An Existential Slap Across the Face: Dean Rickles, PhD, on the Essence of Life's Meaning

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welcome to another episode of Living a Life in Full. I'm your host, Dr. Chris Stout. Death might seem to render pointless all of our attempts to create a meaningful life, but Professor Dean Rickles argues that only constraints and death as the ultimate constraint make our actions meaningful in order for us to live full lives. Dean believes it is the finiteness and shortness of life that brings meaning. In this episode, we'll explore how this insight is the key to making the most of the time that we do have. Dr. Dean Rickles is a Professor of History and Philosophy of Modern Physics at the University of Sydney. He earned his PhD from the University of Leeds under the supervision of Stephen French, with a thesis on conceptual issues in quantum gravity. His postdoctoral fellowship was at the University of Calgary and was split between health sciences and philosophy on the application of complex systems theory to population health. He joined the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney in 2007, receiving a five year ARC Australian Research Fellowship in 2008 and a four year ARC Future Fellowship in 2014. He is also Director of the Sydney center for Time and advisor for the Lifeboat foundation and co leads a Templeton foundation funded interdisciplinary project on the flow of Time. His primary research focus is the history and philosophy of modern physics, particularly quantum gravity and space time physics. However, he also has strong interests in econo physics, population health and musicology. Dean's authored dozens of peer reviewed articles along with a number of books including Covered with Deep the Development of Quantum Gravity, the Philosophy of Physics, A Brief History of String Theory and Symmetry, Structure and Spacetime. He's co edited Information and Eddington, Wheeler and the Limits of the Structural foundation of Quantum Gravity, Structural Realism, Structure, Object and Causality and Thinking About Reflecting on Art, Bringing Aesthetics and Philosophy of Science Together. He's edited the Ashgate Companion to Contemporary Philosophy of Physics. He wrote the Forward two on Dialogue, a Routledge Great Minds volume and most recently wrote Life is An Appropriately Brief Guide to Making It More Meaningful, published by Princeton University Press, which we'll be doing a deep dive on in this episode. He's also a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the Foundational Questions Institute. He co edits the Routledge Studies of Philosophy of Mathematics and Physics with Elaine Landry. Welcome to the show, Dean. It's great to have you on.

Thank you. Good to be on. So I'd like to, I should just say on the center for Time, I'm co director with two colleagues of the center for Time rather than the director.

Okay, great. Good, good. Thank you. Thank you for clarifying my foibles here. Please, please keep that up because I'm sure there will be quite a few others here as we get into things because I am quite out of my depth but quite, quite interest interested in your work. So maybe we could start off with a little bit more about your background. I know that before you studied philosophy you also trained as a concert pianist, I believe, at the London College of Music. Where did that come from? Were your parents musicians?

Yeah.

No.

Well, my dad was a pretty terrible heavy metal drummer in a band called Dan, but that was about as far as it went. It was. They were very bad. It was a strange sort of circumstance that led me to piano. There was just this TV program called BBC Young Musician of the Year. There was a pianist who was playing this amazing piece. I've never even thought about the piano before this point or, you know, music or anything like that. And I just saw this amazing pianist on the TV screen and it absolutely blew me away and I just couldn't believe what I was seeing and I managed to record another one of the pieces he played Which I still have this recording, and it was truly amazing. And I sort of immediately had to go out and find that the music score that he was playing, it was a ridiculously hard piece of music. But I went and got the score. I had to order it, special order, from some music shop, and then made it my mission to learn that piece. And this was When I was 13, 13 years old, I saw this.

And were you playing piano or playing any instruments prior to that?

No, no, no, nothing. Nothing whatsoever. It was literally right out of the gates.

Wow.

Absolute obsession. It's one piece initially, Balakirev's Islam. And I managed to learn it while I was still at school, probably about 15, 14, 15. So I just hammered away at it for a year and a half from scratch. I managed to memorize this thing on a really bad old piano that had candlestick holders and these awful sharp keys, but I somehow managed.

Wow.

To get the most out of that piano.

Wow. And was that then what took you towards the London College of Music or.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So then I. Obviously, it wasn't just that I started getting into music in a big way. And that really got me into reading and research, actually, because I started getting heavily into biographies of composers and pianists, you know, the older sort of generation of pianists, which I somehow, you know, associated with a little bit more than the present generation. And they wrote amazing biographies. There's a pianist called Arthur Rubenstein who has these two volumes, and the life he was describing in there was just fantastic. Sort of traveling on trains with Paderewski, you know, the old Polish prime minister who was also a penisite. It just opened up a whole interesting world to me. And the piano was part of it, but it was music in general and composition. And then in those books there were also bits of philosophy and just wider culture and art. So I got heavily into music in general and I was learning a lot of other pieces, obviously, on the piano after a year or so. And, yeah, ended up in music college, did an audition, got into there and was there for about one and a half years, maybe before I switched.

