept?
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Well at some point, all children
become aware of death.
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It can happen in different ways of course,
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and usually comes in stages.
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Our idea of death develops as we grow older.
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And if you reach back into the dark corners
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of your memory,
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you might remember something like what I felt
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when my grandfather died and when I realized
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it could happen to me too,
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that sense that behind all of this
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the void is waiting.
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And this development in childhood
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reflects the development of our species.
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Just as there was a point in your development
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as a child when your sense of self and of time
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became sophisticated enough
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for you to realize you were mortal,
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so at some point in the evolution of our species,
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some early human's sense of self and of time
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became sophisticated enough
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for them to become the first human to realize,
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"I'm going to die."
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This is, if you like, our curse.
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It's the price we pay for being so damn clever.
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We have to live in the knowledge
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that the worst thing that can possibly happen
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one day surely will,
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the end of all our projects,
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our hopes, our dreams, of our individual world.
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We each live in the shadow of a personal
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apocalypse.
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And that's frightening. It's terrifying.
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And so we look for a way out.
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And in my case, as I was about five years old,
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this meant asking my mum.
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Now when I first started asking
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what happens when we die,
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the grown-ups around me at the time
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answered with a typical English mix of awkwardness
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and half-hearted Christianity,
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and the phrase I heard most often
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was that granddad was now
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"up there looking down on us,"
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and if I should die too, which
wouldn't happen of course,
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then I too would go up there,
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which made death sound a lot like
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an existential elevator.
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Now this didn't sound very plausible.
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I used to watch a children's
news program at the time,
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and this was the era of space exploration.
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There were always rockets going up into the sky,
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up into space, going up there.
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But none of the astronauts when they came back
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ever mentioned having met my granddad
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or any other dead people.
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But I was scared,
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and the idea of taking the existential elevator
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to see my granddad
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sounded a lot better than being swallowed
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by the void while I slept.
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And so I believed it anyway,
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even though it didn't make much sense.
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And this thought process that I went through
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as a child, and have been through many times since,
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including as a grownup,
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is a product of what psychologists call
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a bias.
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Now a bias is a way in which we systematically
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get things wrong,
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ways in which we miscalculate, misjudge,
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distort reality, or see what we want to see,
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and the bias I'm talking about
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works like this:
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confront someone with the fact
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that they are going to die
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and they will believe just about any story
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that tells them it isn't true
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and they can, instead, live forever,
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even if it means taking the existential elevator.
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Now we can see this as the biggest bias of all.
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It has been demonstrated in over 400
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empirical studies.
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Now these studies are ingenious, but they're simple.
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They work like this.
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You take two groups of people
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who are similar in all relevant respects,
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and you remind one group that they're going to die
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but not the other, then you compare their behavior.
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So you're observing how it biases behavior
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when people become aware of their mortality.
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And every time, you get the same result:
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people who are made aware of their mortality
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are more willing to believe stories
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that tell them they can escape death
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and live forever.
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So here's an example: one recent study
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took two groups of agnostics,
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that is people who are undecided
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in their religious beliefs.
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Now one group was asked to think about being dead.
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The other group was asked to think about
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being lonely.
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They were then asked again
about their religious beliefs.
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Those who had been asked
to think about being dead
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were afterwards twice as likely to express faith
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in God and Jesus.
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Twice as likely.
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Even though the before they
were all equally agnostic.
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But put the fear of death in them,
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and they run to Jesus.
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Now this shows that reminding people of death
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biases them to believe, regardless of the evidence,
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and it works not just for religion,
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but for any kind of belief system
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that promises immortality in some form,
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whether it's becoming famous
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or having children
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or even nationalism,
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which promises you can live
on as part of a greater whole.
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This is a bias that has shaped
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the course of human history.
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Now, the theory behind this bias
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in the over 400 studies
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is called terror management theory,
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and the idea is simple. It's just this.
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We develop our worldviews,
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that is, the stories we tell ourselves
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about the world and our place in it,
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in order to help us manage
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the terror of death.
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And these immortality stories
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have thousands of different manifestations,
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but I believe that behind the apparent diversity
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there are actually just four basic forms
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that these immortality stories can take.
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And we can see them repeating themselves
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throughout history, just with slight variations
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to reflect the vocabulary of the day.
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Now I'm going to briefly introduce these four
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basic forms of immortality story,
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and I want to try to give you some sense
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of the way in which they're retold by each culture
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or generation
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using the vocabulary of their day.
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Now, the first story is the simplest.
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We want to avoid death,
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and the dream of doing that in this body
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in this world forever
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is the first and simplest kind of immortality story,
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and it might at first sound implausible,
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but actually, almost every culture in human history
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has had some myth or legend
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of an elixir of life or a fountain of youth
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or something that promises to keep us going
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forever.
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Ancient Egypt had such myths,
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ancient Babylon, ancient India.
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Throughout European history, we find them
in the work of the alchemists,
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and of course we still believe this today,
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only we tell this story using the vocabulary
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of science.
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So a hundred years ago,
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hormones had just been discovered,
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and people hoped that hormone treatments
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were going to cure aging and disease,
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and now instead we set our hopes on stem cells,
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genetic engineering, and nanotechnology.
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But the idea that science can cure death
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is just one more chapter in the story
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of the magical elixir,
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a story that is as old as civilization.
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But betting everything on the idea of finding the elixir
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and staying alive forever
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is a risky strategy.
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When we look back through history
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at all those who have sought an elixir in the past,
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the one thing they now have in common
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is that they're all dead.
