The Examined Life

Stephen Cave - How Long Should We Live?

• Kenneth Primrose • Season 4 • Episode 5

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 55:45

Stephen Cave is a philosopher, writer, and Director of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. His work sits at the intersection of philosophy, religion, ethics, and technology, exploring humanity’s oldest questions about death, meaning, immortality, and what it means to live well in a rapidly changing world.

Before entering academia, Stephen worked as a diplomat for the British Foreign Office. He is an internationally recognised public philosopher whose research and writing examine how human beings confront mortality, and how emerging technologies, especially artificial intelligence, are reshaping those responses.

In this conversation, we explore why the awareness of death may be the defining feature of being human, and how our attempts to escape mortality continue to shape culture, religion, science, and modern technological ambition.

In This Episode We Explore:

  • The evolutionary roots of the survival instinct paired with a uniquely human awareness of death
  • Terror Management Theory and why immortality beliefs appear across cultures
  • Religion, legacy, fame, and technology as competing “immortality stories”
  • The wisdom tradition: gratitude for the sheer unlikeliness of being alive
  • Serving others as an antidote to self-focused mortality anxiety
  • Presence, mindfulness, and practices that reduce future-oriented fear
  • Near-death experiences — and how naturalistic explanations can still preserve meaning
  • Why living “forever” might collapse identity, values, and purpose
  • Life-expectancy myths, real medical progress, and the limits of longevity optimism
  • AI and biological technologies accelerating anti-ageing research
  • Modern abundance alongside a growing crisis of meaning
  • Population pressure, carrying capacity, and what it would take for longer lives to go well

Stephen Cave’s Books

Podcast Links:

www.examined-life.com

https://thisexaminedlife.substack.com/


Support the show

The Unlikely Gift Of Being Alive

SPEAKER_00

If you just spend a moment reflecting on the incredible unlikeliness of your being, think back at all of the ancestors going back through time and all of those couples that had to come together, and then that particular sperm and then that particular egg and the childhood diseases, each one of them had to survive. Every one of us is the product of so many millions of cosmic strokes of luck. And here we are, we have this wonderful opportunity to live and give each moment its due and appreciate it as if we were having an incredible stroke of luck.

Kenny Primrose

Across the world, archaeologists open ancient tombs and burial sites, Egyptian pyramids, Viking ships, forgotten cemeteries beneath modern cities, and across cultures separated by thousands of years, one thing keeps appearing. Human beings refuse to disappear quietly. We emban bodies, build monuments, carve names into stone, and tell stories that something of us might live on. The mummies of ancient Egypt may be the most striking example of this, but the impulse is a universal one. A deep human longing for immortality, a hope, or perhaps an intuition, that death is not simply the end. In many ways, civilization itself can be read as an attempt to outlast mortality, through religion, art, family, achievement, and now increasingly through science and technology. So what do we really mean when we talk about immortality? Why do human beings long for it? And does this desire help us to live well? Or does it distract us from the life we actually have? This is The Examined Life with me, Kenny Primrose. And today I am delighted to be sharing my conversation with the philosopher Stephen Cave. Stephen is director of the Institute for Technology and Humanity at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of the Leverhume Centre for the Future of Intelligence. He is the author of Immortality, a widely acclaimed exploration of humanity's attempt to overcome death, and his work focuses on ethics, technology, and what it means for human beings to flourish in an age of rapid change. I hope you enjoy listening to the conversation. Do please, as ever, share it with somebody else who you think might enjoy it. Review it wherever you're listening to podcasts. That really helps other people find it. Without further ado, let me share my conversation with Stephen Cave. Thank you so much for joining me today on The Examed Life. It's a pleasure to be speaking to you.

SPEAKER_00

Thank you, Kenneth. Pleasure to be on the show.

Kenny Primrose

So, as we've just discussed, the show revolves around a big question that you think we should be asking ourselves. And as a philosopher, and someone whose life is spent thinking about humanity and technology and so on. What is the question that's currently kind of preoccupying yourself?

Why Humans Chase Immortality

SPEAKER_00

The question that I want to put out there is, how long should we live? Now I've written a lot about our desire for immortality. There are plenty of people who would answer that question with, well, forever. Death is terrifying, death destroys all meaning. We as living beings should want to continue to live forever, and lots of belief systems revolve around that. But at the moment, there's a powerful and extremely well-resourced movement of people who are trying to combat aging and disease, which is itself an age-old quest. As far back as we have records, we can find people trying to do this in ancient Egypt. Mummification was very much Plan B. So we've always had this pursuit of an elixir of life, but now there's a huge amount of money, talent, resources, technology going into combating aging and disease. Perhaps there will be a real breakthrough where we can control our lifespans much more. And then I think we will, in a very real sense, face the question: how long should we live? Is the answer forever? Is it, you know, as it says in the Bible, 70 or 80 years? Is it somewhere in between? And I think this touches on many, many aspects of our lives or what gives purpose and meaning to our lives, uh, our relationship to future generations, our relationship to the planet, and so on.

Kenny Primrose

It's uh it's a fascinating question, as you say, a really pertinent one with people like Brian Johnson, whose aim seems to be to not die. You mentioned your previous work on immortality. This is this is a basic human desire that you see going back you know thousands of years. As far as the the epic of Gilgamesh, you know, the first human narrative. So I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about how you see the desire to keep on living as something that's manifested through our whole human civilizations.