Wow. What. What caused the pivot?

The pivot was. I've said this a few times on the podcast now, and I get a little bit embarrassed about it, but it was. It was some lsd, a particular LSD experience. So musicians are kind of quite a wild bunch, actually. So this was kind of the norm to do these things, to do LSD at the time. And the experience was very specifically focused on the nature of space and whether it has a Discrete structure, you know, further down, whether it had an atomic structure, like matter has an atomic structure. And I just got obsessed with this. This became sort of the new obsession, as with the piano. Actually went out the next day, grabbed a bunch of books including Bertrand Russell's Problems of Philosophy, which had some relevant things in there, and then became absolutely obsessed with this question of what is the nature of space and time? What's the nature of space time? And it got to such a degree of obsession that I switched courses and then took up physics and philosophy and then went through all of that, obviously the degree, the Master's and the PhD. And I've pretty much stuck to that topic since. Space time, the nature of space and time and whether it's the street or not. That's basically quantum gravity, which you mentioned. Some of the books that I've done. Quantum gravity is basically the study of. One way of thinking about it is the study of space time at small distances, very small distances, and whether it gets corrected by quantum mechanics, modified by quantum mechanics. So that's my strange history.

So for the non physics oriented people in the audience, myself included, included, I know you're. I believe I know. So correct me if I have this factoid off a little bit, but your dissertation was on quantum gravity and with a philosophical focus, or in a philosophical focus that you later published as a book. So can you reconcile In a very 101 kind of way, if it's even at all possible, about how quantum gravity with a philosophical focus, what does that mean? How did you come to that and what was that work like?

Yeah, I mean, so we have a bunch of theories at present that are considered to be our best theories of matter and space time. So, you know, you've heard of quantum mechanics, of course, and you've heard of particle physics and maybe you've heard of the standard model of particle physics, which tells us about the strong interaction, the weak interaction and the electromagnetic interaction. They are all described by quantum theories that tell us that there's a certain discreteness to the quantities that we're dealing with. In those theories, they don't come in, you know, if you've got a certain energy A or B, in a classical theory, in the old way of thinking, you could have any value in between any two values of the electromagnetic field strength. In quantum mechanics, it has to be one or the other. It's discrete in that sense. And being quantum theories, you also get these strange features known as superpositions, which is if you've got a possibility for some, you know, Atomic system. Maybe it's an electron that has a certain spin. It can be spin up or spin down. In quantum mechanics, it can also be a sort of strange combination of neither and both of those. It's neither spin up nor spin down. And this is, of course, the Schrodinger cat kind of idea. The Schrodinger's cat states. So that's our theories of matter and force. But then we also have gravity, which in Einstein's theory, general relativity, is described as a sort of aspect of space time curvature. And you usually get these pictures when this is being described on popular science programs of a kind of trampoline. There's a big bowling ball or something that makes an impression in that trampoline, and it drags the surface of the trampoline around it. And if you imagine rolling a ball, a little marble or something on that trampoline towards that bowling ball, because of the curvature and the way it's indented that surface, it will drag the marble into orbit around itself. And the idea is that gravity is described in this way as matter moving in curved space time. And then the problem is, okay, they're both inhabiting the same world. We have this quantum theory of matter and force, but we also have this theory of gravity that tells us that it's got something to do with space time. And we know that every object, every massive object gravitates. So how is it that these quantum. These strange quantum systems are interacting with space time? Does it mean, for example, that space time has to be discrete so that you only get smallest, you know, a smallest volume of space, for example, and you can't go lower, or that you can have superpositions, for example, where there's a, you know, if a bowling ball has a possibility of being in one position and then a different position, you should end up with a sort of superposition of the space time that corresponds to that, the curvature of those two systems. So you get all sorts of weird scenarios. And it. Because gravity is dealing with space and time, these are the basis of philosophy, right? Philosophers are. It's sort of their bread and butter topic, the nature of space time and matter. And what's being suggested here is that there's a real schism in the foundations of physics where the two components don't fit together. Our theory of space time does not merge with our theory of matter. So we need a new theory, and it will involve a new theory of space time, which is a philosophical problem. So that's where the sort of philosophical aspects come in. They focus heavily on the nature of space, time and what it is going to have to be in order to solve this problem. It's certainly not what we've got. We need something different.

Well, so do you. This is going to be. My apologies again for naive questions, but are there experiments that are run, or is it more so theoretical thought experiment kinds of things? Is there actual physical kinds of things that can be observed or tested or not?

