Vsauce: Mortality and the Meaning of Life | AI Podcast Clip with Michael Stevens

So a quick and impossibly deep question, last question about mortality. You've spoken about death as an interesting topic. Do you think about your own mortality?

Yeah, every day. It's really scary.

So what do you think is the meaning of life that mortality makes very explicit? So why are you here on Earth, Michael? What's the point of this whole thing? What? You know, what does mortality in the context of the whole universe make you realize about yourself? Just you, Michael Stevens?

Well, it makes me realize that I am destined to become a notion. I'm destined to become a memory. And we can extend life. I think there's really exciting things being done to extend life. But we. We still don't know how to, like, you know, protect you from some accident that could happen, you know, some unforeseen thing. Maybe we could, like, save my connectome and like, recreate my consciousness digitally. But even that is could. It could be lost if it's stored on a physical medium or something. So basically I just think that embracing and realizing how cool it is that, like, someday I will just be an idea and there won't be a Michael anymore that can be like, no, that's not what I meant. It'll just be what people like. They have to guess what I meant, and they'll remember me and how I live on as that memory will. Will maybe not even be who I want it to be, but there's something powerful about that, and there's something powerful about letting future people run the show themselves. I think I'm glad to get out of their way at some point and say, all right, it's your world now.

So you, the physical entity, Michael, have ripple effects in the space of ideas that far outlives you in ways that you can't control. But it's nevertheless fascinating to think. I mean, especially with you. You can imagine an alien species, when they finally arrive and destroy all of us, would watch your videos to try to figure out what were the questions.

But even if they didn't, you know, I still think that there will be ripples. Like, when I say memory, I don't specifically mean people remember my name and my birth date and, like, there's a photo of me on Wikipedia. Like, all that can be lost. But I still would hope that people ask questions and teach concepts in some of the ways that I have found useful and satisfying. Even if they don't know that I was the one who tried to popularize it, that's fine. But if Earth was completely destroyed, like, burnt to a crisp, everything on it today what would. The universe wouldn't care. Like, Jupiter is not going to go, oh, no. And that could happen. That could. So we do, however, have the power to, you know, launch things into space, to try to extend how long our memory exists. And what I mean by that is, you know, we are recording things about the world and we're learning things and writing stories and all of this and preserving that is truly what I think is the essence of being a human. We are autobiographers of the universe, and we're really good at it. We're better than fossils. We're better than light spectrum, we're better than any of that. We collect much more detailed memories of what's happening, much better data. And so that should be our legacy. And I hope that that's. That's kind of mine, too, in terms of people remembering something or me having some kind of effect. But even if I don't, you can't not have an effect, right? This is not me feeling like I hope that I have this powerful legacy. It's like no matter who you are, you will. But you also have to embrace the fact that that impact might look really small, and that's okay. One of my favorite quotes is from Tess of the Durbervilles, and it's along the lines of, the measure of your life depends on not your external displacement, but your subjective experience. If I am happy and those that I love are happy, can that be enough? Because if so, excellent.