How To Deal With The Shortness Of Life - Dean Rickles - #568

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dean Rickles. He's Professor of History and Philosophy of Modern Physics at the University of Sydney and the Director of the Sydney Centre for Time. Life doesn't last that long. The ever present spectre of death looms large, even if you live to be 100 This can feel like a tragedy in many ways. What use are our efforts if they'll all be turned to dust eventually? A philosopher's insight is needed here to give us a fresh perspective. Expect to learn why keeping your options open is a path to an early grave. How you can remind yourself of the miracle that you're alive at all. The solution to living a listless, unintentional life. Whether death is actually the only thing that gives life any meaning. The danger of being a sailor without a journey or a route. And much more. I didn't plan it to be this way, but this feels like quite an appropriate episode, I think, to go into the Christmas period with. I do sometimes feel a bit melancholy when it's Christmas time. I think it's because I'm back home and I'm reminiscing about what's happened throughout the year and everything slows down a little bit. And I do think that considering the shortness of life and where it is that we're going with our days is probably a pretty nice reflection. And it is despite the morbid sounding description, it is actually quite uplifting. So this will be the last episode I get to speak to you about before Christmas happens. There is no episode this Saturday. I figured that I would give everyone their ears a rest on Christmas Eve. But yeah, thank you very much. Merry Christmas to you and your family. Love you all. I can't wait to see what the New Year's got in store. Tons and tons of exciting things. But for now, enjoy the food, enjoy the family, be present. Remember that life is incredibly short and that this could be one of the last Christmases that you get to spend with even the annoying aunt who you can't bear to hear her burping her way through Christmas dinner. Whatever it is, I really hope that you find time to reflect and enjoy it. So yeah, Merry Christmas everybody. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Dean Rickles.
Is it right to say that life is short in your estimation?

**Dean Rickles** (2:32)
It is short, I think it is a little bit too short. Even though it's necessary that it's finite, I don't think it needs to be quite this finite. Although, having said that, I mean, that's just my selfishness and my ego talking.

**Chris Williamson** (2:46)
What would you optimize for if you had the choice? 250?

**Dean Rickles** (2:51)
That would be pretty good, but then if it was 250, you would be sitting here saying, I don't know, 250

**Chris Williamson** (2:54)
I wish it was 750, you know.

**Dean Rickles** (2:58)
But it seems to be, the way that, I mean, I make this point in the book, the way the memory system and the human mind is put together, seems to be pretty much well-made for about 100, maybe 120, something around that years. Because one of the examples I give is this classic example from the philosophy of memory, so the back in the Enlightenment period, where there were these debates between John Locke and Thomas Reed, pair of philosophers, and they were talking about what the nature of self is and the continuation of the self. There was a memory theory of the self, which is that we're just this continuation of being able to remember who we were over our lifespan.
Thomas Reed pointed out, well, we can imagine situations where when you're sort of in your middle age, maybe 30 years old, it's easy to remember what you were doing when you were five maybe, or a little easier. You can remember scrumping apples when he was a kid is the example he gives. And then as he gets older, he's supposing it's an officer. He can remember being, when he's retired, he can remember being an officer, but he can no longer remember scrumping apples. He's lost that bit. So there's sort of limits, finite limits that have been placed by biology on what we can fit coherently in a lifespan and what we can remember of ourselves to hold ourselves together.

**Chris Williamson** (4:32)
Yeah, because I mean, the ship of Theseus as an example, right? That if you replace every board on this ship after a particular amount of time, is it still the same ship? The difference is that the ship has no idea that it is a ship or that it can remember each of the floorboards being removed. I think it's every seven years, pretty much every cell in your body has been recycled so that there are no cells that would have been there seven years before. So you go, okay, well, if I am a ship of Theseus in that regard, what does it mean to say that me now is the same as me seven years ago, or 14 years ago, or 21 years ago? What does that mean?