Well, that's the other reason why this is more philosophical than usual is because the scales at which you would expect to have direct observations of effects from quantum gravity are so phenomenally far away from what we can detect at the moment with the LHC, for example, many orders of magnitude away, 20 orders of magnitude away from what we can detect, there's a scale called the Planck length, which is 10 to the minus 34 centimeters, which is unbelievably timely. So you can't do experiments at the moment for detecting direct effects. But what we've realized recently is that you can sort of use the universe itself to detect the impressions that would be made if quantum gravity theories were true. So if, for example, space had this grainy feature where it was discrete in sort of atoms of space space, then if light is traveling over that, what is essentially a lattice, this discrete lattice, then it's going to have its properties modified somewhat than if it was traveling over a continuous smooth space time. So you look for these kind of corrections in the properties of light traveling over vast distances, which by using those vast distances, you're sort of using the universe as your experimental apparatus to reveal things that were very, very tiny, but that if aggregated over vast distances and times, you can possibly detect. And there was a point where they thought they made actual detections. There were these experiments called the magic telescope experiments, where they thought they had it, but then it got shown to be a sort of statistical, just a fluctuation noise rather than signal.

Wow. So you're looking.

But it's changing a lot at the moment. And there are sort of ideas for producing small scale, as they call tabletop quantum gravity experiments, as we're getting a better control over the technology that, for example, allows us to keep quantum states coherent for longer periods of time. Because the problem is those superpositions I mentioned, they always want to collapse. They don't stay coherent. They want to collapse all the time. And the trick is to try and keep those coherent states going long enough and for large enough objects so that you can measure the gravitational effects, because obviously you need a slightly large object, massive object, to detect its gravitational effects. So that's the sort of problem that's being faced.

I see. So it's sort of like having a conceptualization or a theory or an approach, but then looking for things at whatever scalar level that might be evidence for or against to support one of those theories or hypotheses. Okay, gotcha. Wow.

Exactly. I mean, the problem is that a lot of different. There are lots of different theories, lots of different approaches to quantum gravity that try and solve the problem that are completely different in their worldview. They make completely different claims about what the world is like, but they all generate very similar predictions at these large scales. So they all seem to have this sort of graininess feature. So even if we did find confirmation in some experiment that said, yes, it looks like space is grainy, it still doesn't tell us which of these approaches is the true one because they're all making the same prediction. So then we'd have to filter some other way. It's a mess. It's an absolute mess. And the book Covered in Deep Mist traces the origin of this problem back over 100 years. It's a hundred years unsolved problem which shows us that our theories that we've got are wrong and our foundations of physics are completely at odds with one another.

Is it a computational problem? I mean, is it something that throwing enough bits and bytes at a problem like this could be calculatable? Or, or is that the wrong approach?

I don't think so. I mean, the point of my PhD thesis was precisely that there's something weird about this problem, which is that it isn't like that, it isn't a technical problem, because the firepower that has been thrown at it for a start by people like Richard Feynman and so on is with no real progress made, no real serious progress, shows that there's something else going on. And the fact that we're dealing with things like space, time, to me, shows that we've got a conceptual problem, a philosophical problem. So you need to bring philosophy to bear on this problem. And there needs to be something like an old fashioned, you know, a return to something like natural philosophy. And in fact, I just heard the other day, I'm sure you know Sean Carroll, the physicist Sean Carroll, you should get him on, by the way.

Okay.

But he's just a chair, and he wanted to call it, he got to choose his own title and he called it A Chair in Natural Philosophy, which is what we used to call the discipline of just looking at the natural world and trying to study it. So Newton would call himself a natural philosopher rather than a physicist or a philosopher. And I prefer this way of thinking about it because we're dealing with the, you know, the conceptual structure of our universe. Basically. It's always a philosophical problem as much as a technical problem.

Right. Well, that's very clarifying for it because I was just having a very difficult time trying to reconcile those kinds of things. I guess it's been a little bit more stereotypic for me of just thinking about physics from an engineering perspective or a more scientific kind of one or mathematic kind of one. So this is helpful. Maybe it's a good segue into talking about your book Life is Short, which doesn't have a whole lot of physics in it. But I just, I think just for audience to know. When I reached out to Dean, I was probably midway through his book and just enjoyed it so much and I just put it down, opened up my laptop and shot him off a letter and said, hey, we'd love to have you on the show and be able to talk about this and think out loud about this with you. And he was very gracious enough to join and be doing what we're doing right now. Before we get into the book, I want to tee it up a little bit with, with what some other folks have already said about it. Sky Cleary and the Times Literary Supplement said, it's illuminating. Rickles aims to provide a panacea for those facing death, anxiety bound to be ameliorative for any member of the human species. Amanda Gefter, author of Trespassing on Einstein's Lawn, said, a stirring and useful reminder that the key to a fulfilling life is, is not more time, but time spent more intentionally. Dean Rickles draws on philosophy and science to show us that the future is open. Our life stories aren't written yet because we're the ones to help write them. An inspiring read. And Oliver Berkman, New York Times Best selling author of 4000 Time Management for Mortals, said, a brilliant and brilliantly condensed dose of perspective, jolting the reader into a fresh understanding of paradoxical truth that death is what makes life worth living. We can't wriggle free from our human limitation, but Dean Rickles demonstrates with clarity and wit how to be free within them. It's an existential slap across the face, which I really like that and I think you even use that on the front cover of the book. I thought that was terrific. So again, I just really enjoyed it. Thank you for writing it. I guess maybe to start off with. I have maybe a two pronged question about its origin. What spurred you to write it from, you know, kind of the things we've talked about that you focused your research and writing on prior to this. And then how does one go from, you know, like books like that on quantum gravity and string theory to something more aligned with Marcus Aurelius or Seneca the Younger?