SPEAKER_00

When we talk about the desire for immortality, it can sound very vague or or metaphysical, you know, detached from everyday reality. But actually, nothing could be more natural. It makes perfect sense from an evolutionary point of view. Organisms that care about survival, that are programmed to keep going and and of course reproduce, are the ones who pass on their genes. You know, the the mouse who wanders about in daylight, uncaring about whether it gets eaten by the cat or or what have you, doesn't pass on its genes. So we are, in a sense, survival machines. And that means, yes, repro reproducing, but in order to reproduce and raise offspring, you just need to survive. So we have a basic survival instinct. Now, all living things have that to an extent. But because of these massive brains, which is really our you know distinctive survival tool as humans, we we have an extra dimension to that. So what I mean by that is most creatures, you know, beetles and so on, that are you know trying to survive, do not have a sophisticated conception of themselves or of the future. They don't generalize into natural laws, but we do do all of those things. We do have a conception of the self and the future, and we look at the world around us and we distill some kind of natural laws. And what is the natural law that we see? It is it is the inevitability of death. We see our loved ones die, we see other creatures die, and so on. So not only do we have this will to survive, but we have this awareness of the inevitability of death. And that can very easily induce a paralyzing sense of panic. And there's a you know a wonderful, you know, increasingly large set of psychological studies that have explored the effect of the fear of death. It's called terror management theory. So, what do we do in response to this fear of death where we tell ourselves stories about how death can be avoided or how it isn't what it seems, how one way or another we can survive.

Kenny Primrose

And you see these stories as the kind of a propelling force for lots of civilization, lots of good things within civilization, is that right? As well as some of the more unfortunate turns we've taken.

SPEAKER_00

Yes, absolutely. I mean, our basic will to survive, of course, produces so much of what we see around us. I mean, the the material framework of civilization, if you think of agriculture that gives us food and housing and that gives us shelter and clothes and tools and weapons and so on, they really are all survival tools. They're all about helping us to live longer. So, you know, much of the material basis, I mean, even now, of course, that this desire to live on is what propels a lot of material progress. But built on top of that, we have a sort of philosophical, cultural, religious superstructure that tells us that even if the material basis doesn't do its job and keep us alive forever, nonetheless we can survive in some other form. So, you know, most religions are very explicit about this. Christianity and Islam, very explicit about promising resurrection and life in heaven and so on, Buddhism in a perhaps a slightly subtler way, Hinduism promise a kind of rebirth, but there's also a cultural sphere in which we can live on through fame and and so on. So if we look at really the majority of aspects of civilization, one way or another, relate to our desire to overcome death.

Kenny Primrose

So you see this in purely materialist terms that these are these are stories, they're they're they're fictions that we tell ourselves to cope with a basic fear of death. It makes our consciousness kind of structurally tragic if we've evolved with this longing for immortality or eternity, and we are doomed to face our our death. But my understanding is there are ways of coping with that, in your opinion, that are kind of healthy, help us adjust to our mortality. Is that right?

Terror Management And Civilization’s Stories

SPEAKER_00

Yes. I mean, I use the word stories rather than fictions as I I think we can identify these kinds of stories that we tell ourselves and have always told ourselves, and some important themes among them, and we can do that work before judging whether they're true or false, which I think fiction has a strong implication that they're false. Stories doesn't necessarily, we could we might be telling true stories, but as it happens, I am quite skeptical of whether any of these stories promising immortality are true. But I think it's important that we can do this sort of work of cultural analysis and of identifying these belief sets separately from judging whether they're true or false. But I I like the I think you just used the phrase sort of structural tragedy or a kind of yes, I think there is. We are blessed with these massive brains that you know that they are what has allowed us to build these complex civilizations and societies and you know spread over much of the planet. But at the same time, they do bring about this tragedy. They do bring about this sense that a personal apocalypse, like the worst thing that could possibly happen, inevitably will happen to each of us. So we do all live with a sense of tragedy that we will lose our loved ones, we will lose so much of what matters to us, and that is difficult to cope with, okay. So that's why we tell ourselves these immortality stories. But you asked, are there other ways of coping aside from these immortality stories? And the answer is yes, there is a tradition that's just as ancient as these immortality stories that we can see throughout human history. It's sometimes called wisdom stories or a wisdom tradition. That's how it's often referred to in the Babylonian-Sumerian literature, or you can see them in the so-called wisdom books of the Bible in in the Old Testament. So a kind of wisdom tradition that is about confronting mortality in a perhaps clear-eyed way, you know, with with without telling ourselves these stories. This wisdom tradition emphasizes gratitude. So instead of thinking about all that we would lose when we die, we should instead contemplate how incredibly lucky we are to be alive. And if you just spend a moment reflecting on the incredible unlikeliness of your being, like we think back at all of the ancestors going back through time and all of those couples that had to come together, and then that particular sperm, and then that particular egg, and the childhood diseases, each one of them had to survive in order to grow to reproduct, and so on and so on, and so on. Every one of us is the product of so many millions of cosmic strokes of luck. And here we are, you know, we have this wonderful opportunity to live and appreciate the world. You know, there is a tradition, the Stoics of ancient Rome expressed it very well, that you know, we should give each moment its due and appreciate it as if we were having an incredible stroke of luck. Because that really is, and now I think we understand even better than they did, you know, 2,000 years ago in ancient Rome, just how true that is.

Kenny Primrose

It makes me wonder because part of what I get from your book, in fact, towards the end of your book, you think actually moving away from these stories and facing our own mortality is a is a really helpful thing. And we can do lots of good if we're less occupied by thinking of the afterlife. I'd I'd love to ask a little bit more about that before we move into this big question of how long should we want to live for. If we have this basic desire, if we are kind of structurally tragic in our consciousness, then those stories are serving a real purpose for us. And if we try and suppress them, do they come out in perverted forms? So when you said that we can do a lot more good in this world on earth when we're we're less occupied by the hereafter, some would say, I'm thinking of philosopher John Gray who says communism and the the idea of progress is just a perversion of looking for kind of you know the Christian belief in heaven, and instead we try and create it here and now, and perhaps part of the quest for longevity or an elixir of life is just that story made into the here and now.

