Hidden Brain is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Jennifer Schmidt, Rhaina Cohen, Parth Shah, Laura Kwerel and Thomas Lu. This week: the problem of death, and the paths to escape it.
Each one presents a clever plan to cheat mortality, but raises new, unsolvable dilemmas. Cave says that all of these immortality stories can be boiled down to just four narratives, repeated over and over again in different forms. Fortunately, we have come up with solutions: stories that assure us that death is not what it seems – that there are ways to live forever. Philosopher Stephen Cave calls this the "mortality paradox," and he says it's a problem we have wrestled with for thousands of years. Even in death we are somehow still there, off to the side, watching. "And whenever we attempt to do so, we can perceive that we are, in fact, still present as spectators." Humans have always struggled with this puzzle: we know that one day we will die, but imagining that reality feels unthinkable. "It is indeed impossible to imagine our own death," wrote Sigmund Freud in 1915.
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