Holiday Message: Reflections on Immortality
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll
4.7 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2023
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The final Mindscape podcast of each year is devoted to a short, reflective Holiday Message. This year the theme is Immortality: whether it's an attractive idea, and whether the laws of physics and cosmology would allow for it in principle. (Spoiler: they do not.) Mindscape will return as usual on January 1, 2024. Happy holidays everyone!
Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/12/18/holiday-message-2023-reflections-on-immortality/
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Here are some of the stories and papers mentioned in the episode:
- Borges, "The Immortal"
- Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
- The Good Place
- Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
- Dyson, "Time Without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe"
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello everyone welcome to the 2023 holiday message from the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. |
| 0:07.0 | Every year we do this holiday message because basically I take roughly two weeks off for holiday time. So next week really will take off. There will be no |
| 0:17.0 | Mindscape podcast released on Christmas Day itself. But the previous week we do the holiday message, which is supposed to be a short, shorter |
| 0:27.4 | than usual anyway. |
| 0:29.2 | Little solo podcast, not quite a full-blown podcast, not something it deserves to be a solo episode all by itself, |
| 0:35.0 | but a little brief reflection on something interesting |
| 0:38.0 | that is either on my mind at the moment |
| 0:40.0 | or happened during the year, or many things happened during the year or many things happened during the year or whatever it happens to be. |
| 0:46.9 | So this year I thought that there was something interesting that I participated in this year. |
| 0:51.9 | Back in September I was a speaker at a workshop at the |
| 0:55.8 | Santa Fe Institute devoted to the topic of immortality. Yes you heard that |
| 1:01.6 | correctly. Immortality living forever. This was the topic and I love this fact about the Santa Fe Institute that they're willing to be that adventurous I guess maybe is the word to try something different |
| 1:16.7 | extraordinarily interdisciplinary so this is an idea that was actually hatched |
| 1:21.1 | by David Krakhauer previous Mind Mindscape guest, and Caitlin McShay, who is also at SFI. |
| 1:27.0 | And they brought together a bunch of people, scientists, but also literary artist type people, people from a variety of different humanities |
| 1:38.2 | as well as social sciences and physical sciences backgrounds and just said yeah immortality let's talk about it what |
| 1:45.8 | what does it mean what are the prospects would it be good or bad etceter |
| 1:51.6 | very specifically it was not about mortality. Mortality dying is something |
| 1:57.0 | that we don't want to face up to, but okay, we do talk about the prospect of it, and it's |
| 2:01.9 | very important to, and as I've said several times I don't think we do a very good job in our culture right now |
| 2:07.8 | But immortality we don't talk about that much |
| 2:11.2 | Probably because it's not very realistic to be frank, but would it be a good |
... |
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