Yeah, I mean, yeah. This is certainly the first book I've written that was supposed to be outward. The previous books I've written were a sort of inward quest to try and figure out something about the nature of reality for my own benefit. This one was probably the first that wasn't written from that perspective. Weirdly enough, although it seems very different from the work on quantum gravity, it was also inspired by the work on quantum gravity because there is a particular researcher called John Wheeler, who was, in fact, he was the PhD supervisor of Richard Feynman, who's one of the most famous physicists. But he has this approach where he recognizes that there's a problem with the theories of space and time that we've got. And he tries to probe beneath them. And he ends up with this thing called pre geometry. And as he's trying to figure out what the nature of this underlying stuff is, he realizes that it has to involve observers. So he ends up with something like the idea that the world is built from information, from questions that you put to nature. Are you spin up? Are you a mass between 1 and 2 kg? And then you do an experiment and the world tells you its answer. And the point is, until you've posed a question as a participator in reality, the universe doesn't know what it is yet. So he gets this from quantum theory before you've made a measurement. And his own mentor was Niels Bohr, who came up with this idea of the idea that there's no world there when you're not watching it. There's no objective way the world is independently of the questions that you put to it and your participation and bringing it about. So Wheeler calls this the observer participator. And the idea is that there is an essential role for maybe not humans, but consciousness, something that can probe the universe in some way. There's an essential role for that to play in bringing about what the universe is. So the universe doesn't know what it is until you kind of give it some hints. And then it will give you something back which has a certain degree of indeterminacy. So it's not that you're literally creating what Happens because you don't know what answer you're going to get, but you are sort of telling the universe, giving it sort of contours on what kind of answers it's going to give you. So this to me seemed like a complete reversal of the standard worldview that we're told, you know, throughout school and then throughout university and all these kind of things and in the popular science books, which is that the universe doesn't care about humans. The universe goes its merry way. It has its structure, knows exactly what it is. It doesn't care. If humans went extinct, the universe wouldn't really bat an eyelid. It would just carry on going on evolving as it does. What this shows is that there is a special place for consciousness, for observes and participation, because there quite literally is no manifested universe without the reflection of consciousness telling it what it is and making it manifest. So in this I sort of found that there was a, like a role for providing some deeper meaning in humanity's place in the universe. And it seemed especially necessary because what we're being told about things like climate and the world problems and the population crises and so on, seems to conflict with this other view I mentioned, which is that we're sort of just part of the laws of the universe and we go on deterministically. We're sort of machines, just like the objects in the universe, just another object in the universe. So it seems to conflict with the idea that we're supposed to be able to do something about climate change problems, pollution problems, population problems. If you're just a machine and you're deterministically ordered like the universe, then how can we expect humans to also take responsibility for their actions if they don't have any freedom in their actions? So it seems completely inconsistent. But if you've got this other worldview, which remember, is completely consistent, in fact, it might be even more consistent with the nature of reality because it sort of gets around this problem. I mentioned earlier that our foundations of physics seem to be inconsistent. So we've got a reasonable worldview that's consistent with the physics that tells us that we also have a role to play in how the future of the universe unfolds and therefore are responsible for what happens in the future and are capable of having an impact on that future. So I mean, the idea is that if we sort of raise people with this worldview in mind, that they are capable, they are co creators. I mean, it's quite a common idea now, this idea of co creation, but it's not often rooted in physics like this, there's a genuine piece of physics that makes sense of all of these co creation ideas as the root of the nature of our cosmos, basically. So if you're raised with this kind of mindset, then I think you sort of gain a huge amount of meaning and purpose and you can have this idea of a custodian almost of the universe and how it goes, maybe just on a smaller scale, but it matters. Our actions matter for what happens in the rest of the universe. We are special in some way, even though we're often told these days that we're not remotely special. This is supposed to be a feature of the Copernican principle. In fact, I don't think it is like that. There's a decent theory of physics that says otherwise and goes against all of the stark kind of communications that it seems to be almost a fashion these days to say the most outrageous things about how insignificant humans are. And it's not necessary and it's not part of science, it's not part of the scientific worldview. So that was how the quantum, the old. The other work that I was doing linked into this one. Obviously this was a. I say obviously this was a Covid book. This was written during the lockdown. So I'm obviously in Australia. We had extremely strict lockdowns. So I started this in the lockdowns. And that probably colored its flavour a bit in focusing a bit more on issues of purpose and meaning and seeing how we can sort of restore these notions back into society, basically. Which seemed to be very, very missing during those lockdowns. Missing, but also not missing in another. Because you're at home thinking, right? You're at home in lockdown thinking about things that you wouldn't otherwise have thought about. And you're also set to thinking about things like death. So the other stage of this book is that there is also a role played by finiteness, by having boundaries. And the reason for having this constraint, this condition, is that if you don't have that boundary, then you basically have all possible options open. So it's. I mean, the way I describe it is it's a little bit like in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, where every decision, well, nothing actually happens because all of the possibilities happen in a decision. If you have a decision whether to turn left or right at an intersection, well, both happen. You go both ways, just on different branches. But in that case, nothing happens. Neither of them actually happen because they both. And it sort of makes it incoherent, things happening and choice and Choosing. And you find a similar thing, I think, with this case I mentioned, with the idea that we have to tell the universe what it's going to do next, if all possibilities are realizable, then we're not really choosing as such. Everything's possible and there's no urgency, certainly, to any of our choices. And then we lose this idea of getting meaning from making choices.