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So we need a backup plan,
and exactly this kind of plan B
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is what the second kind of immortality story offers,
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and that's resurrection.
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And it stays with the idea that I am this body,
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I am this physical organism.
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It accepts that I'm going to have to die
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but says despite that,
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I can rise up and I can live again.
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In other words, I can do what Jesus did.
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Jesus died, he was three days in the [??],
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and then he rose up and lived again.
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And the idea that we can all be
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resurrected to live again
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is orthodox believe, not just for Christians
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but also Jews and Muslims.
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But our desire to believe this story
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is so deeply embedded
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that we are reinventing it again
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for the scientific age,
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for example, with the idea of cryonics.
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That's the idea that when you die,
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you can have yourself frozen,
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and then, at some point when technology
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has advanced enough,
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you can be thawed out and repaired and revived
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and so resurrected.
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And so some people believe an omnipotent god
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will resurrect them to live again,
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and other people believe an omnipotent scientist
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will do it.
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But for others, the whole idea of resurrection,
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of climbing out of the grave,
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it's just too much like a bad zombie movie.
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They find the body too messy, too unreliable
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to guarantee eternal life,
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and so they set their hopes on the third,
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more spiritual immortality story,
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the idea that we can leave our body behind
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and live on as a soul.
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Now the majority of people on earth
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believe they have a soul,
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and the idea is central to many religions.
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But even though, in its current form,
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in its traditional form,
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the idea of the soul is still hugely popular,
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nonetheless we are again
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reinventing it for the digital age,
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for example with the idea
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that you can leave your body behind
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by uploading your mind, your essence,
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the real you, onto a computer,
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and so live on as a an avatar in the ether.
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But of course there are skeptics who say
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if we look at the evidence of science,
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particularly neuroscience,
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it suggests that your mind,
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your essence, the real you,
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is very much dependent on a particular part
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of your body, that is, your brain.
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And such skeptics can find comfort
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in the fourth kind of immortality story,
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and that is legacy,
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the idea that you can live on
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through the echo you leave in the world,
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like the great Greek warrior Achilles,
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who sacrificed his life fighting at Troy
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so that he might win immortal fame.
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And the pursuit of fame is as widespread
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and popular now as it ever was,
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and in our digital age,
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it's even easier to achieve.
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You don't need to be a great warrior like Achilles
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or a great king or hero.
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All you need is an internet connection
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and a funny cat. (Laughter)
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But some people prefer to leave a more tangible,
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biological legacy: children, for example.
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Or they like, they hope, to live on
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as part of some greater whole,
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a nation or a family or a tribe,
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their gene pool.
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But again, there are skeptics
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who doubt whether legacy
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really is immortality.
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Woody Allen, for example, who said,
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"I don't want to live on in
the hearts of my countrymen.
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I want to live on in my apartment."
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So those are the four
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basic kinds of immortality stories,
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and I've tried to give just some sense
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of how they're retold by each generation
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with just slight variations
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to fit the fashions of the day.
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And the fact that they recur in this way,
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in such a similar form but
in such different belief systems,
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suggests, I think,
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that we should be skeptical of the truth
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of any particular version of these stories.
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The fact that some people believe
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an omnipotent god will resurrect them to live again
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and others believe an omnipotent scientist will do it
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suggests that neither are really believing this
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on the strength of the evidence.
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Rather, we believe these stories
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because we are biased to believe them,
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and we are biased to believe them
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because we are so afraid of death.
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So the question is,
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are we doomed to lead the one lives we have
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in a way that is shaped by fear and denial,
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or can we overcome this bias?
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Well the Greek philosopher Epicurus
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thought we could.
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He argued that the fear of death is natural,
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but it is not rational.
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"Death," he said, "is nothing to us,
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because when we are here, death is not,
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and when death is here, we are gone."
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Now this is often quoted, but it's difficult
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to really grasp, to really internalize,
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because exactly this idea of being gone
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is so difficult to imagine.
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So 2,000 years later, another philosopher,
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Ludwig Wittgenstein, put it like this:
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"Death is not an event in life:
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we do not live to experience death."
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And so he added,
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in this sense, life has no end.
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So it was natural for me as a child
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to fear being swallowed by the void,
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but it wasn't rational,
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because being swallowed by the void
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is not something that any of us
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will ever live to experience.
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Now, overcoming this bias is not easy because
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the fear of death is so deeply embedded in us,
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yet when we see that the fear itself is not rational,
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and when we bring out into the open
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the ways in which it can unconsciously bias us,
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then we can at least start
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to try to minimize the influence it has
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on our lives.
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Now, I find it helps to see life
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as being like a book:
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just as a book is bounded by its covers,
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by beginning and end,
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so our lives are bounded by birth and death,
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and even though a book is
limited by beginning and end,
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it can encompass distant landscapes,
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exotic figures, fantastic adventures.
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And even though a book is
limited by beginning and end,
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the characters within it
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know no horizons.
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They only know the moments
that make up their story,
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even when the book is closed.
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And so the characters of a book
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are not afraid of reaching the last page.
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Long John Silver is not afraid of you
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finishing your copy of "Treasure Island."
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And so it should be with us.
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Imagine the book of your life,
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its covers, its beginning and end,
of your birth and your death.
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You can only know the moments in between,
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the moments that make up your life.
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It makes no sense for you to fear
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what is outside of those covers,
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whether before your birth
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or after your death.
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And you needn't worry how long the book is,
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or whether it's a comic strip or an epic.
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The only thing that matters
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is that you make it a good story.
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Thank you.
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(Applause)