SPEAKER_00

So I think we can see good and bad in cultures that do tell the immortality stories of many different kinds, and indeed those like say, you know, Roman stoicism that try to confront mortality without such an immortality story. So, for example, I mean, the if you tell people that they can live forever if they do what you say, which is what a a lot of religions do, then you have an enormous amount of power over them. And of course, that can be used for good or ill. You can tell people that they have to go and be suicide bombers and blow up, you know, regular civilians and they'll be rewarded in heaven. Or you can tell people that, you know, they ought to give to charity and you know, be responsible householders and and and so on. So we see these all of these narratives, I think, leveraged to different ends. This urge to confront death can be, but I think at the same time we can lead equally generative lives without that. So, you know, I talked a bit about gratitude as one way of dealing with the reality of death. Another way is to focus more on others instead of oneself. Because what I mean, yes, of course, we might be afraid of the death of loved ones, but a lot of the terror of mortality is the terror of one's own mortality, of the of trying to just get your head around what it means to die and what comes after, if anything, and what we'll be leaving behind, and all of that. But of course, all of that is very much about the self. And so if you have a very individualistic culture that's very much focused on the self, then it does feel like an apocalypse. It does feel like the end of everything that matters. But if instead you're much more focused on other people and other causes and things that extend beyond you, both in time and space, then your own death seems much less important and much less terrifying. And that impulse to be focused on other living beings and other causes can, of course, also be very generative and constructive.

Kenny Primrose

Excellent. So gratitude, cultivating gratitude and then serving others to become less focused on the self, less kind of ego-driven. And I think you've implicitly mentioned this that sometimes these stories make us instrumentalize the present for some future gain. And am I right in thinking your third tip here, your third virtue, is that of becoming more present to the time we do have rather than focusing on the past of the future?

Wisdom Traditions: Gratitude And Service

SPEAKER_00

Yes, exactly. You know, talking about the structural tragedy of being human, I mean, and the kind of curses that are built into the blessings of our massive brains. One is our tendency to live in the future in the past rather than the present. We're constantly dwelling on the past, of course, and what we should have done or could have done or what was done to us, and on the future. We're always making plans, and that is a huge part of our success, but we're also always worrying. And, you know, we we talk a lot today of the anxious generation. But anxiety has always plagued humans because it's part of what helps us to survive, worrying about the future and therefore planning for contingencies. But death is always in the future for us. Now, that might sound odd at first, but I mean, this is an insight that the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who very much influenced the Stoics I've already mentioned, had, that when he said, when we are here, death is not. And when death is here, we are not. And his point is, as living beings, we cannot know death, we cannot experience death. As living experiencing beings, what death means is the end of this living experiencing being. So exactly because there is no immortality, there is nothing to be afraid of. The Austrian philosopher, 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, tried to express this in a slightly different way as death as a horizon beyond which we cannot see. We do not live to experience death. And so when we're anxious about death, we're always anxious about some future event. It's never with us in the present. And so if instead of always being anxious about the future, we learn to focus more on the present and to go back to Grassry, be appreciative of the present, then that will help us cope with this anxiety. And I I wrote this out 15 years ago before mindfulness became quite as fashionable as it is now. But now there is, you know, luckily I think there mindfulness as a practice has become much more widely accepted as a way not to ignore the future. We do need to plan. Of course we do. We do need to think about the future. There are tools like mindfulness that help us control the anxiety that can come from this obsession with the future.

Kenny Primrose

It's helpful what you say about it being a practice, because these are not just beliefs that we kind of give mental assent to. People do gratitude journaling or exercises to help them to become more present. Or of course, serving other people is a very practical thing.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, just to pick up on that, I think you know, these kinds of beliefs, whether they're belief in an afterlife, uh, you know, the resurrection on a day of judgment, or equally that, you know, death isn't something to be afraid of, they're all extremely difficult to really internalize. So none of these are the kind of arguments where you hear it once and you think, oh yeah, okay, that's fine. I'll just, you know, live my life like that. They all come with practices that continually, daily remind us of whatever it might be, whether it's your immortality story or whether it's a particular way of confronting death. Because what we're doing is always confronting these cognitive biases. So there's always the possibility of drift into anxiety. So, you know, so here in Cambridge, I'm a member of King's College. King's College has this famous, very beautiful chapel, and every day there is even song where this world-famous choir sings and there are some readings and so on. And it's a very ancient practice where the idea is the community comes together. Today it's more often tourists, but you know, the community of the college comes together and contemplates what really matters. And if you know, if you read the texts of what is sung and what is spoken, it's all about confronting death and focusing instead on you know doing the right thing by God, you know, appreciating the time one has and so on. These are ancient daily practices. And of course, if you don't believe in that particular immortality story, then we need different rituals, as you say, gratitude journaling, mindfulness practice, engagement with other causes that take us beyond the self and so on, in order to, as a daily practice, help us cope with the functional tragedy of being human.

Kenny Primrose

Are these your practices? Is it is this how you kind of plan your days and weeks?

SPEAKER_00

Yes, so I do practice mindfulness every day. I do try to practice gratitude, which is s also sometimes part of the mindfulness, because you know you might do mindfulness with a with a mantra. And uh in terms of I suppose my my my life choices about what I do, I try to engage in pursuits that are about bigger questions that I think might be about, it might in some way help others. Okay, people might laugh at me. I am a philosopher, I'm not a you know, nurse or ambulance driver or or something. The ways in which I might help people might be a little indirect. But you know, it feels to me like I'm engaging with bigger questions and broader communities and something beyond my own meager existence.

