In this week’s newsletter

✅ Introduction to Episode 10 with Prof. John Martin Fischer. ✅ How should we think about near-death experiences? ✅ Medical immortality.  ✅ Detailed show notes. ✅ ”There's nothing in human nature itself that rules out the choice worthiness of living forever.”

”NDEs are real in the same way that dreams and hallucinations are real”

I don't believe in an afterlife, and whenever I hear about near-death experiences (NDE), fascinating as they can appear, I think there must be a naturalistic explanation. For example, it's well established that we can have transcendental experiences, a suddenly unlocked part of the mind under certain circumstances. There's also much we simply don't know about consciousness.

It might not be immediately obvious why LEVITY invited Professor John Martin Fischer from the University of California, Riverside, to discuss NDEs, especially given our podcast’s focus on solving aging and exploring indefinite lifespan.

But this conversation touches on a crucial question: is there any inherent value in death? This is a subject that John Martin Fischer has extensively studied.

At one point in the episode, my co-host, philosopher Patrick Linden, connects these themes. He says to Fischer:

”You work on near-death experiences, and you work on the value of death. To relate them, I looked at it and I thought, well, the near-death experiences work is looking at whether death is the end. And a lot of people will say that death is not bad, that's the value, because death is not the end, but it's a new beginning. Or death is not quite real, but it's a transition, rather. So, death is nothing for us to regard as bad, and therefore nothing for us to fear. And of course, that's the kind of message that a lot of people take from these experiences […] they learn that we should not be afraid of death, because death is not bad for us.

And in fact, that's also something that people who take hallucinogenic drugs often come away with, they report, saying, ”now I'm not afraid of death the way I was afraid of death before”, by taking these drugs. An interesting parallel there, again.

But there is another argument for why we shouldn't regard death as something bad, and something to be feared. And that is that death actually is the end.

So, how does that argument go? Well, they say, death is the end, and therefore when you're dead, you can no longer suffer, you're not there, nothing bad is happening to you, because you don't exist. So death is neither good nor bad, it's nothing to us. And that's of course an old argument.

So, that's something I think you disagree with, right? Because you believe, like we do, I think, that death is bad for the individual, just looking at it from an individual's point of view.”

What was John Martin Fischer’s response? Well, for that, you’ll have to listen to the episode. I also recommend revisiting our very first episode, where Patrick was our guest. I’ll embed both below.

As for my stance? If you’ve followed me for a while, you probably know it by now: I don’t see any inherent meaning in death and I certainly think it’s very, very bad. I get that we’ve created constructs to cope with it, but they fall apart under scrutiny.

We’ve spent our lives being conditioned to view life and death in a particular way, leading to what Aubrey de Grey calls the “pro-aging trance,” where aging and death are seen as beneficial. It’s astonishing how something as damaging as aging can be viewed as positive.

That’s why Patrick and I believe it’s so important to continue questioning these narratives. To solve aging, the geroscience field needs more talent and resources - and that’s easier to achieve when more people start to realize that overcoming aging is humanity's greatest challenge.

A detailed overview of the episode

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