Exploring Consciousness, Death, and Meaning in Life

The Joe Rogan Experience explores the complexities of consciousness, mortality, and the significance of living in the present.

### Exploring Mortality, Consciousness, and the Nature of Existence
* 🎬 While watching the show "Vikings," I was frustrated by the **unrealistic details**, such as a character's **modern shoes**, which made me question the **authenticity of historical interpretations** in media.
* 🤔 This leads to deeper reflections on how we understand **mortality and consciousness**; the ability to conceive of death is **paradoxical**, as one must be **alive to imagine it**.
* 🐘 Elephants and other mammals exhibit grief, indicating a **level of awareness about death**, but this differs from the human capacity to **ponder an afterlife or what comes after death**.
* 💭 The discussion touches on the limits of language when describing "nothing" or the state before the Big Bang, emphasizing that we **struggle to articulate concepts beyond our understanding**.
* 🌌 I explore ideas presented by thinkers like Deepak Chopra, who suggests that **consciousness is fundamental to existence**, yet this notion can seem **speculative without scientific backing**.
* 🧘 My experiences at Chopra's wellness center in Carlsbad led me to consider the measurable benefits of practices like meditation, which may **reduce stress and improve overall health**.
* 📚 Ultimately, I argue that whether there is an afterlife or not is less important than **how we live our current lives**, echoing the sentiment that "**we live in this life**."
* ⏳ The beauty of life's temporality is highlighted, suggesting that the **finite nature of existence adds value to our experiences**, contrasting with the idea of **eternal life**, which may not be as **desirable as it seems**.

the Joe Rogan experience like I'm watching this show Vikings right and oh man it pissed me off episode 2 this guy puts his feet up on the table and he's got rubber bottom soles of his shoe mic you know

he has a heel that's clearly made in a factory and there's like this textured plastic bottom to his shoe like how did no one catch this you guys have this amazing wardrobe and all these ships and I'll take a picture of it no I'll put it

up on my Instagram later it's so dumb it made me angry but I'm watching this and I'm like how do we know this was how they talked how do we know this is what they did how do we this is some weird interpretation of some historical events

really hard to interpret and of course thoughts don't fossilize oh no I start off early in the book about you know who are the first people to figure out we're gonna die right and become aware of our own mortality in a way that well maybe I can conceive of

being somewhere else I don't actually die so we know you know elephants grieve and mammals grieve and you know dissertations dolphins whales and so on and chimps say you know they feel these mothers are just just depressed and almost suicidal when their infants die

but that's different from you know conceiving of like well I know I'm going to die because I see people around me gonna die but I can conceive of maybe some other place to go so I start off with something of a paradox that if I

ask you to imagine yourself dead you can't do it because to imagine anything you have to be alive so it's not gonna be like falling asleep and waking up the next morning because you have dreams or whatever it's gonna be more like general anesthesia where it's you know 10 9 8

boom boom lights out and you end but you just never wake up so and we and so we talk about things like well there's nothing after death but but even the word nothing implies there's a thing or you know you're going to this place this

nother there's there's nothing well nothing or nowhere it implies that there's aware that you're not going to but there's not even aware that you're not going to and it's like you know with Lawrence Krauss and some of these

cosmologists you know what was there before the Big Bang so when you say well imagine no universe you know no stars or planets or galaxies no light but there's not even any space or time and at some point you just we don't have the words to even say

what it is we're trying to talk about there's there's nothing before the Big Bang you can't even actually talk about it well don't they think now though that it's in part it's entirely possible that the Big Bang is like a cycle yes well I

think it's something like that it expands and contracts infinitely forever yeah that that's a preferable well again we have to come up with some way to talk about it so don't we also have this weird biological idea based on our own limitations that there's a birth and a

death of everything right so I actually have a chapter devoted to Deepak Chopra in the Eastern kind of buddies now yeah I went to his Center down in Carlsbad and spent some time there and I think he's all right he's a good guy yeah no

he's totally a good guy I mean he's been and at times in the past either misleading or misled yes sometimes that's right you know some of his recommendations for dietary things or whatever perhaps but I know for sure because I've gotten to know him pretty

well that he totally believes the stuff he says it sounds like woo-woo as I used to call it but a lot of it if you interpret it from a kind of a Buddhist Western Buddhist position you know when he says you know consciousness is the ground of all being it's the ontological