And so is this then related to, like, where you talk about, like, provisional ways of living, of always looking elsewhere, always looking to the future or to others, or is that part of this?

Yeah, I mean, so the provisional way of living. So the provisional life is CG Jung's description of this character that they call the Puerto Nus, which is basically a character that can't take. That won't take responsibility for their actions. They won't choose, basically. And if they don't choose, and the reason they don't choose is because they don't want to be held responsible for their actions in a childlike way. They want to be able to do whatever they can without consequences and be. Yeah, exactly. An eternal child. So that's a similar case because what's happening is that it's always virtual. There's never any decision being made. So you're not telling the universe what to do, and you're not carving a path or forging a particular path, which is the very thing that gives you meaning. This is why these ways of living are often extremely meaningless and they often lead in later life to what Jung also calls the unlived life. It will sort of really smack you in the face. And this. So many midlife crises happen, right? Because you've got a whole bunch of unlived life where you didn't make decisions and didn't go down particular paths. And then you obviously want to start living that later on and you become this sort of juvenile. I mean, sometimes it can be useful to have a burst of, you know, young energy.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think from a Jungian perspective, too, it seems that, you know, to set the stage for a variety of other kinds of what we would think of as mental illnesses and other kinds of emotional, behavioral health kinds of crises that are more serious, as well as the maybe more cliched midlife crisis. So I think Seneca kind of made reference to these kinds of things, too. I've given some talks of what I used to refer to as the pox of the Antilles, that people would put things off and they would have these quasi superficial reasons for it. Until I graduate, then this will happen until I Get married, then this will happen until I whatever, have children or have this job or have this house or have this thing or possession or whatever. And then it becomes a little bit too late of whatever those things that were always put off. So does it also. Go ahead. Go ahead.

Yeah, I was going to say, I mean, you call it untils. I call it one day ism, which is one day I'll do it. I do it. And it's a thing you have to battle against and be conscious of because it's clearly a very natural instinct. And I think this is precisely the point of the book, which is the instinct comes from the very fact that you think that there will always be another day. You always think that there is this until this point in the future, whereas if you have the finite boundary in mind, well, there might not be another. There might not be another pill. So it forces you to focus a little bit more, with a little bit more urgency on how you're spending your time and what decisions you're making and are making decisions. And it's difficult. It's a difficult process.

You know, Ryan Holiday, I don't know, you might have seen, seen it, I think just within the last couple of weeks, had a post and he talked about, you know, not putting things off and a very sad but true story about, you know, wanting to reach out to someone and, you know, just over a weekend and life kind of got in the way. And then there's, you know, catastrophic event and this person passed away and he never had the chance to do that. And it. I've also read again, a little bit more popularized, but how when people are looking back at their lives, the regrets that they tend to have have is not so much more so focused on what they did, but what they didn't do. And it just maybe that was kind of the resonance that your book had with me as well too, of these, you know, putting things off and, and whatnot. Do you, do you see that as a, a metaphysical, philosophical kind of issue? Why is it, is it just these children that never grow up kind of things or what. What do you see as causal or. You know, because it does seem to be like a, a collective kind of kind of thing across cultures and times.