Kenny Primrose

Have you ever seen the film Brainstorm with Christopher Walken? Oh no, I don't think so. Okay, so it's uh it's a terrible CGI film, but quite an interesting idea. So he's some kind of neuroscientist, and they create some machine which can read the read the thought the the inner kind of thoughts of someone's mind, and then you can watch what somebody else has been thinking afterwards. He's a skeptical, cynical scientist who's hardcore materialist, doesn't believe in any life after death. And someone near the beginning of this film is using the machine and they have a heart attack and they die, and it's tragic. But then Christopher Walking, being this curious scientist, decides I can vicariously experience death. So I can watch what they saw when they died. And what he saw was this kind of celestial city in the distance, and then the tape ends, you know, spinning. At school and it totally transforms how he lives. So he becomes a much kinder person, a much more generous person, a much nicer person. And it makes me think a little bit about the stories I know from near-death experiences where people have had some kind of fantastical experience and it's totally transformed the way they lived afterwards. And so I know you say that belief in an afterlife can make us very self-centered, but some of the anecdotal evidence would suggest the opposite. And this idea that people are too heavenly minded to do any earthly good perhaps sometimes it's the opposite. Being heavenly minded can empower us to do good on earth.

SPEAKER_00

I wonder how that I mean the deeply unscientific, from the top of my head, question, but it would certainly be far too simplistic to say that you know, people who are interested in whether they go to heaven or hell are just acting selfishly and therefore this focus on the afterlife is a distraction from being good here and now. And I think that would be very unfair, because lots of immortality systems are mobilized for social and communal good. I mean, really, most ethical systems of the last few thousand years have been sustained by a broader metaphysic that links them to afterlife beliefs and who'll be punished and who hasn't. And they only survive by being, you know, these ethical systems only survive by being functional. You know, if they're totally self-destructive, they've got they disappear. These things happen, you know, these cults that are very self-destructive, and they and they come and then they go again. You know, functioning ethical systems do encourage people to focus on their duties to family and community and and so on. But specifically with regard to near-death experiences, I mean I agree they're really interesting. There tend to be, as I'm sure you know, common themes to them around experiencing a tunnel, experiencing light, but often positive, warm feelings. Now, you know, biomedical researchers have explanations for these feelings, and in fact, near-death experiences, including out-of-body experiences, can be replicated without stopping someone's heart through direct neuronal intervention. So the kind of biochemistry of them is understood, if you like, in a way that is a bit deflationary. Now, but you know, to come back to what they mean to people, I think you can still ask questions about what they mean to people. Some people interpret them within the context of the particular religion they have. So some you know, devout Christians might feel like they're being welcomed into the arms of Jesus or seeing a celestial city or so on. People in other religions tend to interpret them differently or believe they see something different. But even people with no religious framework nonetheless find them to be meaningful and positive experiences in ways that I think are wholly compatible with the sort of reality of the biochemistry. And for example, people often come away thinking, well, death actually isn't so bad. You know, I died once and it felt kind of nice. It felt fine, you know, the sense of warmth and going to the light and of belonging and rest and all of these positive feelings. And so it can take away a lot of the anxiety. And at the same time, any near-death experience reminds people of their mortality and makes them reflect on what matters. And there are other studies that show that when people are systematically asked to contemplate their mortality, so not casually reminded of death, which might sound odd, but there's a different set of experiments that show that if people are fleetingly reminded of death, they activate their defense mechanisms, like their immortality beliefs. But if people are systematically encouraged to reflect on their mortality, then they activate their values, that, you know, things like love for other people, and of course, an appreciation for the time that they have. So I think these can be meaningful and positive experiences, even when interpreted in a naturalistic framework.

Kenny Primrose

You are listening to The Examined Life with me, Kenny Primer. Today, in conversation with Professor Stephen Cave. Today we're talking about death and immortality. It's a theme that's been the focus of the last three or four conversations I've had. So if you're enjoying this, you're finding value in it, then do please check out those conversations too. And if you're enjoying the podcast series as a whole, then I would love you to subscribe and to leave a review. It will help other people to find it or send it to someone you think might like it. We'll return now to my conversation with Stephen J. Cave. So there's this point that you know Marcus Aurelius, the the Stoics make about the fact that we're not going to be there when we're dead. So there's there's really nothing to fear. But actually, the immortality thing, the idea of living on in perpetuity, is not something to be desired in your mind, is it? I think you who is it you quote. Those in whom belief in immortality is strongest are those who think about it least. That's a poor paraphrase. But it's something to that effect. So do you want to unpack a bit about why you don't think living on immortally is actually a desirable end?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Here's another of my favorite quotes from the novelist Susan Ertz. Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon. It says a lot. It does say a lot. And you know, Woody Allen, uh, who thought a lot about these ex-central questions, and you can find them in his films and and writings, it um uh has a similar version. He tells a story, I think, in Annie Hall, about two elderly ladies who are at a resort somewhere, and um they're talking about the food, and one of them says, the food here is terrible, and the other one says, I know, and the portions are so small. And it and he draws out that you know life's a bit like that. So the question is, why would we want more of this? I think the urge to immortality is often not motivated by a genuine conception of what happy forever would look like. It's rather motivated by the fear of death. And so it's quite possible that we long for immortality but don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon. That, you know, we want a bigger portion, even though we think the food is terrible. Because what's motivating us is this is the fear of this absence of this negativity rather than joy in what lies before us. And when people try to imagine a happy immortality, they usually don't get very far. They usually stumble quickly. It doesn't seem like we're the kind of things that can live a happy ever after. So to give you an example, I mean, Jesus in the in the New Testament is uh, you know, but the but people thought have always thought about this question and and uh they had obviously a very rich philosophical tradition when Jesus lived 2,000 years ago in the Roman Empire. In the New Testament, Jesus is asked a kind of paradox about, oh, you know, uh a man dies and so his ex-wife marries his brother and then he dies, and his ex-wife then marries his other brother. Whose wife will she be in heaven? And this is a simple paradox that shows really how complicated our thoughts of eternity are of a happy ever-after. You know, my idea of a happy ever-after might be, you know, playing the Scrabble with my grandads, long-deceased granddads, you know. Maybe I've got happy memories of playing scrabble. But maybe his idea of a happy ever after is playing poker with his friends, you know. So, you know, it's actually much harder to imagine what life would be like forever in a satisfactory way. Jesus, by the way, evaded the question and said, ah, we'll be like angels. It won't be anything like this. And that is the question that sorry.