primitive these things that sound nonsensical but if you think about it it's sort of from a simple perspective the entire universe is in your brain and when you cease to exist the universe ceases to exist are you but you're in your brain mm-hmm you know I call that

the weak consciousness principle it's just sort of true by definition now he goes a little bit further and says you know that consciousness is everything and that we bring into existence material stuff by thinking about our observing and or whatever and here's some quantum physics experiments that

are really spooky it's like okay time out you know quantum physics is weird and spooky consciousness is weird and spooky that doesn't mean they're connected he thinks they are so it's a debatable point okay but still the the experience of going and so we did the

meditation thing and all the massages and teas and the food and all that stuff and it's it's this beachside resort in Carlsbad you can't help but feeling better like yeah this stuff works Where's Carlsbad? It's down by Encinitas

north of San Diego beautiful totally beautiful yeah he's got a deep box not done and he's got a good thing going and not just deep buck you know there's other people like Sam Harris Bob Wright has a new book out called Why Buddhism Is True okay so it works so we're back

to does it work What do you mean by does it work Not just for me I had an experience and I felt better We got to do better than that for science So what Deepak and Bob Wright are talking about is that is that the Western version of

Buddhism may actually work medically it may you know lower stress hormones in your body the lower blood pressure these kinds of things that are measurable because that's what we want to know from a Western scientific perspective not just do I feel better but 67% of the

people who did this particular treatment they got better by these measurable criteria okay that's that seems fair enough to me I'm open to that Hmm now this idea that there's nothing or no thing that we can't even we can't even wrap our head around nothing because we

think of a thing there's no thing but there's never a thing right right But how do we or why why don't we just say we don't know Why don't we speculate on the possibility of consciousness being some sort of ethereal thing or something

that exists outside of the Bible we don't know we really don't that's what I say I conclude and you know I don't know if there's an afterlife or not at the very end of the book we can come back to this later I just say it doesn't really

matter whether there's an afterlife or not because we don't live in the afterlife we live in this life so this is the time you got to do whatever you got to do I call this Alvy's error Alvy is Alvy Singer Woody Allen's

character in Annie Hall I remember the scene early in the movie where he is in a flashback as a young boy and as he's in this psychiatrist's office with his mom and you know what's the problem he won't do his homework you won't do your

homework why won't you do your homework Alvy says the universe is expanding he says the universe is expanding the universe is everything there is and if it's expanding one day it's all gonna blow apart so nothing really matters I'm not gonna do my homework and

his father yells at him what does the universe got to do with this we live in Brooklyn Brooklyn is not expanding that's my sort of take-home message we don't live in the afterlife right or before the universe or after the you know

that matters I mean it's interesting to talk about but we live in this life yeah so this is what really counts they're fascinating things to contemplate but ultimately really for practicality sake you really should be paying attention to life totally I mean this is why I tell

Deepak all the time he says well you know Michael this table is actually made of atoms that are mostly empty space and the quantum physicist according to Sean Carroll that's not correct over there right yeah he explained that yeah the idea of empty space he's like that's no

that's just a poor way of describing okay and I would defer to him and let him describe it he also described the superpositions like particles subatomic particles being in a superposition where they're in a state of moving and not moving at the same time okay he

explained that in a way that completely blew my head up too I thought I didn't think I had it figured out but I thought I had a definition that at least was like okay well it's this even though I don't understand and he's like no it's

not even that okay yes I refer to be please if you're interested go to the Sean Carroll podcast well as I understand it anyway that it doesn't really matter because the atoms are jiggling in a way that this is solid you could tell it's solid and this is the

level we live at so there's so many drop this on your head you're in trouble that's right yeah so again we don't live in a quantum world we live in a macro world where it's this kind of stuff does matter okay so you know so for Deepak

the whole Western Way of thinking scientifically there's a beginning and an end time is a linear thing that we can measure and there's birth and death all that is the wrong way to think about it that the Buddhist way is that it's just all consciousness and when you die

you return to the conscious state you were before you were in before you were born, so so the physical body is just an instantiation of this conscious thing, whatever this is, and and okay, you know, I don't know, you know, I'd be surprised, but I'll be pleasantly surprised, I'll tell

you that if it turns out, close my eyes for the last time and I wake up and you know there's Deepak and you know whoever my friends, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould and all the greats, Asimov over there, everybody's there, which is there

you know, it's like, oh boy, okay, this isn't this isn't hell, if that's true, you know, I'm not against any of this, just like I'm not against Ray Kurzweil and these guys figuring out that we can live 200 years or 300 years, great

if you can do it, you know, but let's just, you know, so when they say to me, Shermer, don't you want to live to be 500? It's like, just get me 280 without prostate cancer, give me the 90 without Alzheimer's, you know, 100, get me no