Yeah, well, I think it is metaphysical. It's to do with a metaphysical worldview. And again, it has to do with this idea of the strange thought that we have, that this strange business of putting off the thought of death and a future boundary so that what happens is there's a great book by Sheldon Solomon who has this idea of the terror management projects? And it's the idea that most of humanity doesn't want to think about death, but they really are. They're sublimating it into other projects. So it's there in the sense that all of their projects and their strivings are sort of to battle against the terror of facing the fact that there is a finite limit there. But because they're not sort of consciously thinking about it, a lot of these actions are maybe going in the wrong direction. A lot of what they do choose goes in the wrong direction and might not be the most appropriate usage of their time. So if you have a sort of metaphysical worldview where you always do, keeping in mind the boundary and the relationship between the future boundary, death, and the way choice works and the way this sort of space of possibilities works, then you're a bit more consciously focused on. Exactly, on missing out on the kinds of things that you mentioned Ryan Holiday talking about. You're less likely to do those kinds of omissions if you do have in mind there are only finitely many possibilities. And as you're advancing towards that finite boundary, your possibility space is shrinking as you go. This is the anxiety. This is the anxiety that hits in midlife, is that you realize. You start to realize you're not immortal and your possibility space for being certain things or being a. Whatever, an Olympian or being a concept or something starts to dwindle and then you panic. And that's the unlived life. And you think, oh, my God, I should have done this before. And that's where the regret comes from.

Yeah, you know, it's. No, please.

I was going to say. So if we can sort of get this metaphysics into people at a younger age, I mean, they will have a much better, better grip on their own lives. They'll have better control over their lives. And I think you would avoid many health problems, you'd avoid all sorts of divorces and. Because what's happening is there's a neurosis that hits when you get to midlife, which is precisely this unlived life idea. And it causes all sorts of crazy behaviors, really.

Right. It seems too, on both sides of that that, you know, 20 somethings. Again, these are. I'm just speaking to stereotypes, but, you know, if people having a different perspective maybe than 50 somethings about, you know, jobs and careers versus quality of life and quality of experiences and, you know, doing other kinds of things besides just, you know, sort of, you know, working for the man as they used to Say so. So and it seems too. So that's the younger end. And as you made reference to like with midlife crises and stuff, you know, I read just all recently, like A Simpler Life and Arthur Brooks's popular Strength From Strength to Strength. And a number of books are out there right now, you know, still, you know, in the airport bookstores, all kind of stuff. Similarly on this. And do you like, you know, I'm obviously US based, but you know, for us, I think I see it as like a us baby boomers kind of thing, you know, starting to face their mortality. And do you see that globally, is it a weird US phenomenon or Western phenomenon of this purpose and meaning existential frenzy or something else?

I mean, there's probably huge cultural elements. I've not really looked it into them. I mean, there are books that look into the cultural differences between how we approach. But I mean, the globalization is probably going to mean that it becomes a global problem because the ideas are sort of rising and we're all in the same kind of system. So the more we're in the same kind of system, the more we have the same sorts of neuroses and problems that are generated. But yeah, I mean, it would be nice to have people that have this wisdom at the end of their lives, as you mentioned, where they talk about their regrets and it's not regrets for what they did, it's what they didn't do. I mean, it would be nice to have this kind of wisdom given to younger people so that they're not always thinking about what's immediately ahead. But on the end, if you have your eyes on the end and what kind of life you want to have lived, what kind of person you want to have been, then, well, that gives you a, that gives you a sort of path. It gives you a definite trajectory to get to it. And you might go off now and again off the mark and you might even change the end that you want. But unless you have that sort of end in mind, then you're all of your steps and your decisions are undirected all over the place.

Yeah. A little rudderless. Yeah. Yeah. I felt with, pardon me, had conversations with my wife about our adult children. I said, you know, sort of like I don't particularly want to drive, you know, in any direction or whatever, but the fact that either of our adult children have a plan is kind of what gives me more, you know, relief because, you know, at least there's a plan. They can, like you said, they can vary from that plan. They can find that, that Plan, you know, didn't work for them and they can develop another plan. But you know, I'm sort of agnostic as to what the plan is other than just it's good to have the plan. So. And I, you know, I don't know. I mean, some just even looking at my own two children, I mean they, they vary in that, you know, they're, and they're, you know, they both do. And I feel like they both have a pretty good sense of being, you know, experimentalists, I guess. You know, trying things out, seeing if they fit. If they don't, they discard them. They don't beat themselves up about it. But yeah, I agree. I think if it could be something that, you know, it's my bias, if there could be something that would be a little bit more universal and well accepted or role modeled around those kinds of things. Do you do like. I know also in your book you talk about like philosophy as being the ultimate self help tool, but do you have specific ways or recommendations or besides you know, like taking like, like a look at your book or reading Seneca's work or Ryan Holiday stuff with stoicism or, or others. Hedegar, whoever, Jung. That would be.

I would say don't, don't.

Yeah, well, yeah, good point. But what. Who. I don't know there's necessarily a course. But where would people like if they. This is an interest to them, what should be on their bookshelf or what should they be looking for?

