95. John Martin Fischer — Death, Immortality and Meaning in Life

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 17 December 2019

⏱️ 95 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

John Martin Fischer’s Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Lifeoffers a brief yet in-depth introduction to the key philosophical issues and problems concerning death and immortality. In this wide-ranging and thoughtful conversation, Shermer and Fisher discuss:

meaning in life
meaning in death
the badness of death
different philosophical, religious, and scientific ideas on immortality
near-death experiences
extending life through medical technology
medical immortality vs. real immortality
the problem of identity for immortality (who or what becomes immortal?)
living for 100 years vs. 1000 years vs. forever
responding to the theistic argument that without God anything goes, there is no objective morality, and no meaning to life
If you don’t believe in God or the afterlife, what do you say to someone who is dying or has lost a loved one?
Is immortality, like existence, one thought too many?

John Martin Fischer is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, and a University Professor at the University of California. He is coauthor of Near-Death Experiences: Understanding Visions of the Afterlife (OUP, 2016), and coeditor of Introduction to Philosophy: Classical and Contemporary Readings(Eighth Edition, OUP, 2018). He was Project Leader of The Immortality Project (John Templeton Foundation).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This week's author guest is John Martin Fisher. His new book is Death, Immortality and Meaning in Life, Oxford University Press.
0:10.0	He's a professional philosopher, Distinguished Professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, and a university professor at the University of California. work which I also read when I was researching heavens on Earth is near death experiences
0:24.3	understanding visions of the afterlife. Also really a super interesting book. His work as a professional philosopher brings a
0:34.2	different perspective to these questions than I bring and others and so this
0:39.6	conversation was unbelievably interesting, probably one of the most interesting I've had yet in as much as we
0:44.7	cover pretty much all the big topics, the meaning of life, the source of morality with theism or without theism and the free will to what extent you can
0:59.2	hold people morally accountable for their actions if you live in a secular worldview versus a
1:04.1	theistic worldview and then what it means to be immortal I mean not just living
1:10.4	say a hundred two hundred five hundred000 years, but 6 million years, 600 million years,
1:16.2	6 billion years.
1:17.2	I mean, eternity is, you know, a really long time.
1:20.8	Anyway, so we get into all that, he deals with all the philosophical perspectives on that.
1:25.2	So we go back and forth on those and other topics, the fact that for example you can't imagine
1:31.9	being dead because to imagine something you have to be
1:33.9	alive so what is it we're thinking about when we're thinking about heaven the
1:37.4	afterlife and mortality and so on all the restrictions that come from our
1:40.7	cognition anyway super interesting talk I hope you enjoy it.
1:45.2	If you enjoy the podcast in general and you want to support us, as usual I have to say this because
1:51.6	this is how we support our work.
1:53.7	You can support it through the Skeptic Society.
1:56.0	We're a 501c3 nonprofit at skeptic.com
1:59.4	slash donate or you can go to our patron page under Skeptic and make a monthly donation so many different ways to do it and as always we appreciate your support.
	...

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