Kenny Primrose

Well, I know, I mean, I I I guess the point I get from Jesus there is that there's a transformation, right? So eternal life is not life as we know it, going on and on and on and on. It is something, something different that is hard hard to imagine necessarily because we don't experience it.

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, that's exactly right. And that that is what the theologians say. I mean, rabble-rousing preachers might say, you know, it'll be a land of cake and and playing Scrabble with your granddad or whatever else you want. But but the theologians and in like and and Jesus himself recognize that that that won't work for eternity. And so they do tend to emphasize this transformation, and you know, we'll become one with the Godhead and and and one with the community of saints, and it would just it just will be bliss. It just will be. Like in ways you can't imagine because I think that in itself is revealing because the point is, as we are untransformed, immortality doesn't seem right for us. And if there's a rich philosophical debate, well, I think an even richer tradition of exploration in art and literature of what it would be like to live for very long periods. And usually the conclusion that the philosophers and artists engaging with this question come to is that ultimately it would not just be boring, but all meaning would start to break down. It would be very difficult to have any kind of identity, to have any kind of values if you if you live through enough. And I think we only have to look back at the madness of the last couple hundred years, you know, racism and imperialism and fascism and communism, and anyone who'd live through all of those ups and downs and and and pivots and turns would just see, okay, I give up.

Why Forever Breaks Meaning

Kenny Primrose

This is this is very much getting onto the territory of the question how long should we actually want to live for. But I I wonder if we'd I could go for a brief aside, just because we're talking about kind of theologians in the Bible, and and an argument came to mind that I read a long time ago, but you know, in Ecclesiastes, he has put eternity in the hearts of men. And C.S. Lewis had an argument from Desire. He said, you know, we we have various appetites that we're born for, for hunger, this food, you know, our sexual satisfaction, our thirst or whatever. We we long in this basic and deep way for something this world cannot deliver, eternity, if you like. Therefore, we must have been made for another world. Now I I'm wondering how that uh hits you as a Cambridge philosopher. He was obviously a fairly serious thinker as well, but is it an argument that you would ever put any put any thought towards?

SPEAKER_00

It's an argument that makes sense if you believe in a benevolent God. You know, if you believe in a benevolent creator God, then it would be cruel of such a god to create in us this longing for eternity and not fulfill it. That doesn't sound very benevolent. But of course, if you believe that we were created by, you know, an indifferent God or a wicked god, then there's absolutely no reason to think it might fill us with all sorts of desires that are going to be uh unfulfilled. And uh, you know, there is a whole major world religion, Buddhism, which is very much about confronting desires as intrinsically diverting and misleading and that which must be overcome. Now, I don't believe in any kind of creative God, but I rather believe we've evolved. And it's in that context that I look to explain this urge to eternity, if if you like. And uh and as we discussed earlier, I think it is very much well, what we discussed earlier was the our will to survive, which is of course, you know, fundamental product of evolution, but perhaps also combined with the inconceivability of death. And there's nothing you know elaborately metaphysical about that. It's just that as a conscious, you know, experiencing entity, the one thing you cannot imagine is not being a conscious experiencing entity. I mean, you can imagine, you know, being at your own funeral, but you're still there as the sort of observing eye. Or maybe you can imagine being in a sort of black void of nothingness, but you're still there as the observing eye. So, you know, and this is something psychologists starting from Freud onwards, and I think you know, artists and writers long beforehand have noted this kind of inconceivability. But we you we might just as well think of it as a unfortunate cognitive blip as you know a metaphysical sign of a benevolent God who's you know looking out for us.

Kenny Primrose

Yeah, it's all about presuppositions. So immortality is not actually something to desire in lots of ways, partly because we don't know how to imagine it, because we don't know what to do with ourselves on a Sunday afternoon. It's it's going to become tedious. We'll have repeated everything many times. You mentioned George Lee Borges's story where he comes upon the troglodytes and one of them happens to be Homer, who's you know, obviously written the Odyssey, and he says, Well, you know, in the fullness of time, we're all going to write the Odyssey at least once. And finitude are limits, are what give time its value and its meaning. The fact of death imbues the present with value. Can you say a little bit more about that? And then we can think of well, what what what should be the span of that then?

Longevity Science: Hype And Real Gains

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Well, thanks for mentioning that Borg story, which I think is just one of the most wonderful pieces of writing on immortality. It's called the Immortal in English. You know, it's only 13 or 14 pages, and yet I think it says so much more than you know any any great philosophical tone on this question. Because what he captures isn't just that, you know, immortality would be boring and I'm fed up with having breakfast again and putting my shoes on again. It it is how immortality would ultimately lead to the collapse of meaning and an identity and value. But what he's positing there is infinite time. The life of the individual he's describing is something like about one and a half thousand years, if I remember rightly, not the protagonist Rufus. But the basic argument, I think, if you posit an indefinite amount of time, then I think the arguments are probably true. Of course, we're speculating, which is why this is such a fertile territory for artists and writers, because it's all speculation. No one's come back after a million years to tell us all about it. But if we posit infinite time, then it does seem compelling to me that we wouldn't be able to maintain any kind of identity or any kind of stable value system. And that when we're talking about surviving, what is it that's even surviving? You know, but those kinds of arguments about, you know, boredom and ennui and the breakdown of meaning, do they apply if you live for a thousand years or five hundred years or one hundred years? Do they apply already? Are we already living too long? Or would it what do they only apply after a million? Or you know, would we be able to survive for the entire future of the universe, or have many billions of years before it happened? So this is even if you think it's inevitable given infinity, there are still questions about whether it's inevitable given any finite length of life. And increasingly, because we are living longer, and we might be on the verge of further breakthroughs in human life expectancy. So I think now's the time to be asking ourselves, well, okay, we you know, how long have we got before it all starts collapsing?