Oh, wow, okay. That's a very difficult question. I mean, the problem is I don't think there's a definite book that I would say because everybody as you mentioned, is so different, that the thing that will click with them will not click with others. Some of the books I like other people absolutely can't stand. I started with the Bertrand Russell book as I mentioned, which was absolutely perfect for me. But other people might find that too dry. They might need a more romantic approach to philosophy, something from, you know, the existentialists. I mean, having said that, the existentialists are probably a good way, a good way in to the topic that we're talking about now. I have a plan. You should have at least some plan and be acting from your own intentions and ideas. So the existentialists have this idea of bad faith and the idea that there are two ways of being in the world. There's either being as an object buffeted around by other people's plans, or there's being a subject, you being the force that's deciding who you are, what Your system is what your truths are and these kinds of things. Things. So existentialism is a very good one to start with because most people can understand these basic concepts. And a lot of the literature on existentialism was written in the form of novels. So you don't even realize you're doing learning philosophy as such, but you're being delivered it in the form of novels. And there are so many novels that deal with these kind of things. So Sartre's novels and Camus novels are obviously very good for the existential. But there are, you know, there are books by. Classic books by Herman Hesse and.

Man's Search for meaning also. That's, you know, I've.

I've.

Back in my clinical days, that was something that was, you know, quite popular and I think has kind of gotten a resurgence as well, you know, today too, with a whole new generation or two.

Exactly. Again, the point with that book being similar to the novel is that it's coming from the point of view of somebody's personal experience rather than right set of facts about philosophers. So, I mean, maybe that would be a good way in.

You talk in your book with the last chapter. I like. I always kind of nerd out with. With authors talking about, you know, structures of their books and layouts and whatnot. But for yours, one of the things that caught me was the last chapter, how it's laid out of the meaning of life, which is, you know, cliched and well known, but you had a little X through it and then had the word death. So it actually read the meaning of death. And you wrote, life is a miracle, but so is death. Death is where the meaning is born, and death is where we grow, where growth comes from. Could you unpack that a little bit? I mean, it's basically freedom is limitation. It's little, you know, almost a little, to me, Orwellian doublethink or whatever. Can you expand about that on that?

Yeah, well, exactly. So I say it is very Orwellian doublethink, the way it's written.

Yeah.

I mean, so at the beginning of the book, I mentioned that if we imagine being immortal, if we could imagine being immortal, having all possible options open up to us, if we were gods like that, then we would have all possibilities and we could be all possible things given enough time. I mean, a lot of people think of the universe in this way that it goes through all possible configurations infinitely many times and just keeps reoccurring. So if we had this sort of godlike ability, then we would not really be picking A particular thing that we are. And it seems that sort of part of, not the whole part of the meaning of life and having a meaningful life has to do with this, but it gives you a huge component of the meaning in your life that you get to choose. And it's you that's deciding who you are and what you're going to be be. So if you have the possibility of everything, well, as I said earlier, you're not actually anything. If you're everything, you're not a particular thing. So you become a sort of incoherent, sort of virtual being. You are pure potentiality, essentially. You're not really actual in that sense. You're sort of living in this virtual reality where nothing is actually selected. You're not selecting who you are, so you're nobody. I mean, there are sort of Eastern philosophies that say this kind of potential where it's everything which includes every possibility, is what we mean by nothingness or the void. It's just the space of all possibilities and all. So if you're that, well, then that means that you are essentially nothing and nobody. It's by selecting potentialities from within that space of possibilities that you get to shape yourself and decide who you are. And that's where the meaning comes from. But in order to do that, you need to have some limitations on that space of potentiality. You need to have to decide. You need to be forced to make decisions that then concretize some of those potential potentialities to build your. You are in a project of building who you are. If you don't have the limitation, then you don't get that notion of choice. And therefore you don't get freedom, the freedom to choose because there's everything possible. So that limitation is exactly what gives you this freedom to choose who you are going to be by forcing you to select a particular path through this space of possibilities.

Do you think there's a paradox then, with the trope of, like, it seems to me, you know, I see every other week and in the media someplace about some billionaire spending a large part of their fortune on adding decades to their lives. You know, they're. They're all these bizarre, you know, blood boys and all these, you know, strange kinds of things that people are doing to try and do that or. Or the aspects of, like transhumanisms and Ray Kurzweil and the singular or things like that, is that removing those guardrails and those lanes and those boundaries and actually kind of poisoning the well in terms of meaningfulness or what are your thoughts about that?

I think that even if they succeeded in doing this and if they succeeded in somehow getting a situation where they're immortal. I mean, I don't think that the way they thinking about this is correct anyway. They talk about uploading brains, but anything where you're uploading a brain sounds to me like you're killing the initial thing and then just duplicating it. It's not really you, it's copy.

Yeah.