100, so I'm not on a morphine drip in a bed, you know, just quality of life, incremental, a year by year, and if it turns out you solve these problems and we lived 150, 200, then we have a bunch of other problems we don't even know about

yet, okay, well, I think there's some beauty in temporary things that we, for whatever reason, we're we're avoiding that concept, we were terrified of things ending, there's beauty in things being temporary, right? You don't want to go to see a movie that's a hundred hours long

movies a great movie minutes 90 minutes you're in you're out maybe two hours if it's three hours of it's Blade Runner or something it's something crazy like I quote Christopher Hitchens in my book cause I love his analogy first of all

you're at the party and and death taps you on the shoulder says you have to leave and worse the party is gonna go on without you and they're gonna all have fun it's like oh no but if the Christian version of heaven and hell is real

you're tap on the shoulder at the party until you can never leave the party it's like oh that's even worse I don't want to do anything forever right and imagine the classical version of what heaven is like a guy with a harp and there's a bunch of babies with wings

like what or even that aside that there that this which called it celestial North Korea you have a dictator that knows all of your thoughts and everything you're gonna do it's like wait a minute that does not sound like fun to me [Applause]

Joe Rogan on Life After Death

JRE Clips

Historical inaccuracies in media and the challenge of interpreting the past

Criticism of a historical show's attention to detail (shoe soles).

Questioning the accuracy of historical portrayals in media.

Difficulty in knowing how people in the past truly lived and spoke.

Human awareness of mortality and the concept of an afterlife

Discussion of the first humans to understand mortality.

Animals' capacity for grief and the unique human ability to conceive of an afterlife.

The paradox of imagining death while being alive.

Comparison of death to general anesthesia.

The limitations of language when discussing the concept of nothingness.

The Big Bang and cyclical models of the universe

Discussion of what existed before the Big Bang.

The possibility of the Big Bang being a cyclical event.

The limitations of human understanding in comprehending the universe's scale.

Deepak Chopra's views on consciousness and the universe

Personal experience at Deepak Chopra's center.

Assessment of Chopra's beliefs and their interpretation.

Discussion of Chopra's concept of consciousness as the ground of all being.

The 'weak consciousness principle' and its implications.

Chopra's views on the connection between quantum physics and consciousness.

The scientific validity of Eastern spiritual practices

Questioning the meaning of 'does it work' in the context of spiritual practices.

The need for measurable results in assessing the effectiveness of spiritual practices.

Importance of quantifiable data in evaluating spiritual treatments.

The limits of human knowledge regarding consciousness and the afterlife

Acknowledging the unknown regarding consciousness and the afterlife.

The irrelevance of the afterlife in comparison to the present life.

'Alvy's error' and the focus on the present life.

Woody Allen's Annie Hall and the insignificance of cosmic events in daily life.

The importance of focusing on the present life rather than contemplating the unknown.

Reconciling Eastern and Western perspectives on the nature of reality

Discussion of the nature of atoms and empty space.

Sean Carroll's explanation of quantum superposition.

The irrelevance of quantum physics in everyday life.

Contrasting linear and cyclical views of time and the nature of consciousness.

Deepak Chopra's perspective on death and the return to a pre-birth conscious state.

Perspectives on longevity and the value of a finite lifespan

The speaker's perspective on the potential for extended lifespans.

Prioritization of quality of life over mere longevity.

Potential unforeseen problems associated with significantly extended lifespans.

The beauty and value of temporary experiences.

Christopher Hitchens' analogy of death as leaving a party that continues without you.

Comparison of different perspectives on heaven and hell.

Critique of the concept of an eternal afterlife.