Kenny Primrose

So I w what just tell us, Stephen, what are we on the verge of, do you think?

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question. So there are a lot of misunderstandings uh about this, and there are reasons for scepticism and reasons for optimism. So, as you I'm sure know, human life expectancy, in particular in you know so-called developed countries, has more than doubled over the last couple of centuries. From you know, for most of human history, it would be in the sort of upper 30s, 36, 37, 38, whatever.

Kenny Primrose

Can I just uh chip in though to say that's not necessarily because people only lived till that age? It's because of infant mortality, right?

SPEAKER_00

Correct. So this is a big misunderstanding because sometimes people say, well, we've doubled life expectancy once, surely we can do it again. But this misunderstand misrepresents what happened. If we think the the peak age at which people died for most of human history was in the first weeks, months, years of life. So you see a massive spike at the beginning. But then actually, mortality rates were pretty steady until the 60s, and then people were dying of old age, 60s and 70s, and so on. So actually, the average life expectancy might have been, say, 38 in whatever the Roman Empire or 16th century Britain, but very few people were dying at that age. So it's very misleading. It's not like people, you know, got to, but that's people's prime, of course. So what uh you know, science, technology, but public health measures and so on have done in the last couple of hundred years is really flattened that initial spike of infant mortality and also, you know, reduced mortality rates at all ages by things like antibiotics that can stop people dying of infections. And so now we just have one big spike at the end instead of a spike at the beginning and a spike at the end. So, you know, and and there's lots of evidence that actually humans have always had a natural lifespan of 70 or 80 years. It's I mean, it's literally written in the Bible, as we talked about earlier, you know, we can expect to have 70 years, and if by strength of our will, 80 years and so on. And you see this in many other cultures. It was a clear conception of human life, and you know, it lasts into the 80s, and there are life stages around that. Okay, plenty of people were still dying younger, but it certainly wasn't unknown. So it's wrong to argue we've doubled life expectancy once, therefore we can do it again. Because adding years to the life of a baby, nature is on your side if you can combat infection and so on. And of course, that isn't true if you're trying to add life to years to someone in their 70s or 80s. But okay, so here's the rest. So that's the reason for one of the reasons for skepticism. Another reason for skepticism might be we've heard it all before, right? You know, I could say we've been on the verge. Here we are on the verge of a breakthrough in life extension. Well, we've been standing on this verge for about 5,000 years, and it's, you know, giving me arthritis. In ancient China, 2,000 years ago, they talked about being on this verge. In ancient Egypt, 5,000 years ago, they talked about being on this verge. So those are the reasons for skepticism. Right. The reasons for optimism. So the doubling of life expectancy that came from tackling infant mortality in countries like this one where we are in the UK had really played out in its benefits by the 1950s, 60s. But life expectancy has continued to go up by about two years every decade since then. So we've more than doubled life expectancy. We are now getting better at curing or managing the diseases that previously would have knocked people out. So, for example, one of my elderly relatives has just survived his tenth incident of cancer, four different kinds of cancer, ten incidents, and you know, he's still in enjoying life. And people say, oh, it's about quality of life, not just length of life. And quality of life statistics would say he doesn't have any quality of life. He's got 10 kinds of cancer. He does, actually, he's enjoying life, you know, still, luckily, touch wood. And any one of those could have killed him even 50 years ago. So we are now helping people to live even longer. And okay, you might think we we we might reach a plateau, or that might carry on, but there are reasons to think we might be on the verge of a significant uptick. And I would really point to the truly vast amounts of human and financial and technological resources now going into uh understanding aging and the diseases of old age. It's hard to get your head around. I mean, there were only two billion, and a tiny fraction of them went to university. We didn't have the fundamental understanding of biology we do now, we didn't have the tools we do now. Just compared to a hundred years ago, the number of well-trained, biological, well-resourced biological scientists is so exponentially bigger. Like it just doesn't compare. You know, the number of people who go to university as a percentage has gone up enormously around the world. Enormously. And of course, we have had lots of genuine breakthroughs in our understanding of human biology and the underpinning aging. And the evidence for this, it isn't just sequencing the genome and so on, it's the fact that in the lab, scientists now can extend the lifespans of other organisms significantly. So simple organisms like nematode worms tenfold, but even other complex organisms, other mammals, up to 30%. So when I say we need to be at least thinking about the possibility of a breakthrough in life extension of, say, 30 or 50%, well, we need to be thinking about it because we are doing this with fellow mammals right now. And in what time frame is this, Stephen? Like within our lifetimes, what might people live to? This is a very good question. You know, all of this is speculation, of course, but given the rate of technological advance and a lot of, you know, thinking about technological progress, a lot of it is about the ways different technologies come together and enable each other. And so we're not just experiencing a revolution in our understanding of the life sciences, but we of course also experiencing a revolution in other sort of general purpose tools like AI, of course, what everyone's talking about at the moment. But we really have seen, again, this isn't just speculation about what AI might do in the future, um, as it would have been a few decades ago. Now, with, for example, AlphaFold, you know, Google DeepMind's tool for understanding protein folding, we're seeing hugely significant breakthroughs. So using AI, it's possible to synthesize the vast amount. Amounts of data that we're now producing, process the vast amounts of scientific papers that are coming out, and generate from that insights that previously might have taken centuries or even just been impossible for humans' brains unaided by these tools.