So it's death, basically killed yourself. But let's forget that. Even if it were possible that without death and with, you know, with continuity, you could make yourself immortal, there would be a point, I am sure. And this is the point of one of the. I forget which chapter, the chapter on the. Where I talk about immortality, you would end up having to do something like simulate a death and forgetfulness. Because I think either you would have to simulate death and forgetfulness to alleviate the sort of the monstrosity of the sheer boredom of going for millions of years, or there would be a situation where the fact that you are existing for that long would automatically portion itself out into different lives in some other way. I mean, it's hard to do with these situations because what's going to happen is we can't have the same kind of consciousness. We wouldn't be human. We would be transhuman. We'd have different memory systems. If we had the same memory system, then we would end up having lots of different lives and we wouldn't be immortal. Our memories would mark off, which would be essentially different people. You wouldn't remember what you did a hundred thousand years ago. That might as well be the same as reincarnation or transmigration of the souls. So either we're different people, in which case we're not immortal, or if we are immortal, we would get very, very fed up of it. And we'd be very different from being human because we'd have to have different memory systems to hold ourselves together as a coherent self. So it's not easy. These issues are not easy to deal with. And I think the people that are exploring these and putting all of their money into them are not properly thinking it through, even at this very base. Well, they're not thinking it through.

Yeah. I think

I don't have anything against extending life by however many years. I would love to live a thousand years. I mean, it would be silly to say you don't want to have a bit longer to live because there's so many interesting things to do. You're very Busy. I just. I had a look at your page. You've got lots of different projects. You would not. I don't think you would get bored in a thousand years. I don't think I would get bored in a thousand years. But there needs to be this boundary that is at least telling you that you can't be everything and you can't do everything, and you're going to have to make some choices that matter and that have significance and that are irreversible.

Yeah. You also yourself have said, I think in the book that life is too short. And yeah, it would be nice to maybe have a couple more decades or two added on. And you're on a show that's entitled Living a Life in Podcast Full. So as we kind of get close to wrapping up, could you share with us the ways that you live your life, albeit too short as we all feel in full? What, what kinds of things, you know, with your work, with your family. What are the, the personal, the professional kinds of things of how you live your life in full?

Yeah, well, I probably do too many things and I live my life a bit too. It would be better to live it less full. I think my issue. I need to live a less full life in order to open up some space just to kind of relax a bit. It's been a bit of an obsessive drive and I sort of have so many projects, not just work projects, but other things to do with music. I still play piano all the time and give recitals, so I'm always learning a new recital. I'm trying to learn various languages, including ancient languages, so I've got stacks and stacks of books all around.

You do need another thousand years, Dean.

One nice thing is to do the garden. We grow our veggies together and that is actually really nice. And we're about to start experimenting with some ways of increasing the yield and the growth. And that's really nice, actually getting involved in a bit of nature. I don't know what I would do without that. So the music is very good for getting away from. From the work and the garden is very good for getting away from the work. But yeah, my issue is exactly the opposite and I. I'm always trying to jettison projects to. And I never can because everything is so interesting.

That's good. The curse of the curious mind. Right? Well, I tell you where, kind of because I've got a. I've got a few decades head start. Start on you. But one of the things is as I've tried to shift away from kind of being employed in a traditional academic or research or whatever kind of day job that being able to pick and choose the kinds of projects that you do want to go deep on I think is really kind of one of the goals that I found has been very helpful and being able to feel like I can devote if this thing needs 10% of my time, I can do 10%. If this thing needs 50% of my time and I'm really into it, then I've got the scalability of being able to do that. So I suspect that that's maybe the experimental phase that you are in now or will be getting to as well. So just look forward to that.

It's very accurate.

What are some of the best ways that listeners can learn more about you, your work, get your books connect, etc.

Yeah, I mean, one of the things I mention in the book is that I don't have any social media, so I don't have that kind of distraction. So I'm very non.

It does make it tricky to research you. Dean.

My books are available. I mean they're all on any of the bookshops really. Any of the online bookshops. I do have a Sydney University webpage. It's not really outdated very often. And there are various podcast interview interviews like this that I've done that are on YouTube. Going to a little bit more personal detail.

I will research those and then put those in the show notes for folks so they can take a look and do a deeper dive. Well, I just again with. With all your activities and all the things that you're doing, I really appreciate you carving out a little time for me and the audience today. It's just been something I've been looking forward to and so enjoyed your book and so enjoyed getting to know a little bit more about you and my research and then being able to have this conversation today. Thank you.

Thank you. I enjoyed it. Enjoyed it a lot.

Take care. Living a Life in Full is a

production of Stout Media, a subsidiary of Gordian Knot, LLC. Assistant producer Gracie Wong Music Dan O' Brien executive producer and host Dr. Chris Stout to learn more, stop by our website A lifeinfull for show notes and please recommend us to your friends and subscribe on your favorite platform. And as for the obligatory disclaimer, this podcast is for general information uses only and does not constitute the practice of psychology, medicine, nutrition or other professional health care services, including the giving of medical or psychological advice. No doctor patient relationship is formed. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I take conflicts of interest Seriously. For all of my disclosures as well as show notes, please see livingalifeinfull.org podcast and my LinkedIn profile. Thanks.

And until next time,