Kenny Primrose

So it's it's kind of exponential speed this is accelerating at. I mean, what comes to mind is the the Greek myth of Tithinus, you know, who asks for eternal life without eternal youth. We're talking about health expectancy extending decades. So you have a good quality of kind of physiological life that goes on. And so if we ask you, Stephen, what what kind of thinking goes into your answer to that question? How long would you want to live for?

Meaning Crisis And Planet Limits

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. So I'm not going to give you a number, you know, 320 or 103 or what have you. I think the answer to that question is it depends. And then the real work comes in working out what it depends on. And so, you know, we've talked quite a bit today already about questions of meaning in life and relationship to death and whether immortality would never be boring and so on. You know, but to go back to that quote about millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Well, I mean, actually, for a lot of people, it's a lot worse than not knowing what to do on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Depression affects five percent people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. You know, three-quarters of a million people every year commit suicide. You know, there are studies showing that there's a crisis of meaning and purpose among young people in developed countries. So this is not a phenomenon that you observe only where people are, you know, struggling for the next meal or, you know, just getting by day to day. On the contrary, it seems that this plague of meaninglessness is is, if anything, worse in wealthier countries.

Kenny Primrose

So the the the implication here being why would you want to extend that, right? If if people are not happy for their three-score intent. Though we we spoke earlier about stories and perhaps giving up some of those stories, were they not what gave a lot of meaning to people's lives in the first place? These stories of and there's a danger of kind of nihilism if you think, well, the universe is, you know, as Satra said, it's gratuitous, it's meaningless. What am I even doing here? Is it not that that gives the meaninglessness when we give up the belief in a hereafter?

SPEAKER_00

Yes, I think there is a strong relationship between them now. Okay. I think one way to look at it is, you know, these traditional ways of life, if you like, uh by which I don't just mean, you know, various indigenous peoples who have been living the same way for 10,000 years. I also mean, say, you know, medieval Christianity, people who had lived within traditions that had been relatively stable for many centuries and which were very defined by rituals and daily practices that were connected to this larger belief system. And now I think the the most successful of those kinds of systems were those that answered many questions. So, yes, the question, what happens when I die? Should I be afraid of death? But also questions like, you know, what does a good life look like? What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? Should I love my neighbor? Who counts as my neighbor? How should I react to, you know, and and so on? So these belief systems answered many, many questions and provided a way of life that was, you know, relatively coherent, but perhaps more importantly than that, really lived in daily practice that that gave a kind of felt coherence. And, you know, as is well known, you know, modernity of a scientific revolution and political revolutions and technological revolutions, all of which are interconnected, have destroyed a lot of those old ways of life. And what they've given us is material progress. You know, it's great. I'm glad I have plumbing and antibiotics. You know, I'm in two minds about Netflix, but you know, it kind of like this clearly we all have we live unprecedented quality of life in material terms. But the whole way of thinking that has enabled that has undermined these belief systems that gave us meaning. So this is the great paradox of you know modernity or postmodernity, wherever we end of now, of being now in the 21st century, is that we have this kind of abundance, but aren't enjoying it very much. And indeed, those with greater abundance seem to be enjoying it the least.

Kenny Primrose

It's a, as you say, it's a really interesting paradox. And so where does that take you to then with this question?

SPEAKER_00

So what it means is I think we can't answer the question how long should we live, just by asking, well, how long can we live? Maybe we can defeat aging and disease. And great, we'll all live thousands of years. But I mean, plenty of people are already miserable and we're already destroying the planet. And, you know, so we have to think about okay, not just what is possible technologically, but what good lives look like, good lives for each individual, good lives for communities, good lives as you know, future ancestors, if you like, you know, thinking about future generations, good lives with regard to our relationship to the rest of the planet. And all of those things require very material infrastructures. Much as I enjoy and find insights in the speculations of philosophers and and writers like Borges, we need a kind of empirical turn in this question. We need to ask, okay, what are the infrastructures that underpin meaning in life, a life well lived? If we're going to live to 150, what's going to make that not just accessible to all, but actually genuinely beneficial and enjoyable for all?

Kenny Primrose

Your partner in debate, John Fisher, thinks that it is a desirable thing. It is a good thing. And he talks about, say, the absorption of flow states that you know you're not time conscious, and why could we not be occupied by being in a flu state more often and just enjoy that perpetually? That gives, as we understand, flow states, a rich, meaningful existence. Does that factor into your thinking?

SPEAKER_00

So what philosophers traditionally, like John, who's you know an excellent philosopher, and I really enjoyed writing that debate book with him, they argue as if there were no material constraints. So they are effectively arguing for the logical possibility of a happy ever after. So, you know, if I were to say, Oh, living fate would be boring, I'd get bored of you know, whatever, playing golf. And then John would say, Ah, but you don't have to just play golf, you could also play tennis or take up Scrabble or whatever. And so, so, you know, philosophers like John are they're trying to demonstrate the theoretical possibility. And so they would talk, we might talk about how we could endlessly cycle through different careers or different hobbies or different relationships or or not if we don't want to, or you know, how we could achieve you know flow states through you know contemplating the nature of the universe or what have you. But because they're trying to demonstrate at a theoretical level, they are effectively assuming infinite resources. But if we look at life on earth, of course, it isn't like that at all. So, you know, even if John were was right, and of course I argue in that debate book that he isn't, but even if we said that John was right and theoretically a happy immortality is possible, that's a very, very different question. It might give us insight into thinking about how to make it practically possible, but it's still a very different question. Because reality for most people on earth isn't that they have infinite resources to change their jobs, their hobbies, their relationships, enter flow states, studying cosmology or what have you.

Kenny Primrose

So you've got this individual piece of can we logically imagine being able to continue enjoyably into the future, but also I think you you you call it the carrying capacity of the earth. Like the world is not set up resource-wise for us to continue to live. So this this is a piece of the puzzle as well on should we continue to live on, right?

“Don’t Die” Versus Acceptance

SPEAKER_00

Yeah, I mean, so Thomas Malthus and Malthusianism gets a bad rep these days because you know he thought we'd already reached a limited population when the population was tiny by comparison to what it is now. I mean, of course, what we understand now is that the carrying capacity of the planet, that is how many humans can live on it sustainably, is related to our state of technological advancement. So, you know, if Fritz Harbour, as I think it was, hadn't worked out how to fix nitrogen and therefore create fertilizer from air 100 years ago, we definitely would not be able to support the 8 billion people that are currently alive today. But but now we can. And people point to this, you know, optimists point to this kind of progress, and they say, well, you know, progress is continuing exponentially, so we'll be able to support ever more people, and if the planet gets full, we'll go to Mars and all of this is inevitable because technological progress is inevitable. So they might argue. But of course, if the jury's still out on whether we've reached the carrying capacity of the planet or not, it's all very well saying we're supporting 8 billion people. Well, we are, but at what cost? I mean, we're living through a mass extinction that is playing out faster than the destruction of the dinosaurs and you know, climate change and microplastics and and thousands of other things. So, so I think we generally don't know if we've exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet. But it tends to so, and of course, if we live significantly longer and continue to have children at the same rate, then there will be a massive population boom. That's that's the point. And one way to think of it is, you know, even though the number of children uh you know per per per couple has been going down steadily, if people carry on having children at all but are living longer, then there are more generations alive at any one time. So the population will increase, even if you know, people will still we're not talking about living forever, people will still die, but they'll die later. So there are more generations in life. So if we suddenly live to uh we'll live to 120 or so, then we might see the population expand to you know 12 billion or or or more. I think in pointing out this kind of thing, often because I'm involved in debates, which are like, should we live forever or not? And I raise these issues, and people are like, so you're against life, you're a deathist. You think people should die rather than you know put more microplastics in in the ocean. I'm not saying that these are reasons against pursuing research into life extension or or or or combating aging. I'm saying these are things we need to think very seriously about if we want that to go well. You know, and that's this is not about saying we shouldn't do it. Life is precious, and I, you know, I'm enjoying it. I hope I don't want to die when I'm 80, and hope that more of us do get the chance to live longer, but we need to think about how we make that go well.

Kenny Primrose

It's interesting. The you know, you there's so many questions here, isn't there? You think of the fact that this is the preserve right now of the mega rich who are pouring billions into it. And I think of to me strange ambition of Brian Johnson to just to continue living. So his daily regimen, you know, whether it's plasma or whatever he's doing to ensure that he lives on. How do you square the ambition of those people with your affection for what you call the wisdom tradition?

SPEAKER_00

So yeah, uh I mean, I think you know, the but Brian has come to symbolize a movement that is much much much bigger than him, as uh, as he'd be the first to say. And I mean, I you know, I I enjoy Brian, I think, in as much as I think he's got a sense of humor, he's doing some interesting work, he's mobilizing people to think about living healthily and and and so on. So so in in many ways I sort of appreciate the Brian phenomenon. And I do think, as I say, it's culturally interesting for what it represents because the the movement of you know supplements and going to the gym and and trying to live healthily and and living longer is is huge. It's one of the great sort of you know currents of our time. But of course, ultimately I think Brian's motto, don't die, catchy as it is, is misguided. Because to me that sounds like death denial, but we will die. You know, maybe we will hopefully learn to better manage the processes of aging and and disease and continue the kind of progress we've seen uh over the centuries. But we will all die. That is absolutely inevitable. It really is life's only certainty. It's partly because of just the complexity of human biology and the inevitability of decay of entropy, if you like. But also, even if we totally brought bodies under control so we could engineer them for perfect health always, there will still be accidents. You know, civilizations will rise and fall. I mean, just look at your history of the last one or two hundred years. I mean, this movement we're talking about, this longevity movement, there were plenty of people pursuing it in Ukraine. You know, I had Ukrainian colleagues who would be telling about supplement regimes and so on, and they're now fighting for survival. So, you know, history, history will happen to us and and we will not live forever. And so even though there's much about you know the Brian Johnson movement that I enjoy and appreciate, I think ultimately we do need to accept the reality of death, and doing so can help us to live better because it will help us to live with more gratitude and appreciation.

Final Takeaways

Kenny Primrose

This is a a nice place to to kind of draw it in. So let me try and summarize. It is good to think about what makes life meaningful, and these stories that that have helped us to cope with our fear of death, you would gladly see replaced by a kind of stoic acceptance of the inevitability of our own demise, along with an ability to live meaningfully in the present, think less of the self by serving others, and be grateful for what we have. Is that is that kind of your modus operandi for for life, Stephen?

SPEAKER_00

It is that that's exactly right. And you know, some people might hanker for some greater meaning, some you know, God-given meaning, if you like. But I think if you are living like that, you know, engaged with the community, with those around you, appreciating the present and the many blessings that we have, then I I think meaning comes that for the majority of people, that will be a life worth living, however long it is.

Kenny Primrose

Thank you so much, Stephen, for for joining me on the examined life today.

Contributor

Dacher Keltner

Host
Contributor

Alex Curmi

Editor